Our daughter and I went shopping on Sunday. She wanted decorations for her room. I wanted decorations for spring. The equinox is one week away. I feel like I’ve been waiting for it forever. I’ve got pages and pages in my garden journals, regular journals, and diaries dedicated to, “OMG will spring never come?”
For the mantel, my daughter and I found a nest with speckled eggs at Pier One. I saw it when we walked in, and I kept coming back to it over and over again as we browsed the store. I love it so much. I bought it. At Michaels we bought some silk cherry blossoms for the mantel vase. Two days later I went back out for pink candles and a silk chartreuse hydrangea puff. There wasn’t enough color on the spring shelf and I desperately need green in my life right now.
Our mantel looks fresh and springlike, and it makes me both giddy and restless. The same day we decorated, we awaited a snow storm. The kids wondered all day, “Will school be closed?” I wondered, “When will the weather break so I can be warm in my garden, move all my plants, and sow my seeds?”
The storm came in the night. About four inches of snow. Luckily none of the seeds I sowed early have sprouted or they’d likely have been killed. Everything is buried under white.
The kids played in the snow with friends all day (school was closed). The space heater in my office warmed my toes and my indoor seedlings. Last night we had a blazing fire underneath the hopeful mantel of spring. And here I am, writing again about how ready I am for it to be here, as more snowflakes drift down.
I am out of control. Once Christmas ended, and the holiday decorations were all stored and put away in the cubby hole under the stairs, and winter became plain old winter with nothing left to look forward to in it, my mind switched gears to gardening.
Yep. Gardening. In January.
Two years ago, I embarked on a grass-killing spree in our front yard. I converted about 1000 square feet of lawn into flower beds. This past year, I set my eyes on the giant hill out back, the one that makes me feel like I’m going to have a heart attack every time I mow it. I determined to convert that to flower beds as well, and every time I pushed the mower up the hill, or along the hill, or tried to keep the mower from pulling me down the hill, I cursed the grass and dreamed of the day we would never have to mow it again.
Dead grass out back. No more mowing. Yes more butterflies… if winter would ever end.
In November, I killed it. I killed it dead. Seeing all that dry yellow that we’ll no longer have to mow makes me ridiculously happy. In fact, I’m going to expand it because I don’t like the shape, and I messed up the curve down there at the bottom, and what the hell, I just spent $50 on seeds, and an expanded swath of dead grass means less to mow and more room for flowers.
This is where the crazy comes in. Since the beginning of January, when I’m not at work, I think of nothing but gardening. I scour Pinterest for planting combinations. I measured all the beds on a day last week when the temperatures finally broke freezing. I scribble notes in my gardening-specific composition book. I check my gardening-specific blog for when things happened last year, jot notes down in my gardening-specific calendar, and draw plans in my gardening-specific graph-paper notebook. I even created a spreadsheet with all of our current plants, the seeds I ordered, and when to plant and where.
In my sweaters and fuzzy slippers, sipping coffee, I walk from window to window, staring out, studying the spaces, thinking about what we already have that I can transplant to another part of the garden, thinking about what new plants I want to buy, considering color and height, reminding myself of the budget, moving another choice from the “buy at the nursery” to the “start from seed” column, checking to see if my on-paper plans will scale to the real landscape, visualizing. Dreaming about what it’s going to look like when everything fills in. I’ve probably worn the paint off the gardening section of the bookshelf, pulling Essential Perennials for Every Garden and Gardening for Birds, Butterflies, & Bees nearly every day to check, “What was that purple plant I liked?”, “What were those native grasses?”, “What will look good with the bee balm? The yarrow?”
I. Just. Can’t. Stop.
I thought I had gotten to a stopping point yesterday. On Friday I spent about 6 hours, and on Saturday about 10 hours, sketching real-deal, true to scale, plans for both the front and the back: about 2000 square feet of butterfly and bird garden.
Once the plans were set, I ordered seeds and made month-by-month purchase lists in Trello so we’ll make sure to budget the right amount each month.
And I was SO PLEASED! I thought maybe I’d stop thinking about it all. I thought my brain would be free to consider other things, like blogging or our children. And it kind of was, for a minute.
Now I want to just finish this post so I can look up shrubs that might do well on the side of the house where they get blasted by wind, and I want to think about the mailbox bed which I neglected to think about in all the thinking about the bigger gardens. Even though the plans are finally made, I keep doing all the same things I was before, only this time with plans in hand. I hold the back hill plan up against the sliding glass door while I look out at the bird feeder and think, hmmm, will that plant actually work where I think it will? (No.) Then I want to redraw everything, or note alternative plants in case the nursery doesn’t have the one I want.
The good news is that I’ve transitioned from “The amount of space to plant is overwhelming there’s no way I can do this!” to an actual plan, with dates of when to do what. I’ve already put in vacation time for my annual gardening week.
I’m very antsy to get started. I want to clean out all the old brush. I want to kill more grass. I want to learn when and how to prune the roses, how much to cut back the rue, what to do with the forsythia when it blooms. I want to start seeds, and move perennials, and see if I can successfully transplant the milkweed. But it’s only January 14! Only 3 weeks past the winter solstice! I can’t believe I have to wait a whole two months to start doing anything.
I don’t want to wish my life away. But I am. Just these two months. I wish winter were almost over so I could stop thinking and start doing.
