Caring Less, Caring More, Priorities Shift in Everyday Ramblings

I just like this picture, the composition. Neither the color nor the shape of the dahlia is my cup of tea (Carlo would love it, Carlo only wants to play with the pink toys), but the shape, vibrancy and the oak leaves are appealing.

It is raining! Last time I was down at the garden a few days ago, the ground was wet. It has been so long since we’ve had wet ground. May, I think. The fact that so many plants survived is a miracle of adaptability to me. I filled up my watering can when I got there but ended using it for the communal plants along the fence line. There is one sad blueberry being subsumed by an out-of-control rosemary bush.

In the next three weeks I need to pull up all the plants and till under what green manure I have growing. It was sad to see a completely bare plot that was vibrant last week with a random cherry tomato sitting on it, probably dropped by a bird the other day. This is the hard part of community gardening here.

Mrs. Sherlock keeps marveling at how much knowledge I have picked up over the seven months. My head is full of ideas and colors and patterns, and I am looking forward to next year where I will keep my same plot. Now I need to turn my attention to healthy happy seedlings. I am okay at getting them to germinate but the transfer process after that is a disaster. I have 4 tomato plants left and some spindly columbines for next year.

I need to be realistic about how much space I have and what I can do but there is an LED grow light calling my name with a siren song. Also, I need to find a way to compost. It is so hard when you don’t have a car and the garden is not attached to your home. I suppose I can put something on Next Door to see if someone between the garden and me is organically composting.

Oh, and speaking of that; there is a house I walk by on my way to the garden, an older house with an older woman who putters in her garden, but also has help. I noticed walking by that in among her bulbs in the front patch there was a large and unusual variety of mushrooms.

I had never seen anything like that, they came up fast. I talked to a woman helping and she was talking to the woman who owned the property and apparently there was a miscommunication about the compost delivery. The older woman, a friend maybe, or a paid helper, laughed and said too bad we don’t know which ones are edible, but the owner was not amused. The mushrooms were gone the next time I walked by.

When I tell people about the Pull-Up Club, they look at me like I am nuts. It is fun for me. I like to challenge myself. But in a practical way.

I was an active kid. The most active kid in the family. I loved playground apparatus and any kind of jump roping imaginable. But I never bonded with another kid that loved it, for me it was a solitary thing. And then came puberty and some undue and inappropriate attention and all the playing stopped. I still walked a lot, and swam when I could, but the jumping and swinging and running stopped.

My focus was on some warped notion of romantic love and the arts and dealing with some emotional pain I had taken on because of my temperament and circumstances. Oh, and to be honest, drugs. I took a lot of drugs. It is a miracle and some sense of agency I learned from my family that kept me from becoming addicted to anything other than cigarettes (35 years now since I smoked!) and soda. Only a few months this round free from soda.

Now, 20 years into menopause I could care less about romantic love. And that kid who loved the monkey bars has resurfaced. I like challenging myself. In a practical way.

Last week I taught 10 classes. Granted, most of them were a half an hour long but it is a lot. I am happy to do it, but I need to evaluate what I can do and what I want to do so that for the next 12 or 13 years I can stay strong and healthy and skillfully useful to all those wonderful folks that practice with me.

It is all about energy management and allocation. But it is also about having fun and finding a way to focus on what brings me the most joy based on what I have available.

At least, finally, my arms don’t hurt from the shots. I plan to enjoy that while I can.