Grow Veggies Grow!!

Well it has been just over 3 years since my last post! Crazy! So much has happened, but I'll skip it for now. I was working in my garden and thought how nice it would be to have a garden blog. Then I remembered I already had a blog, and here I am.

I spent a good portion of Sunday clearing out weeds and prepping the strip of dirt down the side of my house to be a butterfly garden. During the process I found several tiny little hostas growing under the weeds! I dug them up and moved them to the back of the house where I felt they would be happier. I just checked on them when I got home from work today and it is incredible how much bigger and better they look after only a few days! The leaves look happy as they stretch out to meet the morning sun and then relax in the afternoon shade. I'm glad I found them. :) The butterfly garden... I don't know if anything I planted will actually grow there, but the invasive ground cover (bishops' weed? Sheppard's weed? I don't know. Somebody's weed.) will come back for the rest of my life. I decimated the plants and yanked up the roots and turned the soil and scowled at them a lot... but once it is in the ground, it is there to stay. A few days after tearing up the whole plot there are already plants growing back, some of them several inches tall. This will be an uphill battle... Honestly I don't care if it ever goes away, as long as my garden grows along with it.

I am also growing veggies. They are inside right now... I got a deal on a portable greenhouse but it has fallen over twice so I'm afraid to put the plants in! But I check on them every morning and once or twice a night. Oh how it fascinates and thrills me that in a matter of house a once bare cup of soil can have a gorgeous green leaf poking up out of it. :)

I still have several kinds of flowers to plant when I get some time, but here's what I have sprouting on my craft table as of this evening.

4 of 6 Green Peppers (from new seed packet)
0 of 2 Green Peppers (from seeds from last year's crop)
2 of 4 Red Peppers
1 of 2 Snap Peas
0 of 2 Green Beans
1 of 2 Onions
2 of 2 Tomatoes
3 of 9 Dianthus (flowers)
1 of 6 Sensitive Plants (planted for funsies)

I shall try to update on the progress of my gardens: front, back, butterfly, and veggie. I do so love talking about my gardens. It is incredible that I get so much pride and joy from gardening. All I do is take a seed, put it in dirt, and water it. God does the rest... and I get to say I made it. :)

Off to make dinner. Which in some weeks time, God willing, shall include some of my very own garden vegetables!

Happy First of March

Happy First of March



Happy first of March

Another month gone by

It will be April soon enough

How the time does fly



Twenty years ago

Six months felt like forever

I had all the time in the world

To sit and do whatever



Now before I know it

My weekends are half passed

If there’s anything I want to do

I’d better do it fast!

As Yet Untitled

When the shadows slide out and the silence sets in

That’s when the loneliness and depression begin

The lack of noise echoes in my ears

Screaming all of the words I’ve been longing to hear

I love you

You’re beautiful

You’re all that I need

When the world lets you down you will always have me

I toss and I turn as my heart beats in pain

My tears soak my pillow but my cries are in vain

From my lips a sad sigh escapes through the night

As I roll over once more and turn out the light.

My Poppop

I just got off the phone with my mother... my grandfather passed away about an hour ago. Yesterday he'd had a heart attack and was put on a ventilator to keep him breathing... but his wishes were to not be kept alive by machines. If he couldn't do it on his own, he wouldn't do it at all. He was always a stubborn man. It was probably his most defining quality. It is likely the reason my mother is so stubborn, and thus the reason that I am too. But he loved us all very much, and through his grumpy old man facade he always wore, you could never miss the caring, mischievous twinkle in his eyes. The twinkle that was there when at Christmas a few years back he gave me a box of clementines. I couldn't stop laughing. I believe at Thanksgiving I'd made a silly joke that clementines were fancy, expensive food that I couldn't afford... I don't believe I've ever seen one since and not thought of him. I don't know that I ever will.

Even though I rarely had the opportunity to see my grandfather, the world already seems a little emptier without him in it. It just seems that he belongs as a part of it somewhere, snipping at someone he loves and smiling happily to himself because he knows that they love him just as much. I prayed earlier today that if he had to go, an angel would come to take him home. I hope that angel was prepared, because I doubt that my Poppop is any less feisty on the other side.


I love you Poppop, and will miss you. If you find Zipper up there, give him the biggest hug from me.

Amen

Those who know me well know how hard it is for me sometimes just to get up and push forward, one day at a time. Some have been there for me through some really tough times... or just been there on a regular day to pull me up out of the darkness and get me into the sunshine so that I remember there are moments of happiness out there. Oddly enough my inspiration found recently comes from an unexpected source who will never know me... Kid Rock.

I know, that seems ridiculous, but my Kid Rock CDs are one of my secret guilty pleasures. Some of his music is obviously quite disgusting and vulgar and I try to skip that, but he has some songs that are simply beautiful too. I bought his newest CD a while back because I heard him on Ellen singing the song "Amen." I thought the song was great so I went straight to half.com and ordered the disc. I've listened to the CD many times since I bought it, but recently part of that song has really stood out to me, and I have found myself rewinding over and over again in the car to keep hearing a select few lines....

