My Autobiography in Blooms

Garden as autobiography

So, Lucy did it again. This new friend, this musician/poet, pops up to say a few words and somehow she just knows.

Take a look, take a listen, she will say. Or on a page quivering with grief, she mentions her own experience, just briefly. But the contrast is so vivid, so profound, that at first I think I am misreading. And that’s the thing. I’m talking quantum leaps here. Some of us find them once in a lifetime. Maybe twice. Lucy makes them regularly. This, for Lucy, is normal. Which defines the artist.

And so.

Her most recent find, for me, was a link to a gardening video, an interview with a woman whose garden is in significant ways quite like mine. Lucy messaged about it in the comments section of my previous post. It is a lovely video.

The subject of the video is a woman across the vast ocean whose garden doesn’t even look like mine. But it is like mine, precisely, in fact. Because, as the interviewer said, this garden is in fact the woman’s “autobiography.” That’s what Lucy understood without seeing my garden. That’s what I have been writing about now for months but had not been able to put into words.

My garden is my autobiography.

Take my cleome. It reminds me of the naturalized azalea strewn throughout the magic woods behind my house growing up. The spiky blooming shrub sprang from the azaleas that lined the old vanished farms back there, left behind with the old wells of crumbling stone that dotted the landscape. And the azalea grew and spread and became something quite different. Hummingbirds love them. And I grow the cleome to remind me.

Wild beauty, the cleome

I also grow coleus, which comes in every color in the imagination and then some. I grow it for V., who took a walk one day near our first apartment near the campus and came back carrying an armful of brilliance. She had admired the brightly colored tropical plant in a yard and the owner gave her a pair of clippers, insisting she take some. We had been nervous about crime, the neighborhood, about striking out on our own outside the safety of the dorm. But the coleus, and the elderly lady who bestowed it, were talismans. And we knew we were safe.

Bright talisman, coleus

And the rose. I have what I consider the grandest birthday of the entire year — June 21. This is the first day of summer, the longest day of the year. And what better flower to embody this glorious day and season than the rose.

I started planting zinnia seeds after I pulled into the driveway of my mother’s house and there they — waving in the sunlight. Of course, I thought, zinnias! And that’s been the response by so many of the people who make a point to walk by my house in the summer now. To remember the zinnias their grandmothers grew, their mothers, their aunts, even fathers. All those old zinnias grown so many years ago, now brought back to them in my garden and their hearts.

And the Angel’s Trumpet, which I fell for, deeply, hopelessly, the first moment I set eyes on it, at a farm market in my hometown. It didn’t matter that it thrives in warmer climates, like me. That I kept failing at getting it to bloom in northern Virginia’s too cold winters. That it kept dying in the ground. I was possessed by its beauty. Mesmerized. I had to see it through, to help it bloom despite the odds. Because this plant represents me. And in the angel’s sway I am, still.

And one special flower I put in my garden several years ago for no special reason other than I was drawn to it, for the bloom’s unusual nature, for a particular shimmer. This flower is small and unique. It blooms early and stays. It appears to be all white, but when you look closely, you can see a surprise tinge of lavender in the bloom. And at night, the petals glow, luminous.

I’ve never seen another plant like this one — the starburst hydrangea — which I now understand is in my garden for, who else, but Lucy.

The Cloak Falls

I am a tight fist against the cold. Wrapped head to toe, resentfully, I pull inward, angry at the winter months.

Then today I saw it.

Driving down a street, tucked among scores of other sullens, I looked up. I was struck to aching stillness by the beauty. The trees. Trees soaring black and charcoal against a light blue wash of sky. The moment a painter tries to capture through a lifetime of canvas.

This was that moment, seen through eyes that had refused this silent gift for so long.

“My God,” I said, aloud, through the windshield. I had pulled over, to the side of the road. Such soaring, angular, giant beauty, reaching higher than any building. None of this in sight during my favorite time, summer, when leaves and color flesh out the stark branches, hiding the bones, the foundations of these mammoths of nature.

