flowies

Tis the season.

This last was two weeks ago; the red tulips are long gone now, and the ribes blooms as well.  But the daffodils and rosemary are going strong.  And the apple blossoms.  Be still my heart.

outdoors

It's true, I am tired of the basement seedling scene.  It is a very contrived, idiotic situation to be sprouting plants in the darkest place you can find.  But, OK, it does work.  Time upstairs on the buffet by the North windows; time on the front porch, covered, with only east light; time on the back porch, in the weather and the western sun... and out they go.  I did it on Sunday and it was hot as hell and they instantly flattened to earth in mourning for their lost spring.  But I never worried.  It is just what those little guys like out there now.  Of course, too many cabbage starts, endive starts - because you can't pack them in and eat them young like the lettuces.  What is the point of an escarole without the blanched heart?

A few house plants got a breath of fresh air.  So needed.  They start to feel so dirty in the house after a winter.  The little lemon that has been hanging out green since Kiera gave me the little tree a month ago turned its bottom half yellow in about four hours.

Progress

Oh, spring.  I forgot about you.

I think depression is the feeling that nothing will change, or that we are left out of the change, untouched.

In order to not be depressed, we prepare for and try to accept the static nature of winter.  We take advantage of the lightening of outdoor chores, since, whether we make an effort or not, everything will drip and not grow.  We are blessed here in the Pacific Northwest, and some things do flower - but nothing grows.    

We forget the feeling of newness.  I forgot.  

And now you're here, layering on the romance.  Like a new baby or an old lover, you lead the way.  I am shy, excited, surprised.  You are a step ahead of me, unfolding, unfolding. 

I planted these plants with space between, expansion in mind.  Jeff pruned for rapid, rampant growth.  We were here, less than a year ago, when you could see the corn get taller in an afternoon.  And yet I forgot.  

And still you came.

Asparagus

I saw one.  Jeff saw it first.  Among the trailing grape hyacinth foliage, between the brown branches of last year's fava crop and the soggy sticks which used, themselves, to be asparagus, yellow fronds ten feet tall...

A new soul.

I want to say, hooray, not later than last year, at least!  And, we'll cut them this year for sure -
but what do you do with eight asparagus?

bleach water

So, there was all that cat shit.  

When Gay was here I mowed the row of its cozy, spoiled, rapidly growing, just-as-planned February bright, and we washed it in bleach dilution.

What else could we do?

It took a couple of rinses.

There were a lot of bags.  

Mixed greens (arugula, radicchio, leftover lettuce, luscious spinach just getting going, random other small and bitter things).  Chard.  Kale.

We did eat it all.  No problem, though some of those days I ate two salads.  Two fresh salads a day!  In March!  

Amazing what it's like, a few times a year, to really have enough from this little garden.  

just the facts

Last week, on Wednesday, I planted peas.  It was glorious warm and Holly for din and there was a debate, as the day stretched to evening and I chopped with the hoe and the girls spun the swings, about how they should be tied, 'this way or this way,' in which Zelda helpfully participated by wondering if we shouldn't just do them 'this way and this way.'  I rolled them in their black bath and plopped them into bed just as the darkness descended.

Yesterday I moved the two trays of starts from their schizophrenic basement environment to the plant buffet by the North window.  Just today they grew a new leaf each.  They are pale and wan.  That horrible basement.  There are cabbage, escarole, lettuces of many sorts.

This evening, after hot dogs on the deck, I began to make a space for them in the third bed by pulling out and gleaning the bolted kale.

Today I made a bouquet.

Perhaps tomorrow a few seeds, raked in hopefully? Spinach, radishes, mache, arugula.  Perhaps.

Plagues III

The plagues are not all known.  They come from all sides.  They seem to come because we invite them.  We invite them by inviting life.  For plagues are life, after all: too much of one kind of life, more than we can handle, or accept, or sustain.  A kind or quantity of life which seems determined to disrupt our own.  We work to establish a rhythm and balance which feeds itself and us.  A plague knocks out this balance, makes the cycle ever more susceptible.

There was a squirrel in our house.

Despite the firm, clear, confident reassurances I gave her that the squirrel making noises in the roof of our upstairs bathroom could not get in our house, it did.  Zelda, inside with neighbor Camille, came to the kitchen door, opened it to Jeff and I outside in the sun, doing our chores, putting into motion our left-for-a-sunny-day-in-February ideas, and she said this: THE SQUIRREL IS IN OUR HOUSE.  WIGHT NOW.  FOR WEAL.

She was clear and brave and calm, our little girl.  And indeed, the squirrel that had not once but twice chewed into the dormer on the front of the house to burrow and scratch and sleep, throwing insulation all over the neighborhood and keeping Jeff up all night and on the roof all day for three days - that squirrel had become so stuck in the wall that it had chewed a hole around the water pipe near the back of the toilet and escaped - into the inside of our house.  Of course, it was all too happy to be helped out the front door.  And we all laughed in shock and leftover panic.

And Jeff bought a bigger and better trap, and the stake out resumed, and poor Zelda hears that little wild beast in every bump and creak - but we have seen no sign of it since.

So.  Back to the rhythm, or what is left of it.  The trap yawns wide next to the patched hole.  Jeff scans the roof with binoculars.  The bird feeder swings empty and battered in the wind.  Linden moans with fear as she pees, perched on the toilet and glaring out the corner of her eye at the drywall dust still scattered around the ragged hole.

It's just a squirrel.  One nutty, territorial, little wild animal.

Jeff told me last night that shortly after the event, while Zelda was doing what we call 'processing' - that she told him: One time, when I was in my bed sleeping?  A squirrel came and - Scratched Out My Eyes!  Imagine, along with the words, a demonstration: her little faced scrunched and crumpled, her hands clawing at her eye sockets with tensed fingers.

As usual, she cut right to the emotional core of the situation.

A plague.  Circumstances out of our control.  Fear and loathing.

But c'mon.  It is a squirrel.

At least the raccoons haven't come knocking yet.