Somewhere you got a brother, sister, friend, grandmother, niece or nephew
Just dying to be with you
You know there's someone out there who unconditionally, religiously
Loves you
So just hold on 'cause you know it's true

Those words make me think. About my five nieces, about my sister, my mom, my grandmother who keeps trying to get me to come for lunch... The people who don't give up on me even when I give up on myself. Those are people who need me... who love me. Not because I have done amazing things with my life, or because I am the life of the party, I'm so cute, so smart, so funny, or I aways know the right thing to say to fix eveything. I wish those things were true of me but they are not. I may find it hard to love myself most days but there are people who love me anyway... just because.

It feels vain to think that I could mean so much to any other person... but it isn't. It's the truth. I need to learn to believe that as much as they mean to me, I mean that much to them too. I don't know why that has always been so hard for me.

Anyway, I hope you all realize not only how much other people mean to you, but how much you mean to them. Don't hurt them by assuming they don't care and not being there when they need you.

Easy to write it, harder to live it... but I am gonna try.

"The Lure of Giverny"

I am stricken with regret that I did not elect to bring one of my many untouched blank journals with me to the museum. When I am inspired to write, words come to me so quickly that I can't keep hold of them... they tumble over each other into every corner of my mind and if I do not write them down they become soft and dull until they are nothing more than blurry representations of what could have become clear, focused ideas. At this point I can only do so much to recall them.

I went to the Columbus Metropolitan Museum of Art today, as it was the last day for the "In Monet's Garden: The Lure of Giverny" exhibit that graced Columbus in October of 2007. It is not often that I venture out alone to a populated venue other than Easton, but this I saw as a rare and marvelous opportunity... this was worth an anxiety attack if it came to that.

I climbed the stairs and followed the hallways to the back of the line. A young lady informed us that it would be a thirty-five minute wait from where we were, and I thought about that for a moment. This was only one day of the four month exhibit, and only one small piece of that day... yet the museum was overflowing with people of all ages who had come to see the small handful of paintings that our tiny museum was able to aquire. I cannot imagine the pride and elation that I would feel if I had ever done something in my life that even a handful of people would pay to stand and wait to see.

Behind me was a man who had obviously been dragged one too many places by his more worldly companion. She was irritated but not surprised by his continuous nagging about what they were doing there. I was mildly amused by their banter for a while, but eventually I was more annoyed by his constant prattle than she likely had ever been. One of the things he said made me think, though. The man snapped at his girfriend: "Come on. There are tons of painters in the world. Why this guy? What's the big deal? What's so great about his stuff?" She didn't have an answer for him. I have always said that Monet is my favorite painter. I had never really considered why until that moment.

After finally crossing the threshold of the exhibit, I was in disbelief. There I was looking at "The Artist's Garden, Irises," painted over a century ago. The purples were vibrant and beautiful, and I would have given so much to be able to trace the tips of my fingers over the textured deposits of oils on the canvas. The second picture before me, I could have cried tears of happiness. The crowd had parted and I found myself standing there, front and center, three feet from "Water Lilies."

I know why I love Monet's works so much. The colors and strokes are soft but vibrant. So little can appear to be so much... the paintings are simplistic but the complexity of the movement and the blending of the colors are stunning. Looking at these works of art, I picture myself leaned back in a small rowboat with a parasol shading my face, breathlessly taking in the beauty around me, myself like a figure in the painting. I love these paintings because when I see them, I feel warmth, and peace. I wish that I had been given the gift to create something that could inspire beautiful emotion in people who are separated from me by a hundred years, like Monet.

In his later years Monet continued to paint with passion despite his failing eyesight. Looking at some of these works, I was overcome with a deep sadness for him. How much did it hurt to no longer be able to see his beloved gardens at Giverny in all of their crisp perfection? How hard was it on his mind and soul to have been given the talent to define their beauty clearly with paint and brush, but to have lost the ability to do so? Or perhaps he was at peace, feeling the beauty in the way he began to see the world being transferred to his canvas.

As I found myself at the exit back into the main halls of the museum a panic came over me. I had taken my time at each painting, taking them all in one by one and absorbing all that I could... but when I realized that it was over and I should most likely never see them again, I turned and circled back, slipping through the opposing crowd for one last glimpse of each.

I cannot imagine a better way to spend eight dollars, thirty-five minutes in line, and a Sunday afternoon. On my way out I overheard that the wait for "In Monet's Garden" was up to an hour and a quarter. Had I come then I would have waited anyway, and it would have been just as worth it.

A Quick Note on Life/Love

Sadly, every moment in our lives changes us in some way before we realize that it has happened. All we can do is try our best to be conscious of these moments so that we can guide the change to be for the better instead of for the worse. We need experiences of all kinds to learn and grow; if we were never treated badly we wouldn't truly know how to appreciate being treated well. A bad experience shouldn't teach us that everything is bad, it should teach us to recognize the good things, and to fully marvel in the rare encounter of the wonderful.