The winter gives us this. Time to really see what is underneath. It challenges us to bring forth our own strengths too, to think and be creative. To see.

Trees, shorn of their leaves, soaring toward the heavens. Holding unseen life trembling beneath cloaks of bark and soil, ready to burst forth again in only a short time.

Like us, their counterparts, in layer, after layer after layer. The mechanism unseen. But trembling, too, just beyond the membrane dividing us from what we can’t or simply refuse to see.

Friendships as Perennials

New Year’s Eve found us, uncharacteristically, plunging into the cold, icy night for a party in the urban wilds. I couldn’t believe he wanted to do this. And that I agreed. But the boy was out for the evening and maybe J. was feeling the chill of an empty nest a bit early. That’s just like him. Pre-emptive suffering via hyperactive behaviors.

But it’s good to get out, change long-established habits involving hibernating all winter, especially when the cold just keeps getting colder.

So, we found parking, got out of the car and braved the hoodlums making suggestive comments in front of the 7-11 (“How y’all doing,” I drawled, smiling, looking one right in the eye in a pathetic attempt at surprise tactics). We made it in through the gates and the security door, up the elevator and many other doors and into the hostess’s apartment.

Finally settled in, I looked around and realized that most of the women at the party were the soccer teammates of the hostess. Not work colleagues or other friends. Which represents a sea change from my generation in D.C., which is largely a transient city.

How does this relate to gardening? I’ll get to that.

I am 20 years older than the women who were at this party. But we operate in a parallel universe. The hostess and I are/were both journalists in the nation’s capital. And back when I used to pick up my son at the soccer practice fields, I would notice young men and women gathering on the sidelines in uniform, with coolers, tying cleats, stretching, getting ready to play a game under the lights.

They were very patient and polite. Waiting to start a soccer game when the little boys left their practices, sometimes at 9 p.m. On a weeknight. With work looming the next day. Because they loved it so.

And this is how those young women at the New Year’s Eve party bonded, some of them on teams that played in D.C. for 10 years or so together. And they all ventured out into the deep, cold, icy night to attend a party given by one of their number. An adorable young woman who is moving in about two months, back to New York. Only a few of her work colleagues came. But her teammates showed up, in force.

I was so impressed.

These women nurtured their relationships through the love of their sports, the way I nurture my plants. They started playing sports early, as little girls. I actually came from a state where schools could not by law field teams for girls back then. They told us a girl playing basketball had died on the court (not that I believed that). “Don’t tell that,” J. said. “You’re dating us.” Like I care. I told it anyway.

So I relied on work friends when I moved to D.C., away from my family, from my oldest friend, J., who I met at five., away from K., who I met on my first day of college, at the University of Alabama. From the many friends I met just going about my life. I worked so much anyway, I had few opportunities to meet anyone else.

And I found out those friendships, although splashy and intense at the time, like annuals, are ephemeral for the most part. They go away. As do most of the friendships made through the children, through the kids’ schools.

That’s why I loved seeing these women at the party. Because people move here, work long hours, spend ridiculous amounts of time commuting, then flee back home. I’ve been here so long I’ve become loathe to introduce myself to newcomers, something that goes against my every southern fiber. But, I tell myself, they’ll be leaving soon. Don’t get involved, you’ll grow to love them and they’ll leave.

But the women at the party defied that. They bonded early and intensely on their soccer teams, their friendships like perennials in a garden. They nurture them and stay, growing and evolving, over the years.

Which teaches me a lesson: To treat people more like my garden. Kindness for all. More lasting attention for the perennials, of course. But warmth and care for the annuals, too. Because the human garden is worth my time and cultivation, again, too.

Reap What You Sow

Remember the white Angel’s Trumpet stolen from my front yard? My favorite plant?

No, I did not find it. But something happened that makes me almost as happy.

