Recovery.

Apr11

There are so many things people don’t talk about. So many things unexpected that needn’t be. Before becoming pregnant I didn’t know of any possible normal oddities other than nausea, stretch marks, and swelling, and I honestly thought nausea was always in the morning.

It wasn’t until I was pregnant that I learned that it could be nothing or (as in my case) all day every day for months. Thankfully, I was spared stretch marks and the worst of the swelling. I learned about hives though, and bloody noses. Heartburn and insomnia. More effects that the forgetfulness of hormones has erased in the creation of rewired brain power to be more alert for saber tooth tigers and less inclined toward complex thought.

Recovery, too, isn’t discussed. What is discussed surrounds sleep (or the lack thereof.) Let me say this: it’s not the sleep. It’s the feeling like you were run over by a truck. It’s the recompression of your abdominal wall, the realigning of your intestines, and literal loss of an organ, and the contractions to return your uterus to its usual operating size. Meanwhile is the swelling and the leaking, the hemorrhage scare and the mastitis scare, the dripping pools of sweat and the shivers so strong your uterus hurts.

It’s all of that, and the fact that none of us either know or remember or are comfortable providing actual help.

So let me say this: if you’re visiting a new parent (and if the baby isn’t three months, they count, and if the baby is difficult, they always count), remember three things: bring, do, and leave.

Bring something. A covered dish, a muffin, a lemonade. It doesn’t matter, just bring something.

Do something. Casually start folding the towels on the couch you’re sitting next to while you chat. Clear the dishes from the coffee table and run the dish washer. Ask if you can take out the trash.

Leave: Unless you were invited for hours or are seriously cleaning house and cooking, after about thirty minutes, you should start to excuse yourself. Maybe you’re risking the only nap the parents might get that day. Maybe maybe maybe. If they want you to stay longer, they’ll say so.

Some where along the way we’ve lost much of the knowledge we had as a village. We’ve lost the elders’ wisdom being shared and listened to. We’ve lost the tribal knowledge of breastfeeding, newborn care, and maternal care. I believe, resoundingly, that we can find it again if we only, each of us, find our voices.

And even though I just did this, tomorrow it will be done again.

Aug1

Naptime is midday. Bedtime is after dark. Thanks to my lovely DH, I sleep in until the heat has arrived. So two days a week I have two hours at midday with which to do as I please.

Oddly, or perhaps expectantly? Or even sadly or doldrummy, I often spend much of this time recovering from the hours before and preparing for the hours to come.

I’m a solo recharge type. An introvert. A give me silence, space, and activity person. Motherhood does interesting things to this brain chemistry requirement. Work shifting more and more toward people and meetings and interaction contributes greatly. The days where I would work alone, at home, on my computer in a dimly lit room with only the dog’s snores as soundtrack are rare indeed these days.

So these two hours are precious. I plan gardening adventures, temperature be damned. I dream of baking something delicious and new and complex. Or reorganizing the pantry. (Yes, I am that person. No, I’m not ashamed.) Perhaps, even, of working to finish a wedding quilt for a couple married nine years now…

But no. Instead I, too, take a nap. Or see how many episodes of a show I can binge on. Yet most often, I putter around the house. Rotating laundry. Rotating the dishwasher. Doing my half of the Things In Things Must Be Out rotation.

Yet by the time she awakens I’ve missed her. I’m happy to hear her call out to be released back into the giggling squealing freedom of chasing the dog (four times her size) or reading books or dancing and singing. I’m in love with each new word she fearlessly pronounces with access to only three comfortable consonants and five vowel options.

I may have to resurrect the potted raspberry vine I attempted to neglectfully kill last week. As raspberries aren’t just her new favorite food, but “ae-be-ee” is my most favorite pronunciation.

…ate it anyway. Ate it anyway…

May23

I fill the feeder and they come. They drain and abandon. I fill the feeder and they come. They drain and abandon. The finches and swallows, scissortails and sparrows, they give way. The doves and grackels have claimed their turf. I stop filling the feeder.

The tomatoes are in the shade. Did the china berry grow since last summer? I doubt by that much. My garden layout made it to Plan G before being constructed, and ended at Plan P by the time I finished building. I may’ve encroached on the shade a bit much. Everyone on the west side is a tinge yellow.

