We are in the middle of a fool’s spring, and I took full advantage of it this weekend. From after breakfast to before dinner yesterday, I had shears, rake, shovel, loppers, wheelbarrow, bungee cords, hose, and bags of dirt scattered all over the yard. I pruned roses, cut back ornamental grasses, raked leaves out of flower beds, moved lavenders, transplanted hydrangea, and kicked poor performers to the curb.
As I worked, I smelled fresh mint in the mint patch. I listened to birds chirp and leaves rustle in a warm breeze. When I pulled away dead debris and raked out dry leaves that have insulated the ground these last 5 months, I found green emerging underneath.
A podcast episode showed up in my feed the other day: Why You Should Snap Pictures of Nature. I started listening while I unloaded the dishwasher in the early morning, and I finished it while I made my lunch. It’s on the Science of Happiness podcast, and in it, the guest talks about her-two week experience noticing nature:
I really like the idea of paying really close attention to what was very ordinary.
– Tejal Rao
She watched the progress of a leaf unfurling; she photographed it every day. “It looked like a, sort of like a leaf burrito.” She continually experienced awe.
Needless to say, I love everything about this: the focus on the ordinary, the awe, the photographing, the leaf burrito. So of course, I want to notice nature, too. Especially now that winter turns to spring, and every day something new is happening if I look closely enough.
After I ate my lunch that day, I went out and saw the crocus and snowdrops I blogged about.
Today, I saw my first bees of the season. In February. I had no idea they came out this early! I guess if there are flowers, there will be bees. As I poked around under the brown leaf litter in a flower bed, I saw new green sedum leaves coming through. I found a volunteer feverfew under the rosemary. And as dumped kitchen scraps in the compost, I saw a dot of purple out of the corner of my eye. The first vinca flower of the season.
The world is coming into color again, slowly slowly.
Bee butts in crocusNew sedum leavesVolunteer feverfewVinca
When we first moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, nearly 10 years ago, I read (and blogged about) a local newspaper article about how to build durable happiness. The article said that to sustain happiness, we should appreciate and savor, and continue to appreciate and savor, the good things we have in our lives.
I want to lean into winter this year, so when my husband asked me yesterday if I wanted to go hiking with him, I said yes. I had sniffed the air and knew from the forecast that rain was coming. Being cold and wet is pretty much my least favorite state to be in. It’s miserable and uncomfortable and makes me very grumpy, so I almost didn’t join him. I sucked it up, put on multiple layers, including a rain coat, and went anyway.
The roads were clear on the first part of our drive. As we climbed in altitude on the lesser travelled routes, the winding mountain paths got pretty slushy. Rain spit on the windshield, but when we arrived at the trailhead, it stopped. I grabbed my camera and gaiters, and we set off into the snowy forest.
Snowy road to War Spur trail
Though we’re too far from the ocean for me to want to live here forever, I’m grateful that we get to live here right now. We could have ended up in a much less pleasant town. I’m grateful we live in a place with four distinct seasons, with mountains, snow, mosses and ferns, deciduous and evergreen trees, hiking, birds, and natural beauty in every direction. I’m grateful that yesterday, the weather kept people inside, and we had the whole forest to ourselves.
Hikers had been there since the snow fell, but we were the only ones out when we hiked
I’m grateful my husband planned to hike regardless of the forecast, and that I decided to go with him despite my aversion to being cold and wet. I’m grateful we had nowhere to be and nothing we had to do, and we had the freedom and means to go for a day hike. I’m grateful for my wool socks, wool hat, gloves, raincoat, and hard-soled hiking shoes to keep me cozy while hiking in the snow, and that it didn’t rain on us while we were out of the car after all. I’m grateful for my camera to help me capture the scenery. I’m grateful for the sound of the wind in the trees. I’m grateful for our home, where our cats and children were warm and dry.
And I’m grateful for our fireplace, where I built a roaring wood fire when we got back home and the rain finally came down.
I think that was more than five things for today’s Bloganuary prompt, What are 5 things you are grateful for today? I could have written many more! But it would have bored you.