This summer I made a very quick trip home to Alabama. A relative was ailing and the trip was so fast I barely remember being there. I’m there now, another dash home, this time for the holidays.

As I walked into my mother’s garage, I saw a very small plant in her garage. Green, little, not her usual lavish display. Readers of this blog will remember my mother ignores her gardening into fantastic health. Most of the time.

So I did not pay attention to this tiny plant. Then she said, “Remember the trumpets you left me? One of them died, but one of them is still going. It’s out there.”

I thought a minute. Could it be?

It could be. It is.

I had cut back the white Angel’s Trumpet on the advice of my farm market guru in Alabama. She is as crazy about these plants as I am. She grows them from “scratch.” She takes seed pods and cuttings and grows them in a greenhouse.

She sold a white to me for $7. I was taking an airplane back to Virginia. So she told me to cut it back hard and wrap it up in a plastic bag, then pack it in my suitcase. “Don’t worry, it won’t mind,” she said. I was skeptical. But she’s never steered me wrong.

I gave my mother the two biggest cuttings from the plant. I put them both in potting soil. And the survivor was growing in her garage.

I am writing on my sister’s computer. I can’t post a picture of the tiny little sprig I cut, with Mother’s permission of course. But I have one. A piece of white Angel’s Trumpet. It is carefully stowed away in a canning jar for the ride home to Northern Virginia.

It is not from the trumpet I lost a few months ago at the hands of some heartless thief. But still, it is a new old plant.

It replaces one I lost. It makes me feel better.

I have many faults. But I am quick to forgive, even when people don’t even want to be forgiven. And I am generous. And the fact that I so wanted Mother to experience these lavish tropical plants has repaid me in the best possible way. She wouldn’t have accepted the plants if I had bought them. “Too much responsibility,” she would have said. She doesn’t like to have to look after them, after all.

Not like me, not like me at all.

So now my lost white angel has been replaced. In my mind. And in my hands. And that’s all that counts.

Welcome back, my sweet angel.

Hothouse Flowers, Waiting

I’m waiting for seeds to come in for the winter sowing I was just told about by some very helpful gardeners who have taken on my needy hothouse spirit as a salvage project.

But in the meantime, I found orchids. Orchids! Inexpensive ones languishing on a sale rack at Lowes.

These potted plants did not look good. But they were cheap, $8 and $7. I didn’t have time to be rummaging through this rack due to the long list of errands bedeviling me now that the holidays are bearing down. But the orchids were calling to me. They might as well have been cute little kittens or puppies meowing or yipping behind wire pens, their certain death looming without my intervention.

I reasoned that if I picked up a flower that flourishes in the hot air of the tropics, then I might do more than just make it through the winter too.

So I combed through the inventory. I picked two that looked the healthiest. I checked them thoroughly, not just the blooms, but along the entire stems. The two I selected had strong, healthy stems and leaves. Good roots snaking up out of the pots. That’s because most orchids grown indoors are really air plants, I read, and grow up high in the crevice of trees.

I picked up some Special Orchid Mix for potting by Better-Gro. And some Orchid Plus food. I got the plants home and repotted them in the new mix, which seemed to be bits of bark, really. The instructions cautioned that orchids like to sit up high, with roots peeking up out of the mix. I also repotted another orchid I had gotten on sale at the start of the cold weather. Then I fertilized all three.

The lot of them perked up immediately.

This is the little one. I almost didn’t see it hidden back behind the bigger orchids. I love this one!

And the bigger purple and white spotted orchid. I love this one too!

This one I got some weeks ago at Whole Foods. It had gotten cold, early in the fall, and I was not happy. The white has a special place in my heart now.

The orchids are especially important to me because we had our first big snow of the winter starting last night. This is next to bed where my flowers were just two months ago:

So the orchids are holding me steady. They are placeholders for other blooms that aren’t here right now. Those flowers are alive, though, in my mind’s eye, in my heart, waiting to be brought to life again. With seeds my new friends told me I can start through winter sowing soon. Then there will be vibrant color billowing in the warm wind and luminous sun again in a few short months. Just a few months to bring me back to this again:

Feeling Lost Without the Garden

I’m feeling lost without my garden and zinnia and rose bouquets that filled my house for months. I’m dabbling in the kitchen to try to fill the void.