This is my contribution to the daily challenge, entertain, as the garden seems to entertain me no matter what time of year it is, even if it also makes me crazy.
It is Saturday and the trees are encased in ice. We slept with our bedroom window open, and in the deep stillness of night, I was startled awake by the sound of a loud crash. I thought it was drunk students knocking over garbage cans, and then we heard soft voices in the parking lot. A tree limb, heavy with ice, had fallen onto a car.
My legs are crossed at the cafe table by the kitchen window. Morning light shines in. This is my favorite place to sit. On the smooth round table are my earthenware coffee mug, a cup of ice water, my prompt box, an orchid, and a copy of A Land Remembered — my current Florida read. The fridge hums. The half-loaded dishwasher stands open. I hear my husband shuffle paper in the living room. Tear a check out of a checkbook. Occasionally, he clears his throat. A kettle of pinto beans clinks and groans on the stove. The glass lid beads with steam.
I’ve got the kitchen window cracked. It is inches from my body, and I feel icy January air on my hip. The air smells clean and cold and damp. A heavy drop of water splats on the window stool. Further away I hear gentle dripping on wet soil, on cement, on pavement. The ice in the trees crackles softly, and branches sway slowly under a shimmering weight. Liquid pools in the blacktop parking lot and on our cement stoop. The ground is too warm to freeze liquid into solid, but the air is not. A stirring of wind knocks crystal shards from high branches; ice clatters against our windows. I see tiny snow flakes fall among raindrops. The weather is raw today.
I hiked alone yesterday. I needed to get out of the house.
Beech tree in winter
Actually, I needed to get away from our kids. They’ve been home for what seems like weeks now (13.5 days, to be exact), and I couldn’t take the bickering and wrestling and whining and begging and pouting and grumping anymore.
Poverty Creek Trail
After two weeks of being around them 24/7 I was no fun to be around, either. I was so crotchety and cramped in that I didn’t even want to be around me, and while I considered going for a run, I’m tired of my running circuit: the same hay bales, the same sheep, the same hills and cows and horses in blankets. I needed more drastic measures yesterday. I needed to get in the car and drive away.
I wanted to be alone in the forest. And I wanted to see if there was ice on the Pandapas Pond.
Pandapas Pond crystalizing
Winter hasn’t quite arrived in Blacksburg. It has been fairly warm here the past few nights, so I wasn’t sure how liquid or solid the pond might be. I was excited when I hiked in, gloves and hat on, camera in hand, and saw a thin sheath of new ice creeping from the shore towards the middle of the pond. I lost myself for a while watching the breeze blow ripples against the thin crust; I was mesmerized by the movement of liquid against the crystal skin.
Pond freeze in progress
The trail, too, was icy. It is heavily trafficked by mountain bikers, hikers, and runners, and low points in the path are often trampled into mud pits. I always forget that on this trail. There was no way around the first pit, so I steeled myself to sink into it. But my boot didn’t squish into the muck, it crunched over it. The shiny mud was frozen solid.
Snow cup fungi
ice crust on ground juniper
Frozen tire tracks
Beech leaves
I love hiking solo, listening to the crackle of leaves (or mud) underfoot, the thump of my boots on the trail, the sigh of wind over my ears. I stop and take photos. I breathe cold air into my nose. I feel my cheeks turn pink and nod at runners as they pass. I spend time in my head, running calculations on how many notebooks I’ll fill if I write 10 minutes per day for an entire year (~5.5 100-page composition books).
Mossy stone in the woods
Sometimes I come home from a hike recharged, ready to take on the tasks of life again. Other times I return home and wish I could have more. More quiet. More solitude. More thinking time. Yesterday, fortunately, was the former. I returned to a house full of children (ours and others’), but also to a warm kitchen where I sank my hands into bread dough, and to a husband who assured me I wasn’t a horrible person for running away.
Poverty Creek Trail
Crystalizing
Under the ice
tree skeletons
New ice
This is my entry for the Daily Post Photo Challenge: New.
On February 1, 2014, my husband had an itch to hike the woods around Pandapas Pond. It was a sunny, 50 degree Saturday after two weeks of sub-freezing temperatures, and we had seen pictures in the paper of folks skating and ice fishing on the pond. I asked if the kids and I could ride along. When we arrived, he waved and disappeared into the forest, and our children and I wound our way down to the iced over water. College students walked across the pond’s hard shell – all the way across – and threw snowballs through sunlight. Our kids begged to go out on the ice, and all I could see was them crashing through. I was terrified. I told them to stay near the edges – the surface looked wide and treacherous, more of a lake than a pond, really, with all that shockingly cold, surely fathoms-deep water beneath a thinning sheet of cracking, melting ice. I white-knuckled my camera; I told myself, unclench your jaw. I reminded myself, Breathe, as they ran reckless, full speed, heads-back, mouths-open-in-laughter races on the sun-warmed ice; as I stepped onto pond’s slushy skin. I probably lost five years of my life that day, but our kids remember it as one of the best days of theirs.
Unknown plant, Pandapas Pond, Blacksburg, VA February 2014
Cracking? ice on Pandapas Pond, Blacksburg, VA February 2014
Walking on ice, Pandapas Pond, Blacksburg, VA February 2014
This is my entry for the weekly photo challenge: Threes
Butterfly Mind 