I grew peas this year. I wanted my daughter to have fresh garden peas. Yesterday, she ate fresh garden peas, straight from the pod held in my hands. A moment in time where the time spent away with the soil allowed the soil to grow the food to feed the time spent together. I didn’t even think they tasted that great having already baked through many a day near 90 degrees. She devoured them one by one. As did a caterpillar who had burrowed its way down into a pod and was happily munching through each pea toward the bottom. I let it be.

A tomato appeared at a sprint. Only flowers swearingly yesterday and today a large gum ball grown at an odd angle. As though one side pinched shut while the other ballooned. I lost the labeling system after the final transplant thanks to all of the rain we’ve been having (I never did make it back out with a pencil to rewrite the pen notations.)

Trees are trying for it seemingly everywhere. In the self-re-seeded celusia. In the lavender. In the lime. As much as I like trees and as much as some places need so many more of them, I have quite enough right here. I cannot help but pot up some of the more impetuous specimens. Would you like a baby bur oak? Or perhaps a pecan? I have extra.

The sweet potatoes are impatient months into their stint in the burlap sack. They were promised parole in April. “It’s May, you know,” they say. I dug a bed for them. Grass begone! Organic matter mixed in to lighten the clay. Oh, there’s a rock. Let’s pry that out of there…oh! there’s another rock. And another. Pry pry pry. And…that’s a pipe. Here’s a car, and a hardware store, and some couplings, and here’s a hole in the ground. It’s almost dark. I eyeball. I dry fit. It’s beautiful. I prime. It dries. I cement and connect and cement and connect. Cement and connect and cement and – snap! That’s another pipe. That was Sunday three weeks ago. Last Sunday I attempted the second fix. Cut too long…adjusted too short. Tried anyway. It leaks. There’s still a hole in the ground.

Beginning…

Jan8

Folks are posting this week on the theme of beginnings. Anywhere their minds may wander from there is allowable. The word “beginning” sure lends itself to mind-wandering on my part…or perhaps that’s the ninja dance party in my belly these days causing the wandering…

It is the beginning of a new year, after all, and the beginning of a new season’s garden plotting. The mail box has shifted from holiday cards to seed catalogs. My drool-inducers have shifted from mac ‘n cheese to photograph after photograph of plant porn. (Ok, I lied, I will still drool over homemade mac n’ cheese…) My dining room table has let go of the wrapping paper and ribbon station and moved on to the inventorying of current stock.

The beginning ebbs and flows. Is the beginning the seed catalogs arriving? Or when I begin drafting on graph paper? Or when I pour the seed starter from the bag into the trays and smooth out the surface?

For today, let’s say the beginning is pulling out my seed stock and reacquainting myself with old favorites and rekindling excitement over new experiments to come.
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Things I learned from this beginning? For still not liking to eat tomatoes (I try to like them every year, I do!) I sure have a lot of tomato seeds…*cough* twenty-three varieties…*cough*

Bees and seeds

Aug13

DH and I were talking about the internet the other day. These days, it’s hard to “run out of internet.” There is so much of it to begin with, in addition to the social aspect, the interactive pieces, and the dangerous Bermuda triangle that is Wikipedia that it’s easy enough to waste away an afternoon just click-click-clicking.

When we first met, you could still quite easily “run out of internet.” If you ran out of questions you needed answered or topics to read up on, you were done. That, and there just wasn’t the sheer volume of content on the internet then that there is now, never mind any social media rabbit holes to fall down.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the internet. I work on it all day. I use it on my phone exponentially more often than I use my phone to actually call people. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been out with friends, someone has forgotten the name of a movie or street of a restaurant recommendation and the comment has been made: “You know, you have a phone for that. Look it up.”

I just wonder how much of our lives might be spent doing time-wasting things that don’t do anything or help us be anything. When I’m sixty, I won’t remember that funny meme I just saw. Or maybe I will. But I hope I have more memories of people and moments and adventures than I do of content I witnessed through a screen. (I’m rambling. Through a screen.)