We are strictly in survival mode here. That means I am just doing my best to keep the plants in pots alive until April when I can start taking them back outdoors for a bit during the day. Maybe I can plant some cuttings in May. June is for the zinnia seeds.

Meanwhile, everything has been cut way back for the long, cold winter in Northern Virginia. My husband, the Iowan, thinks I am not normal for saying that. But for someone born in Texas and raised in Alabama, the winters are long and cold here. And they always will be (meaning I’ve been here for 30 years and I’m not going to change my mind).

My plants are squeezed into small spaces and corners with trays of gravel and water around hopefully to provide some humidity against the onslaught of the electric furnace heat. It’s cold here, in the 30s at night.

I’m blue about it. I’ve never done much indoor gardening in winter other than buy the occasional houseplant, which I don’t do much with. I promised myself to do something about that this year. But so far I’m resorting to my old tricks. I’m baking again and catching up with old friends. I have three book club sessions this weekend, one of them at my house.

Recently, I said sure when my husband asked me to bake cupcakes for someone who works with him. It was his birthday and my husband assumed I would use a mix and buy some frosting. He should know me better than that by now.

I decorated some with chocolate grated from a semi-sweet chocolate bar with a carrot scraper. I sprinkled others with French Dragees. That’s a smart way to market sprinkles to grownups. I also have some glowy powder, fairy dust I guess, in the small bottle.

I used a recipe from a restaurant called Eve’s in Old Town Alexandria, VA. The cake is light and airy, angel’s food-like, but the taste is buttery, like pound cake. Absolutely delicious. It wasn’t easy to make cupcakes out of this confection, but I managed. The frosting is made with cream and powdered sugar. Heavenly. Eve’s is famous for its birthday cakes.

The chefs make a tiny one and tints it pink. They say even straight-laced businessmen are seen in the dining room at night, digging into the small, pink birthday cakes. The cupcakes I made weren’t pink, but everyone loved them.

I think all of us should be fussed over on our birthdays.

But my fussing is because I don’t have the garden. The baking is old news. I’m not really happy with this substitution. After all, I’ve been baking since I was a very little girl and would pull a chair up to the counter to stand on. I would pull down ingredients and make cookies and cakes and everything my siblings and I liked from Mother’s cookbooks.

We thought we were scamming her. She gave us free run of her kitchen and everything in it. If we needed ingredients, we got on bikes and rode down the country lanes to the general store and charged things to her account. That way we indulged our sweets habit with my baking using Mother’s ingredients and my labor. And we saved our allowances for other things. Meanwhile, I taught myself to be a decent cook and baker.

But the baking is not really scratching the itch I have now.

Because it’s not really feeding me down deep inside the way the garden did this past summer. Being surrounded by all that wild beauty, working in it, touching it, bringing the flowers inside, filled me with such light that it carried over into everything I did all summer. I miss that.

How do I replace that in the cold dark winter? I just don’t have any idea.

I’ll make it, I always do. I’m just wondering what other gardening fanatics in cold climates do in the winter. While waiting for, say, the lillies to come back.

The Tree Said Hello

I am drawn to a certain crepe myrtle just outside my back gate. I have always loved them and this one is particularly beautiful. My son recognized this at a very early age, too. He would run to this tree and stand in it, just stay there, quietly.

I would sit on the bench nearby and wait for him until he was done communing. Even though this was not like him to do this. He was the kind of active boy who usually ran to the big pines out front and climbed, fast, before anyone could yell him into a stop.

I remember, because I had lots of trouble getting the pitch out of his clothes. Sometimes, of course, this was not possible and I had to “pitch” plenty of them.

