letting go

I just called the Menards store in west Madison. They still have a few cedar pots left.
Ed is not impressed. Why do you need another cedar planting pot? Is it that you want to bring something indoors? Because otherwise why not plant whatever it is that you still have to plant in the ground?
I don't actually have anything more to plant...
So where do you want to put this pot?
I don't know. Well, I do know... (hesitate) No, I don't know.

When you have worked on something so hard, so hard, so that most of your waking hours for two months have been consumed by this, it's hard to then just stop. Or even slow down. It's like being a parent, watching a daughter move off into her adult world. It takes a while to get used to not tracking the details of her life.

I still have lists of things to do in the next ten days, but increasingly, they are less about the outside space.

Except for one task - the perpetual "tidy the garden after the chickens" task.

Their scratching at the dirt remains so disconcerting to me, that after one such tidying effort (where I rake back dirt and wood chips that have been dislodged) I go upstairs to a napping Ed (he's been a little under the weather) and tell him that if he got rid of the chickens today, behind my back, I would breathe a sigh of relief.

If you want to return the chickens, we can do that you know. They're not ours after all.
I shake my head. I could not. I am forever trapped in the love of their happiness, their contentment, their belief that all days will begin with a spring out of the coop into the waiting world of worms and watermelon rinds and end in the warm comfort of their perch in the coop that they have learned to call home. The sweet pleasure of watching them thrive is exactly that: the pleasure of knowing that they are happy, that they feel this space is as much theirs as it is ours. It's hard to take that away from them, to snuff out their trust in us -- their protectors, their safe haven in an awfully mean world.

So I get up as always, very early. It's cloudy and so I offer no photos of a golden sun.

Later, we eat breakfast, but in the kitchen. (Did I tell you? It's cool outside.)






And I take care of mostly indoor tasks. Bill paying. Window washing. With an occasional burst of flower bed fixing.





Cleaning, mowing, weed whipping -- that'll come early next week. For now, I merely fix and mend damage.

Eh, maybe I'll get that cedar planting pot tomorrow. A gradual slowdown is much healthier than a sudden cessation.

In the meantime, I can admire the bees' discovery of things in bloom. Each day something is added.





Even as small details are scratched away.