However, I love gardening for how it roots me back down to what I do love about the internet. The blanket flowers bloom nearly year-round in my garden. They attract the honey and bumble bees, the birds and the butterflies. Recently, they attracted a new bee in a shiny black coat that I didn’t know. I pulled out my phone, searched, and learned right there in my garden – a carpenter’s bee.

Then, if I so desired, I could dig more deeply and possibly discover which of the 500 possible species of carpenter’s bee had paid a visit to my flower bed. Or not. (I chose not.)

The other sort of learning I love best about gardening, is the learning of discovery. Experiential knowledge has always stayed in my brain much more concretely than other sorts. I’d known about onions. I’d known about their blossoms. I’d known about their seeds. What I hadn’t known was how their blossoms transformed into seeds. Did the seeds come with parachutes like dandelions and lettuce? Did they come in shells akin to sunflowers? Nope. They grow in pods more like larkspur and flax. Now just to learn how to get onions from young sprout to sturdy start…

Making space

Aug11

In February of 2011, I cleared out my 100 square foot garden. I ripped the grass, dug three feet down removing weed seeds, grass roots, and June bug larvae. DH built the edging to keep the crawling St. Augustine and Bermuda at bay, anchoring the edging with posts with which to anchor shade cloth and bean string.

In January of 2012, I rented two plots in the local community garden. My 100 square feet in which to garden jumped to 500 over night. By May of this year, I realized that community gardening, or at least gardening with that community, wasn’t for me.

Even with my stark lack of gardening this year so far, dropping from 500 square feet back to 100 was a bit of a blow. So what’s one to do? Whine and lament the attitudes and personalities of those who made it necessary to leave the extra 400 square feet behind? Nah. That doesn’t solve anything. Unless there’s a complaint quota necessary for being human that I don’t know about…it would solve that.

One makes space.

Shannon over at Dirt ‘n Kids has shared her success with a similar climate to mine using Lasagna Gardening. August is not the time to be digging 36″ down through clay and pebbles to make a new bed. I wanted to grow more seedlings of self-saved broccoli seeds (Green Early Heirloom) and Amazing Cauliflower. I wanted to try my hand at some Ruby Moon Hyacinth Beans and Sugar Ann peas. And then…you get the idea.

I dug in the garage for a box. I must’ve had this same urge ages ago when I first stumbled upon Shannon’s blog, because there was a large cardboard box containing untreated brown packing paper, a neighbor’s discarded leaf bag, and smaller segments of lesser-chemical-ed cardboard eagerly awaiting the day.

I needed boards and screws. DH had gathered a neighbor’s discarded decking for my compost bin and had some extra pieces. I found some excess ends of 2″x4″‘s left over from his saw-horse project. Exterior screws were shelved beside the drywall screws, eye hooks, and other fasteners. I had to choose – 1″ 1/4″ dry wall screws or 4″ exterior screws. I knew the 1″ 1/4″ were too short to bite in properly, and may not weather the outdoors very well. I grabbed the 4″ exterior screws.

I didn’t feel like measuring. So many things in life must be weighed and measured, exact and equal. I find gardening to be good practice for my (slightly obsessive) need for accuracy and organization to let go and see that the world doesn’t collapse. The earth and the bugs and the microbes know infinitely more about what they’re doing than I do. The practice of letting them do what they do is soothing in a culture that glorifies busy-ness and demands constant multi-tasking.

I made thicker sides by putting two boards together, locking them in place with cross boards. The 2″x4″s were to serve as the corner anchors. I started the assembly…and learned that while too-short screws don’t work well, neither do too-long screws. I didn’t mind that they stuck out. I rationalized the tops would be great places to lash string ends. What I didn’t know was that a too-long screw won’t pull two boards together, it will leave them with a gap. Frustration set in. I went inside and was done for the day.

Letting the frustration go, armed with my new knowledge, I picked up a box of 2″ exterior screws and went about the business of removing a 4″ screw, replacing it with a 2″ screw, and repeating my way around the box. The boards cinched together and the box was square. I dug four quick holes to sink the corner posts into the earth. One full of pebbles, one blocked by a concrete over-pour, the other two easy. The bed lowered into place, it was ready for soil-making magic.

