Tags
beautiful day, Big Brother's wedding, Catholic Life, CL, garden, gardening, Johnsy, Mariah, roses, Sae's Veil, Sae's wedding, spring, vegetable garden, wedding
Today is the most beautiful day. The temperature is a balmy 60°F, there’s a strong breeze and a bright blue sky. I’m sitting in my knitting chair in my sun porch/work room, a room I haven’t been able to enjoy in months (it’s not heated) enjoying the sun on my face. When this post is done I’ll work on Sae’s veil for a while, and then go off to a Catholic Life Leadership Team meeting. So far this has been a very good day.
The last few days have been good ones in general. The warmer weather has been such an amazing blessing. I still can’t quite believe that we went from single digit lows to highs in the 60s within a week, but then, this is Ohio after all. I know it can’t last, but while it’s here it has me daydreaming like mad about gardens. I’ve been a gardener since I was five or six, when I begged my mom for permission to plant some flowers in a little strip of ground out by the garage. Last year was the first time in a very long time that I didn’t have a garden. I’ve had to leave a lot of gardens behind, and I think it was getting to me.
This year, though, I think I’m ready to have a garden again. I miss picking my own lettuce, and pulling carrots out of the ground. And I miss roses. I really loved my rose garden at Johnsy’s house. The roses are still there, and Johnsy has told me that I can come get them whenever I like, whenever I have a place for them. I didn’t think there was anywhere around our place that would work for roses (a lot is quite shady, and most of the back yard has been gardened for years by Mariah, whom I don’t wish to trespass upon). However, more and more I have been noticing that the area sortof behind and adjacent to my sunporch gets quite a bit of sun, and wouldn’t it be lovely to have roses climbing up beside my windows, and growing beneath them? Right now there are two rather largeish bushes growing there. But they have no redeeming qualities besides that their leaves turn a somewhat attractive red in the fall. Surely my landlord wouldn’t mind if I dug them out and planted roses there instead?
Right about then is when my plan starts to get rather grandiose, going from grubbing out a few bushes (no small task in itself – those bushes are large, sturdy, and well established) and replacing them with roses, to digging a vegetable garden plot in the ground on the other side of the back yard gate and planting several kinds of vegetables, a few herbs, plus dahlias, moonflowers, and sweet peas (to climb over the back yard fence, of course). About when I start debating whether there’s enough room in the small plot of ground right by the back steps to grow cucumbers, dill, green onions and lettuce, or perhaps only the cucumbers dill and lettuce, and what would be the best type of support for the cucumber vine I start remembering things. Like how much work planting a brand new garden is. And that we have, not one, but two weddings coming up faster than we want to admit. And that I have two veils to knit, a bridesmaid dress to sew, and I’m planning the second of those weddings. Plus, you know, living my life. So I sigh, and decide that I should be reasonable and just plant a few things by the back steps this year. Perhaps next year not quite so many siblings will be getting married and I can have more of a garden. I start to resign myself to this, and then that little voice says, “But, maybe just a small rose garden…” and we’re off and running again.
I can’t wait for real Spring to be here!