I ache all over. I hunch like a little old lady when I walk, my feet throb, and my hands have stiffened into claws. But the flower beds are mulched!

Friday, before my first work meeting of the day, I heard the rumble of the dump truck as it lumbered down our street. The mulch men unloaded a giant pile of shredded bark in our driveway and another at the top of the hill out back. It was a glorious sunny day under a bright blue sky, and I crossed my fingers that the clear weather would last through the weekend.

And it did. All day Saturday, all day Sunday, I cut back dead stems, raked leaves, pruned forsythia, dug up weeds, and mulched.

When I came in Sunday, exhausted, with more than half the mulch still left to spread, and after my husband had finished his weekend project of disassembling the toilet and sink to paint our bathroom, we discovered our internet was down. We did all the normal troubleshooting (eg. unplugged the modem and plugged it back in again) and checked for outages in the area before, against my better judgment, I started live chatting with Xfinity through the app.

Forty-five minutes later, having made no progress and getting more and more agitated, all the cool serenity from my garden bliss evaporating in the heat of fighting with technology, I said you know what, I just don’t care enough to spend my time doing this. I want to relax and read my book and eat dinner and get up in the morning and go out in the garden again.

I told the rep I’d call back during business hours. I am so happy I’m off work this week so that I could do that, because it turns out, they need to come out to our house, and the earliest appointment they had was Wednesday. Today. If I hadn’t been on vacation, this would have been supremely irritating since I work from home and cannot work without an internet connection.

Now, on our fourth day without internet, I’ve got time to deal with it. The mulch piles are gone, the lawn is mowed, the bird baths are out and filled with fresh water, the bird feeders filled with fresh seed. The Xfinity tech is coming this morning, when it’s too chilly to be out in the garden anyway, and then I’m off to the nursery to see what plants are available this early to fill my flower boxes with.