So I wasn’t really surprised the other day when I walked by my myrtle and saw an accessory waving in the wind. It looked like something I would wear as a necklace. Or as an earring. It was a dried plant cap, attached to a gossamer thread from a spider web.

It was really cute. I went outside at night with a flashlight to see if it was still there. It was. I knew it would photograph well in the night.

Look at the markings on this tree, behind my accessory.

However, the bark on my myrtle not as dramatic as one out front, which is beloved by my friend and neighbor C. Which makes sense. You wouldn’t know it right away, but C. has more flair. She is a government bureaucrat, conservative dresser, initially very quiet.

But if you are out early on a weekend morning, you might see her coming out dressed in a formal riding habit. C. has a horse she keeps stabled in the country and goes riding with a friend. She is a lawyer married to an Irish chef she met overseas as a young woman. He fell madly in love with her and pursued her from afar, persuading her, finally, to marry him.

She loves my gardening and has very strong opinions about the plants. She says they remind her of earlier times when people decorated with large blocks of color via the flowers. She thinks the hostas and nursery flats of impatiens and pansies are boring. So there.

It makes sense that the crepe myrtle she has claimed as hers is one of quiet drama. Routinely, she dons gloves and collects her tools and carefully trims the suckers that try to grow from the base of the tree, which stands guard just outside her bedroom window. Her cats sit on the sill and watch the tree, too, which has vivid coloring.

There’s a new crepe myrtle out front now, to the side. I think the young tree is watching people, trying to see who resonates with this new plant life. I look forward to seeing who it chooses. I bet we’ll know by next summer.

It’s funny how nature leaves little gifts sometimes. Walk slowly. Open your eyes. See. Really see.

Stolen Angel

My favorite Angel’s Trumpet was taken from in front of my house last week. My big white. I couldn’t believe it.

This was a cutting I had pulled from the first angel I had ever managed to grow. I planted the mother plant in the ground and got only one bloom. Still, I was thrilled. I heavily mulched it, all winter, but it died anyway. Middle Atlantic winters are brutal on plants like this. Too many freezes.

This past summer, I lost track of the slips I had kept the previous winter and rooted. I thought all the pots were pink. Then one big pot turned into a beautiful white. I even wrote a blog post about it. It was gorgeous and I was so happy to have a piece of the old white angel with me still.

Then, as the cold descended, I cut all the angels back in their pots, the two whites and the three pinks. I was letting them have some final time outdoors before bringing them in for the very long winter. They won’t be able to go out again until at least May. So three angels were in the fenced back yard, two out front.

And then there was only one out front. The pink. I kept looking and looking. Surely I was mistaken. It just couldn’t be. But it was. The white angel was gone. I’m down to only one white, the one I brought as a slip up from Alabama this summer.

I admit it, at first I was simply outraged. Quietly so, I’m not much of a surface rager. It takes some doing for me to really blow my top. Still, I was mad. How dare “they.”

Then, I decided to view the theft in a way that allowed me to come to peace with it. The trumpet had been cut way back, it was no longer blooming or even leafed out in green. It was basically a pot of sticks. This essentially is what it looked like (this is one of the pinks, but you get my drift):

So, I had to imagine the scenario this way: The thief knew what he-she was getting. The stealer had seen the blooms outside my home and couldn’t stand it any longer. Seeing two pots outside, shorn of their blooms and most leaves, just sitting there, well, it was all over but the crying (for me). Gone. Taken to another home to be nurtured and cared for and coaxed into reblooming indoors in a few months.

Even my husband said, “You’re known for your plants. I’m not the least bit surprised.”

So, I quickly brought the remaining angels inside. I’m not sure what this means for next year’s outdoor blooming season. I’ll deal with it when it comes. They need the full sun to bloom and that’s the only space I have for that.

