All posts by GretchenJoanna

About GretchenJoanna

Orthodox Christian, widowed in 2015; mother, grandmother. Love to read, garden, cook, write letters and a hundred other home-making activities. View all posts by GretchenJoanna →

My pink and minty view.

August 18, 2016my garden, natureevening, hummingbird mintGretchenJoanna

I’ve been taking evening walks, and have been loving the way the light catches different aspects of the plants from what I see in the morning, even the very early morning. It’s been a wonderful week, with lots of time for me to catch up on a hundred different things, but in an unhurried way. More on all that, and the creekside views, to come.

Tonight I just want to show you a view that I have out my kitchen window for much of the day. The pink-orange hummingbird mint in the sun, me in the shade, I see it across the garden as a delicate curtain, with other flower heads also floating off to the side. I need to remember not to plant anything that will block it out of my sight when I’m standing at that counter. The picture was taken this evening.

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Ah, Grief…

August 16, 2016grief, poetry, quotescomfort, Denise LevertovGretchenJoanna

I shared the poem below several years ago when my angle on grief was different. But I think of the metaphor often these days, because the grief I know is a thing in itself, a changeable being that has to be reckoned with.

Last week I saw its resemblance to an illness of the body, which in fact it is in part. A malaise or pain that comes and goes, and when it goes you forget that the underlying problem still exists. Then you get ambushed. Here the metaphor of the poem doesn’t sync with my own; maybe if I become more hospitable to my grief it will become the sort of companion the poet is hoping for, not a thing waiting in ambush, but a faithful-friend kind of creature that can even “warn off intruders.”

I think this is christ good shepherd lg happening. I see that not only am I on the path to acceptance, of the loss of my husband and of my new life, but that one stage of the journey is the acceptance of the grief process itself, and of its demands. A canine in the corner aptly describes something I would not naturally welcome.

Yesterday was rich and full of encouragement — several times because of my pangs of grief — including this meaningful note from Mrs. Bread after Little Goldfinch revived and flew away: “We all need quiet to regain our senses.” She knew I was having that healing kind of day. My dog (see poem) seemed to rest relatively content in his corner. As I wrote in the original posting:

May all our hurts bring us to Him, and may we experience the comfort St. Paul writes about in II Corinthians:

Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by Christ.

TALKING TO GRIEF

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don’t know you’ve been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house as your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.

~ Denise Levertov

little goldfinch

August 15, 2016birds, my garden, natureLesser GoldfinchGretchenJoanna

This morning a goldfinch flew with a thud into the glass of the sliding door, and lay still on the patio with one wing splayed out. I waited for her to recover herself and fly off, worried that a cat would wander through while she was vulnerable. When she didn’t move, I went out and talked to her, to ask if her wing was broken. Should I touch my wounded bird friend? It was the natural thing to do, to stroke her small body. After a while I tried tucking the wonky wing back in place, and it seemed to line right up with the other one. The bird was looking a little more alert after fifteen minutes or so, but when I tried to lift her on to her feet she stumbled.

I texted my friend Mrs. Bread, who I guessed had experience with wild animals like this – and also daughter Pippin, whose first animal-related job was working for the bird rescue center. Mrs. Bread said I should fix up a shoebox with soft materials and put the victim in it; that would help her to calm down.

So I prepared a box with a towel and some fine rice straw from my bale of mulch, and carefully set the finch in it, and on the patio table temporarily, while I went inside for a minute. From the window I saw that right away she hopped on to the edge of the box, and when I took my eyes off her to go back out the door, she had vanished. My box worked like magic!

This is the last picture I took, before I prepared the box. I am amazed at the details of her feathers, which I didn’t take in when I was with the real bird. I hope she is okay, and that she will be back taking a bath at the fountain tomorrow!

How gardens are made – or not.

August 13, 2016my garden, nature, quotesbees, echinacea, landscaping, milkweed, Prairie Moon Nursery, rosemary, Rudyard KiplingGretchenJoanna

In a way, my gardens have been too successful. I planted tomatoes where they didn’t have gl berries P1040889 room to grow, and have had to drastically prune them back so that I could get in there to pick them as they ripen. No pretty picture to show you there.

The fennel grew so lovely – now I realize it was overgrown and woody before I picked it. I’m eating it anyway, and the edible parts are yummy. Next year will be my third growing fennel and it should be the charm.

Rudyard Kipling said,

“Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.”

That goes for harvesting, too! But the making I need to do today and next week concerns seeds…. Before my next trip to see grandchildren, I have a few weeks to get seeds planted in flats in the greenhouse, and to water them once or more daily until they are big enough to set out in the garden where they will get automatic watering from then on. P1050162

What seeds? I don’t even know yet. But perhaps these that I received from Prairie Moon. I saw a picture on a blog post, of unidentified coneflowers growing wild on the prairie, and researched to find out what variety it might be, and where to buy seeds. It turns out they are Echinacea pallida. The company sent me milkweed seeds also, as a gift, and I dug out my own milkweed I had collected a couple of years ago. P1050165 I’m not even sure that I can successfully plant them now to have plants to set out in the spring. Probably I should be reading up on that instead of writing and speculating!

My front yard is taking a lot of attention. In July we laid cardboard and mulch thickly all over the lawn (this is called “sheet mulching”) to kill it, and now that that has been done stonemasons are beginning work on a walkway and a wall. gl P1050150

Later we’ll landscape with some plants about which I am still deciding. I had two rosemary bushes in the front, one of which was about 25 years old. Landscape Lady said it looked like a Bristlecone Pine, and at first we were going to keep it around for its venerableness. But it wasn’t that worthy, and would scratch and poke me twice a year when I took the pruners to it, over the years shaping it into its crotchety self. I didn’t want to go through that one more time….so I took parting pictures.

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Now that I have great soil and many options for growing various things, I don’t know if I will ever have a chance of “keeping up” with my garden. But I plan to go on enjoying it, and reporting about it here. Perhaps even while sitting in the shade.