I had already saved up some trimmings and egg cartons, some hay and compost. I’d even saved it in layers (you can see it behind the bed frame.) It was as simple as cutting loose a strip of layered goodies, carefully lifting it off the ground, and nestling it in the wooden frame.

So I’m not sure how much square footage I gained. I’m ok with that. I’m also ok with the fact that the stump of the maple tree we had to cut down in the front yard has finally bit the dust. Giant sponges of carbon to start the fungal map off right made themselves available the very evening I needed them. The creation of a suburban forest floor.

I put up the drill and the skill saw. I wrapped and tied the extension cord. The shovel and buckets in hand, it was time to go in. DH had made some grass-fed burger patties and Cinderella squash discs on the grill.

And there it was. A forgotten carrot lost beneath the returning basil offering up spring’s sowings.

June the Plum Tree

Jun9

Last year was her first year with us. A celebratory gift for DH getting all A’s for the year. She lives in a straw-topped pot on the back patio.

The birds beat us to the first ones yesterday. Today, we knew better. Ten delicious sweet globular candies are now on my counter…make that eight…

Or seven…

Seasons are as seasons do.

Jun1

On my trip this week to Houston I couldn’t help but notice the corn was higher than my head, with the tassels starting. Where I grew up there were corn farmers (and grass seed farmers, Christmas Tree farmers, cherry and peach and berry farmers…) and those farmers are just sowing their corn for the season now.

Some years I have tomatoes by now, and this year I don’t. Some years the strawberries don’t have a chance to fruit well for the early onslaught of heat, this year they did (and continue to do so.)

Seasons in Texas are measured two ways – in the classic four seasons (which are measured by what the calendar says it should be) and in the Texas weather way (Not Hot, Beautiful, Hot, Thunderstorm Season, Beautiful, repeat.)

Depending on whether the storms come, or the heat is early or late, the plants do as their coding dictates. This keeps us gardeners on our toes! Not for late frosts or lack of sunlight, but for baked seedlings or flooded fruit.

The backyard this year is the usual mixture of expectations met and seasonal surprises. Like finding more strawberries this morning. Or finding that this fern, so lush and happy in March…

…is now gone without a trace.

Or that these plums just setting fruit in March…

…have started to turn.

Then there’s the Monster Chard that has been keeping you in gigantic leaves of green since October was discovered by the hungry hundred caterpillars.

And the Forgotten Beet that made the most delicious “french fries” (thanks to DH’s talents.)

Which reminds me, I need to not forget about the Onion Rope. The instructions on the internet conflicted with those in a book, which weren’t terribly clear. We’ll see how it goes, but it may just be that DH eats them all before they reach a questionable storage age anyway. (Onions being yet another food I enjoy growing but do not enjoy eating.)

Heat bed in the misty morning.

Oct17

My first attempt at a landscape bed makes me smile. The fragrant mimosa has grown as tall as I am. I missed the part about it having thorns though. Fortunately, the wind blows east most days on our street, which encourages the branches to leave the walkway open by growing up and away from it. The Mexican Bush Sage has not lost the blossoms it put on in May. The orange fellows nearly died seven times this summer but perked up each time I noticed their distress. The Moss Verbena I accidentally ended with an over-zealous weeding, and the only surviving…I forget… has more than quintupled in size and has just put on the most delicate of purple blossoms. Now there are African marigolds putting on buds and other flowers sprouted, yet to reveal their nature. Mostly, this bed makes me smile for the overgrown beside the empty. The thorns near the delicate. And also, because quite by accident, I learned something about myself – apparently I like purple and orange together.

Short ‘n sweet.

Sep24

This little Lemon Basil (success at growing basil from seed! finally!) has enjoyed the shade of the carrot greens while adapting to the ways of the outside world.

These two characters made me laugh when I saw them. It takes some special kind of talent to hang from the very thing you’re eating.

I used to pull the snails when I found them, dropping them in soapy water or taking them down to the pond. Then upon closer observation I noticed they left all of my food alone, and spent their time devouring the spent vines, the decomposing leaves, and the other not-quite-yet-composted goodies on the surface. Since then, I’ve left them to their own devices in the garden. Hopefully they’re not the ones responsible for the Squash Disappearing Act?

plumdirt

Putting in a little

Category Archives: Things I learned today