Although, the truth is, we’ve been talking about moving. My husband has talked about it for years and I’ve resisted. He brought it up again Saturday, this is something he really wants. And what I didn’t say is that losing the angel made me really think about it this time. We wouldn’t move that far. We would stay in the area because my son likes his school and we need to be here for several more years.

And then there was the home for sale I was drawn to just the other day, the one quite near my son’s school. It is not much bigger than the one we are in now. But it is off the road and private and as I said to my husband, “Look at that, straight out of storybook.” He agreed. The notice said the home had a lovely, private backyard adjoining a wooded park area. Woods! I grew up in a house with a woods out back.

I thought when we drove past that house, “This is the perfect home.”

In some strange way was that angel a sign? Angel on the move? I’m not the angel of course, not even close. But still. We’ll see.

For the time being, I decided to focus on other things. On the fact everyone in my world is well. That the big white angel is no doubt fine and being loved by someone who needed him, knew his worth. That the teen boy was spending the weekend away playing a sport he loves, rooming with several of his many best friends (I can say without fear of being overly boastful that this boy has the very useful gift of friendship).

So, his parents went to an Octoberfest party postponed until November by rain. The husband bought beer for the host and I put together a small bit of bounty from my fall garden for the hostess.

If you look closely you will see two tiny origami swans hidden in the bouquet. These exquisite paper gems were made by my favorite sushi chef, who gives them to me by the handsful when I drop by May Island to pick up food for my family and my favorite (vegetarian) dishes. I hid them in the flowers for the little boy of the party house to find after the party.

The cool, crisp fall evening was a sigh of relief after long days and nights of rain. We ate brats from the grill, spätzle and German potato salads. We talked and laughed while children ran and shouted in the yard.

One little boy helpfully warned us shortly after arrival that “a dinosaur is outside the gate” and later told me “t-Rex is out there but he’s dead now.” There were marshmallows roasted on sticks over a fire. And fireworks. Well, sparklers.

And when a little cherub of a girl could not get her daddy to put the German music back on after popular consensus booted it from player, she did not miss a beat. She simply changed tactics. Not yet talking, the little pixie went straight to a new friend, my husband, led him to the table with the music, pointed to the CD and got her wish. Because he is a pushover for miniature charm.

And then we had pie. The universal sadness balm.

Goodbye my angel. Godspeed, wherever you are.

A Gardener Released

For years I was the timid gardener.

There were roses in the back yard when I moved into this house. But with each year the elm outside the back gate got bigger, shadowing the roses, which strained to produce fewer blooms.

So I planted tulips to take advantage of the spring sun. But the squirrels stole most of them. I sent my little son and his friend after them with water guns once, and a neighbor scolded them about being “mean.” Mean?

I did manage to get a few daffodils and bleeding hearts to stay in the ground and bloom. Also peony, white and red, which I love. But peony, like a first kiss, is so fleeting that it is gone before you can properly appreciate this bloom’s full sensuous nature.

But when the elm is in full leaf, the sun is gone from the back yard, which has a tall privacy fence. I grew tired of having a small burst of color in the spring and then mainly hostas. I needed a tall riot of color, blankets of it. So I went to the front where I had a solid block of sun a good part of the day.

Here is what happened, from the beginning, in pictures.

I had lots of failures and things I didn’t care for, in particular. The Angel’s Trumpets I brought up from Alabama as seed and tiny shoots leafed and leafed and finally put out exactly one bloom. Still I was ecstatic. It gave me hope.

I wanted the flowers to be strong, to not depend on chemicals. So I spent several years amending the soil, bringing in bags of top soil and peat and this and that to get a good mix that somehow felt light and airy and well, right. This year I added the pulp from the organic vegetable juicing I’ve taken up. I didn’t use poisons. There are enough of those in the world.

I have mainly planted seeds. Somehow, these have worked better for me. I discovered that the flowers and I needed to start the journey together, from the beginning. I watched them carefully. Just the plants and me.

But I was still being timid. I was out front where the foot traffic was heavy. It was hard to lose myself there. People walked by and spoke and chatted and gave their opinions about my handiwork.

