Yes. Now is the time for flowers.
[By the way, two of the earliest bloomers are plants I wintered over in the sun room. They are not hardy and I had wondered if they would stay with me if I potted them and took them indoors and the answer is a resounding yes! Here they are, survivors of the Wisconsin winter: a nasturtium and a gaura.]
But these flower photos -- they're surely just the visuals. Something happens to you when you spend so many hours tending to a farmette. You throw that stream of water from the hose onto a dry bed and your mind pauses for a while. You think about this or that, or not much of anything. You slow down. You unravel tight knots. You figure out the next step.
I know that I am not very adept at sticking to boring tasks, so how is it that I can spend hours (and I do!) pouring water over tender plants and feel afterwards that I accomplished something big?
It was, in so many ways, a very ordinary day. A premature wake up (some combination of Isis and early sunlight and Ed reacting to Isis and early sunlight). A predictably delightful breakfast on the porch, made special because minutes earlier, I had just finished baking a batch of granola.
The power company comes by and dumps a truckload of wood chips at the end of our driveway. (When they do tree trimming around power lines, they shred the limbs and look for volunteers who'll take the wood scraps -- at any time and in large quantities. We do. Happily.)
Then comes a period of settling in -- an intense time of exam reading. Really, not much more than that for hours on end. I do hop on rosie to go to the post office, but that's a small little sidestep. Mostly, I sit on the porch and read exams.
In the evening, I'm out with the hose. Ed goes off to ride his Wednesday night bike ride, but before he sets out, we stop to admire the great old apple at the edge of the driveway. She is a prolific bloomer, even if her apples are nothing to write home about.
We do one of our arm's length shots to commemorate this perfect moment of her most perfect blooms (yes, Ed is that much taller than me).
And after, I water flower beds and this brings me back to the beginning of this post -- how is it that watering something can be so darn satisfying??