I’m back home from the beach. I wish I could write that sentence differently: “I’m back home at the beach.” Maybe one day we’ll migrate seaward from the mountains. For now I’ll just remember how pretty it is to watch the day end when water, sand, and clouds interact with the changing slant of sunlight.
Late afternoon, low tide. Folly Beach, SCShadow play on the jettySunset SUP; there were lots of board sports at this beach.Foil surferFoil surfer, still goingPink sunset, Folly Beach, SC
I woke this morning to the sound of surf. It was 7:37, and diffused light from an overcast sky seeped around the edges of the blinds. My body wanted to go back to sleep, but I wanted to see the beach. My girlfriends and I arrived at Folly Beach, South Carolina, yesterday evening around 6 o’clock, it was drizzling, and we needed to set up the bar and put groceries away for our annual girls’ weekend. Then it was dark, and we were too busy hanging out, drinking, and ordering fish tacos to do anything like walk the one block to the beach.
We stayed up late, of course. So despite probably needing a lot more rest, I was happy I at least slept this morning beyond my normal 5 am wakeup. Nobody else in the house was awake, and I couldn’t lie there in bed listening to the ocean and not go see it. I brushed my teeth, gulped down some water, pulled on a pair of jeans, and walked barefoot across the street to the beach. No coffee yet, I wanted to get out there immediately.
Now I’m back, sitting on the porch, and everyone else still sleeps. I’m listening to surf pound, processing my photos, and desperately hoping someone else will wake up soon. The coffee maker is this tremendous combination 12-cup pot / single-cup Keurig type deal, where it tries to do everything, and as a result can’t do anything. After 15 minutes of filling the water thing, pressing all the buttons, taking stuff out, putting stuff in, holding buttons down some more, and doing all of those steps multiple times, I can’t figure out how to make a simple cup of coffee.
I really really want a cup of coffee.
I want a cup of coffee and a piece of the key lime pound cake one of my girlfriends brought. I’m trying to buy time, but I don’t think I can last much longer. If nobody is up by the time I post this, I might need to get in the car and go find a cafe.
Path to the beach lined with dune flowersStand-up paddlers in the morning surfGood morning buttercup, or whatever flower you arePelicans are my favorite seabirds ♥️
Every couple of months, I get a notification from Apple: “Your iCloud storage is almost full.” When I first started getting the email, it inspired me to go through my Apple photos and cull the blurry, mediocre, meaningless, and unnecessary shots, like the pictures of the grocery list on the kitchen chalkboard.
After 5 minutes, I’d get bored and give up. I opted to pay $0.99 per month for extra storage instead.
That bump in storage relieved me of emails from Apple for a good while. But recently, I started getting them again. And again, I made half-hearted attempts to go through my Apple photos. I’d try to narrow the ten shots of a monarch butterfly down to one or two, the seven shots of the daisy down to the one best shot. My photo library goes back to 2013, though, and if I’m lucky, I might make it through the past six months before saying, okay, that’s good enough.
My digital backlog is starting to weigh on me the same way clutter in my house or office does. There’s a bunch of unused junk in there, taking up space on servers, creating messy piles of crap photos that make it hard for me to find the good shots I actually care about. I want to keep what’s beautiful, useful, and meaningful, and I want to pitch the rest.
The task is overwhelming though. How am I ever going to get through eight years of phone photos, often with multiple shots of the same thing that require me to look closely before choosing which ones to delete? And photos from my phone are only half of what’s on my iCloud drive. Photos from my real camera are in there too. Large files. Thousands of them, often with twenty pictures of the same thing instead of just five or ten.
I’m going to try to tackle this in the same way I trained for triathlons or approach big tasks at work: break it into small, achievable pieces, and focus only on finishing the portion I’m working on rather than the whole thing all at once. For my first attempt, not really knowing what I’m getting into at all, so really winging it here, I’m going to aim to clean up one year of files per month. So maybe by June of 2022 I’ll be able to click into any year in my photographs and find the year, beautifully curated, photos labeled, zero clutter. That sounds dreamy.
Butterfly Mind 