This is the Washington, D.C., area., just over the Potomac River bridge in Virginia. There are lots of people from other places here. But the Virginians love their old-fashioned, unchanging sameness. Red brick colonials. And the plantings following suit.

I changed that in our little corner of the world.

The cleome were the first of the wild things. My mother had lots of it in Alabama. So I brought back seed in pods to plant in front. It took off like wildfire. One friend, a psychologist from Boston, shuddered when he saw it. “WHAT is that thing? Straight out of Star Trek,” he insisted.

Mother had always grown zinnias too. I cut a bouquet while visiting and it cheered up the house so. The flowers lasted and lasted. That’s it, I said, zinnias too. The nurseries had the same variety, State Fair or something. Small, only a few colors. I wanted tall and vibrant. So I went for the seeds.

There were times they didn’t do well, so I learned to bend over a young zinnia plant, cover it with soil and it would grow long along the ground and push up new shoots and blooms. The picture above is all from one plant!

I planted lillies. Each year they grew bolder, as I did.

And dahlias. These low-to-the-ground but showy orange flame blooms are the favorite of some neighbors. And they just keep coming back every year, despite the cold Middle Atlantic winters that freeze them every winter.

I found my gardening sense of humor with the dahlias. Dahlias or zinnias, please stand up.

I have a fondness for the starburst hydrangea. I think because it isn’t the usual.

This year my something new was purple bells.

But the star of the show is always the zinnia. I hate to thin them, so I keep taking over little plots of earth I find.

They range from minis to California giants that grow as tall as me (5-5). Blocks of vibrant color, sometimes I feel like I am painting with plant life.

This year I grew two new colors, white and a green called envy. New neighbors I had never seen before were coming around to see this one.

And of course as much as I love the zinnias, for the joy they bring me, for the attention they get and for the bouquets they bring for months, the angel’s trumpets captured my heart. After playing coy for years, they burst forth. And bloomed and bloomed and bloomed.

So, is it any wonder that through my front door the following things have been on my walls for decades? These representatives of an inner life, pieces of art I selected for myself and which were selected for me.

These paintings, some abstract, are of flowers and plants. Two are of places in the deep South where it is warm most of the year, where I yearn to be.

Proof that a not-so-timid flower gardener was inside all along. Waiting for the right conditions. To be born aloft by the completing elements of soil, sun, water and air. Finally, set free.

Cold Weather Stop Gaps

After losing my summer garden, I decided to turn to drink. Although not that kind of drink. The bottle of Campari in the picture is ancient. Actually, I had a friend I had not seen in a long time over for tea last weekend.

I made finger sandwiches, cream cheese cucumber and minced ham with pickle (yes, I cut off the crusts). And I baked pumpkin bread, my favorite, the kind with black walnuts and yogurt. The recipe calls for three loaves. If I’m going to that kind of trouble, why not make enough to freeze for later, is my attitude.

I have lots of tea pots and many kinds of tea. My husband gave me this teapot, way back when.

We sat and chatted about mutual friends, about the neighborhood and our children. About my attempts to go back to work fulltime. It was good to catch up.

Of course I can’t just exist on friendship alone. A couple of days later I was down by the river, walking, on a glorious day. That’s when I finally felt happy again.

And although I shouldn’t have done it, I brought back a few bits and pieces of the river as keepsakes. To keep me from calling that suicide hot line. I firmly believe in leaving wild things in their natural habitat. But, well, the cold is settling in and I needed them. I won’t do it again.

At first I thought “these are all scratchy” and then I realized they are pieces of shell that are fossilized. There were many of them.

And finally this, my favorite part of the week. A few little pieces that I crafted into something all my own, to keep over the long, cold winter. To help keep me from descending too far down into that dark winter hole. The place where people who thrive in summer light and heat go when they end up in places where it is cold for the majority of the year.

I absolutely love it.

I might make it after all.