If you could find me would you even know me?
How about a garden?
Really?
Sure. We could do a raised bed with room for some tomatoes and strawberries.
It was a surprise comment from Cole at the castle on a blustery spring day that stirred a long-dormant need to put down roots. Moving addresses every four or five years. Not having time to settle in, to grow. I'm still prone to beginning to write an address I had four addresses ago because I forget.
Okay, lets!
And the garden thrived. It thrived. We were giving produce away. It was a ten by six foot rectangle hemmed in with two by sixes and a few bags of topsoil and it freaking thrived. The kids would run past it and stop for handfuls of cherry tomatoes and pull out baby carrots that weren't even close to ready and eat them without washing them first.
That was then.
This is now.
Now my garden is the size of a olympic swimming pool and I call it 'the patch'. Last night I filled it with pumpkins, tomatoes and cucumber seedlings, mint, sage and radishes. Today I will finish with seeds kept from last year and sunflowers too. I want lettuce and peas and squash and cauliflower. Potatoes! It makes me so happy. I can't work in it when the sun is doing her worst but early in the day or after dinner that's where you'll find me.
I loaded my jeep with manure and came home with a surprise chore for the boys. I drove the jeep around through the big fence gates and across the backyard and I parked her on the bluff and we (by we I mean they) shovelled out all of the manure. Then I hosed it out and put her back in the driveway.
My life is basically perfect now.