We had two truckloads of mulch delivered yesterday. A huge pile in the driveway blocks the garage. A second pile awaits me at the top of the hill out back.
A bolt fell out of our wheelbarrow yesterday; I fear it won’t survive this year’s mulch-spreading. It’s been rickety for two or three years now, and I keep limping it along, replacing bolts and its fat little tire. I’m sad about its death throes because I love our wheelbarrow. It’s the perfect size and shape for the jobs I want it to do, and last time I looked at our hardware stores, all the wheelbarrows were way beefier and deeper than I want. Our little red wheelbarrow wasn’t an option anymore.
I’m on my annual gardening vacation this week. I’m restless to get out there and start spreading the mulch, but right now, it’s too cold. Snow flurries drift among pear and cherry blossoms. The cats are curled up in the heated beds we got them this winter. I’m in cozy sweatpants and a thick hooded sweatshirt after my swim. I guess it’s not too terrible to sit here and write by the window, sipping hot coffee from the spring tulip mug our daughter made me in her ceramics class. My fingers ache from three days of pruning, shearing, digging, and grasping, so it’s probably okay to give them a break for a couple of hours.
Yesterday, since I didn’t have the mulch yet, I cut back about half of a meadow patch where we let the grass grow tall just to see what would happen. What happened is that one invasive ornamental grass — Miscanthus (silvergrass) — took over. I love its bronze tassels in autumn, but the grass grows aggressively, and it’s stems are thick and woody like bamboo, making it hard to trim or remove, and the pretty bronze tassels are not worth the mess the grass makes when I try to cut it back. I spent a lot of yesterday digging up clumps of this grass and preparing an area on the hill for the mulch to be dumped.
This gardening vacation is exhausting physical work, which is great because it’s helping me work off all the schnitzels, beer, and cake I ate last week, but I can’t do it for 8 hours straight every day. Yesterday, I took a break from digging up grass clumps to make banana nut muffins. I wanted them to be ready when our daughter came home from school. It’s been almost ten years since I was a stay-at-home mom, and our daughter is in her final year of high school. Our son has already moved out, and she will leave to go to college in August. This is my last chance to bake treats for when she gets home from school.
Baking the muffins for her filled me up. It made me feel warm and happy. When she yelled “Hey Mom!” across the yard when she got home from school, I told her there were fresh muffins, and her face lit up. She said it was the best news she’d had all day. When I came up after paying the mulch guy, she’d already eaten two.
Oof, that’s hard to think about. I’ve been going through baby pictures to send off to the school and the swim team for end-of-the-year slideshows for the seniors, and it’s an emotional roller coaster. I’m filled with such joy when I see our kids’ chubby smiling faces in their baby pictures, and to see them so happy now, and I’m gutted by the passage of time, and that my babies are now adults, and I will never hear their sweet toddler voices or squeeze their sweet baby chub ever ever again. They’ve grown up. They drive and go to concerts and play Euchre with us. They still love any and all home-baked treats, though, and surprising our daughter with the muffins was the highlight of my day.
It felt wonderful to be a stay-at-home mom again if just for a day. I tried to savor the moment and not to get too sad about what it meant in this long string of endings. I was actually okay until I started writing about it today. Especially because the writing is mixed with my very obvious aging, and time’s march towards the ending phases of life. My whole body aches. I am confronted by the fact that I’m not young anymore, our kids are moving out, and in five short months, they’ll both be gone after sharing space and food and time with them for the past 20 years. I guess the good news is that we tend to get happier after mid-life; age 50 is the trough on the U-bend of happiness*. I can still bake them rolls and cookies, muffins and scones, cakes and pies and cinnamon rolls when they come home for breaks.
The sun is trying to peak out. It shines golden on our greening grass for a moment, then the grey clouds cover it again and the world darkens. Snowflakes swirl outside the window. My coffee cup is empty. I guess I’ll fill it again, then draw. It’ll be warm after lunch, and then I can go out and spread mulch. I hope the wheelbarrow and I make it.
*Not-surprisingly, the U-shaped theory of happiness is not 100% accepted, but I like the idea. I first encountered it in the novel Wellness by Nathan Hill, which is excellent and is probably my favorite book I’ve read so far this year.
Butterfly Mind 