Having time and strength to do my housework properly is a great luxury. I felt that so much the last couple of days, when there were no other duties calling, and nothing urgent to distract me. First I worked at sweeping and organizing my garage. The question remains: Will I ever be able to fit my car in there?
It would be nice, but having no attic, basement, laundry room, pantry or storage shed, I use my garage for everything from firewood and kindling to beach toys and line-drying clothes; lots of gardening tools are stored there, and big pots that don’t fit anywhere in my kitchen. If I have many more days of focused thinking, maybe I will figure out how to arrange the stuff more efficiently. It could happen!
Today, more rich gifts were mine. I mostly cooked and worked in the kitchen, with the door open to the rain outside. Bliss. Eventually I put a large batch of experimental flax crackers into the dehydrator. We will see how they come out tomorrow, after 24 hours of dessication. I was trying to replicate the crackers sold under the Flackers brand, that have cinnamon and currants in them. But then I added three other kinds of seeds: sesame, chia and pumpkin.
Can you see the Thanksgiving cactus in the background, beginning to bloom?
I had already taken a morning walk, with very light rain falling on me off and on. The extravagant blessing of the heavens all around me, wetting everything and making us shine.
One thing nice about using the dehydrator for crackers is, I could go off and leave them in there, which I couldn’t have done if they were baking in the oven. So I put on my rain jacket again, and took a second walk about 4:00.
The skies were clearing. I walked westward that time, and saw different sights. Like the cleanest eucalyptus leaves ever:
Rain is not in the forecast for tomorrow, but housework is. Truly it’s neverending, and I hope my feeling of leisure will hold out for another day, while I prepare for a visit from my older son, whom I call Pathfinder. Last time he was here he helped me make progress with the Garage Project, but I’m happily looking forward to whatever we do together. Rain or not, I expect showers of blessing.
I’ve returned from my short road trip, to the land of my childhood. I stayed with my sister two nights, and then switched to my brother’s place for two nights, which is the very house we all lived in for years, years that went by in a flash. I went away to college when I was eighteen and never lived at home again. Even though my brother has changed a lot of things, the “envelope” of the house our father built remains the same, and the giant oak tree still towers over the back yard.
It also has been pruned recently, its canopy made much more compact, and it looks great. I wandered around the property taking in everything, but I forgot to go back with my phone later to take pictures. I was too busy focusing on the people, my people, so I have found some older images of the countryside and people that I visited, to illustrate my musings.
Wall art that has seen better days, and that we “let go.”
The day before I started out on this journey, I was glad to feel the leavinghomesickness depart and be replaced with happy anticipation at the meetings I would soon have. Just being with these dear ones and also talking about the experiences we’ve shared over the decades has filled me to the brim with thoughts and feelings I don’t think I will be able to sort out.
Nostalgia is a “sentimental longing for the past,” so it’s not that I’m feeling, but just plain wonderment at all the days and years of my life so far. I would not go back in time, and I know those times were not ideal, but looking back I am amazed at how wholesome they were. I was blessed to live through them with several people who remain, and still care about me, which is all a great gift.
The picture and the memory are blurry, but solid.
Over the course of four days, I had long visits and conversations with twenty people, counting the six little children who are my nieces and nephews; four of those children I hadn’t met before. I saw both of my sisters and my brother, and their spouses, and children’s families. Various of us told stories that others of us had never heard, from the distant past or from relatively recently.
I had lunches with three friends, one of whom I’ve known since first grade, and two since about eighth grade; between bites we fell into telling anecdotes about each other’s mothers, may God bless their memory!
The linoleum floor of our childhood has since been replaced.cousinsWe were small Brownies, and the orange trees and rosebushes were small, too.
As I drove back and forth through the orange groves between town and country, I restrained myself from stopping as often as I’d have liked to, to take pictures of the hills and the orange trees. It had just rained, and the mountain peaks were dusted with snow, but the hills are still showing golden and not green. The picture below was taken by my sister Nancy some years ago, later in the season.
When rain clouds are gathering and precipitating and rearranging themselves all over again, it is like watching a huge theater screen from my private box (my car), as I’m driving down the interstate.
This is exactly what was happening on Tuesday, and I did take pictures of that show.
I was thrilled to see cotton on the plants in the wide fields, and I pulled over to look more closely. But I couldn’t get a good view, because mud:
So I went along and along, and saw a rainbow pancake of light on the northern horizon, a very slim break in the clouds way beyond a field of melons.
By the time I got to Nancy’s, the storm was abating,
and the dust had been washed off of all the trees.
So there, I’ve put the beginning at the end of my tale. But don’t you think it’s hard, not to get the times mixed up when one makes a trip to the past? In many ways it is still present –definitely all these people I saw still are present — and may even be future. I feel the need of a pertinent quote… and the one that pops into my mind is:
So many little tasks need doing before setting off on a journey. Of course there is the packing of supplies to use while I’m away, but there is also the making ready of Home. It needs quite a bit of tidying up, just to show the homemaker that she does love this place. Being extra nice to the garden by deadheading and cleaning up also does a lot to ease my sore heart, because it dreads saying good-bye once again.
