ribbons of work

Last night, I chopped the stalks of rhubarb from Ed’s yard, mixed them with strawberries and vanilla sugar and baked them with an oat-almond crumble on top. Is there a dessert that more properly links spring to summer than a crumble? Fresh with fruit, warm for the chilly evening, dripping with vanilla ice cream.

Sandwiched in between yesterday’s baking and this evening's plantings of flowers outside the writer's shed were hours of work, and at least one hour given over to refinancing the condo. As the title company rep whispered to me – this is the most boring job ever;  you may as well look for ways to make it fun. Indeed, because it surely has been a nightmare to get to the closing gates. More accurately though, it is now not fun at all, it is a sigh of relief: I survived the housing market tumult! I did not have to walk away from this mortgage!

But, far more enchanting was the other piece of bread in the slapped together sandwich of my day – the work in a garden, freshly emerging by the writer’s shed. I didn't photograph this, but let me at least offer pictures of others working on plantings right close to us on this day.














I stomp the earth around the slender peonies under the shed's windows. Be there, I tell the young stalks. Don't not come back next spring. Be there!


After, I pedal home with lilac branches strapped to the bike.