And I’m in the middle of my biggest garden project ever, that is, the biggest I’ve ever taken on by myself. Ten areas of the garden will have been changed in different ways, when I’m finished. That sounds like it is almost everything, but it’s not. I won’t be finished for a few more weeks, mostly because October and November are better months for planting perennials around here, but also because I plain ran out of time this month.
Last fall I planted three clary sage plants, which are biennials and will bloom next June. I hope I can remember to start a few every fall so that I can keep them coming. Below you can see one of the older ones in the foreground, next to the pincushion flower I planted last week, and in the background two of the younger clary sages I was able to get from a local nursery recently.
As three big conifers to the south of me, including my own Canary Island Pine, keep growing taller, the amount of “full sun” in the back garden has been shrinking. It was a case of bit by bit, and then all at once. All at once I realized why the purple coneflower barely blooms, and even the recently planted Mexican Evening Primrose is not happy.
apple mint
Also there is the problem of the unpleasing design, or lack of design, from the last landscaper, of the area near my front door. I’m unwilling to live with it, so it’s taken hours and hours of thinking and thinking and reading on the Pacific Horticulture site, researching and shopping for plants, imagining how they will look if I put them here or there. I’m moving several plants installed last year to better places.
When I get new gallons or 4″ pots on site, I arrange them still in the pots where I think they work, and then I think better of it, and carry them elsewhere. To the front yard — No, the back yard — how will it look alongside this other plant that can take part shade? Weird? Probably… Oh well, they will have to get along. It can be exhausting being so unsystematic.
Naked Buckwheat
I’m excited to have my very own Naked Buckwheats — this is a California native that I often see in the mountains. My daughter Pippin has them growing wild around her place. And now me!
I decided to grow annual vegetables in the front garden near the perennial asparagus, because they will be sure to get enough sun there; but I need to add more soil first. I should have waited to buy the kalettes and Chinese Broccoli until that bed was ready, but I didn’t, and they were in little six packs, so I spent an hour transferring them to larger pots so they won’t get rootbound while they’re waiting.
I have cut down the asparagus a few times, first because of the aphids, and then so that I could rake away all the mulch and add more soil, and new mulch. But spears keep coming up, and looking ferny lovely:
When I cut them, I throw away the fronds or chop them up for the worms, but there are always several that haven’t become fronds yet, and that are the right size for eating. I accumulated enough to roast a panful this afternoon.
And I made a batch of Jammy Eggs to have for snacks on the journey.
It’s to Wisconsin I am going, because my granddaughter Miss Maggie is getting married! It was barely over a year ago that her brother’s wedding took me to that state, and now back I go. It will be a very happy time, and I will be over my leavinghomesickness before you know it.
One of the asparagus beds.
It started raining this afternoon. Early autumn rains are just the best. I can leave the windows and doors open and breathe the rain, and hear it pitter patter. The drops began to fall when I was still in the middle of planting my Bouteloua gracilis, or blue grama grass (“Blonde Ambition”), and after I cleaned up my tools I still had to put out all the trash cans, plus an extra green bin a neighbor is letting me use. Four neighbors, two on either side of me, are always letting me use extra space in their green waste bins for my overflow.
Blue Grama Grass
Do you find that when you are getting ready for a trip, not only do you have the packing for the actual trip, and the everyday housework and cooking that has nothing to do with the trip, but also extra, surprise things that come up that take some of your precious time? I realized last week that I needed to lay in some firewood, and that took a whole day to deal with. I got a half cord and stacked it almost entirely by myself. In the course of that my neighbor Eric lent me his wheelbarrow and offered to repair my wheelbarrow. He noticed in going through my gate that it didn’t latch behind him, so I spent an hour figuring out how to adjust that latch. I don’t want the gate to fail to close when I’m away, if he should come for the wheelbarrow.
And what do you know, I also got inconvenient visitors this week — ants! They have been mostly crawling around on my computer table and keyboard — and my hands — so I am going to cut this shorter than it might have been, stopping at long instead of longer, and I’ll hope to check in from Wisconsin soon. But I still don’t have a tablet or anything larger than my little phone to work on, so I don’t know…
The day is cold, and dark, and dreary; It rains, and the wind is never weary; The vine still clings to the mouldering wall, But at every gust the dead leaves fall, And the day is dark and dreary.
My life is cold, and dark, and dreary; It rains, and the wind is never weary; My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past, But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast, And the days are dark and dreary.
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining; Behind the clouds is the sun still shining; Thy fate is the common fate of all, Into each life some rain must fall, Some days must be dark and dreary.
And I made a batch of Jammy Eggs to have for snacks on the journey.
Gladsome Lights 