So I'm working the other day in my office, tap tap tap on the computer, when I hear the unmistakable grinding sound of a wood chipper right ouside my window. I slip on my fave flip flops, the
orange ones from Mary , and head out the front door to find workers from a tree removal company feeding large tree limbs from my next-door-neighbors' property into the chipper. "Free mulch," it says on the side of the truck, and I see my opportunity. My way to get the sink hole on my front lawn filled and to expand my lawn elimination plan just a little bit, thereby easing my weekly
push-reel lawn mowing burden.
I ask the guy in charge if he will dump some mulch on my sink hole before he leaves, and then I head out to meet my younger daughter at school. Her school this year is several miles away and we have taken to driving halfway and walking halfway. We have discovered a stone wall overlooking a babbling brook that we have never, ever noticed before and we sit there after school and have a snack, usually a juicy peach when I can find organic ones (which is hard) and so we started calling this resting spot the Pit Stop. A little girl who waits for her father to pick her up nearby this spot has joined us in finding turtles and looking for the beavers who have built a dam. She says the spot reminds her of the book and movie,
Bridge to Terabithia, and I know already that the three of us will remember this spot as special when one day we think back on it.
Anyway, so we walk and drive home this day and as we come down the hill toward our house, I laugh out loud. The tree guy had dumped the
entire truckload of mulch, right there on my front lawn.
Tending toward obsession a little bit, I spend the entire next day spreading a border of mulch along my front walkway, down my driveway and around my mailbox garden, connecting it all in a swoosh of mulch that will kill off a big ole' piece of lawn and provide me with a place to plant lavender and rosemary, black-eyed susans and daisies, and other food-bearing and pollinator-attracting front-yard-worthy plants.
I also lay a path-and-bed system on the side of the house leading toward the backyard that will be, one day, filled with flowers and three new vegetable beds. I couldn't have been happier with my little wheelbarrow and pitchfork, the warmth on my feet as the compost spilled across them, the blank slate of grass on which my imagination was creating something new, something already beautiful in its possibilities.
I had been at our new community garden already this week (after the opening ceremony last Sunday--check out this
sweet 51-second video created by my new friend, Jim Hines), where I had dragged sixteen cinderblocks and pounds and pounds of soil and compost to create my little piece of harnessed sunshine, my goal to do it all for less than $50. Yes, I'm planting in the holes--the sink hole and the cinderblock holes, and perhaps, a certain hole in my heart, about which I will tell you, in January, when it is time.
I had lingered there, at the garden, looking at the blank slate I had created, imagining. I was reminded of January, my favorite gardening month here in Atlanta, when I take hoe to soil and smell the sweet earth and bask in the still of a fresh dawn on a new gardening year.
And so the seasons change here now. The new blank slates on which I will write have been prepared. And the world's energy, which it seems has not called me to
Kate's in France this year, has called me where I need to be.
So I'm working the other day in my office, tap tap tap on the computer, when I hear the unmistakable grinding sound of a wood chipper right ouside my window. I slip on my fave flip flops, the orange ones from Mary , and head out the front door to find workers from a tree removal company feeding large tree limbs from my next-door-neighbors' property into the chipper. "Free mulch," it says on the side of the truck, and I see my opportunity. My way to get the sink hole on my front lawn filled and to expand my lawn elimination plan just a little bit, thereby easing my weekly push-reel lawn mowing burden.
I ask the guy in charge if he will dump some mulch on my sink hole before he leaves, and then I head out to meet my younger daughter at school. Her school this year is several miles away and we have taken to driving halfway and walking halfway. We have discovered a stone wall overlooking a babbling brook that we have never, ever noticed before and we sit there after school and have a snack, usually a juicy peach when I can find organic ones (which is hard) and so we started calling this resting spot the Pit Stop. A little girl who waits for her father to pick her up nearby this spot has joined us in finding turtles and looking for the beavers who have built a dam. She says the spot reminds her of the book and movie, Bridge to Terabithia, and I know already that the three of us will remember this spot as special when one day we think back on it.
Anyway, so we walk and drive home this day and as we come down the hill toward our house, I laugh out loud. The tree guy had dumped the entire truckload of mulch, right there on my front lawn.
Tending toward obsession a little bit, I spend the entire next day spreading a border of mulch along my front walkway, down my driveway and around my mailbox garden, connecting it all in a swoosh of mulch that will kill off a big ole' piece of lawn and provide me with a place to plant lavender and rosemary, black-eyed susans and daisies, and other food-bearing and pollinator-attracting front-yard-worthy plants.
I also lay a path-and-bed system on the side of the house leading toward the backyard that will be, one day, filled with flowers and three new vegetable beds. I couldn't have been happier with my little wheelbarrow and pitchfork, the warmth on my feet as the compost spilled across them, the blank slate of grass on which my imagination was creating something new, something already beautiful in its possibilities.
I had been at our new community garden already this week (after the opening ceremony last Sunday--check out this sweet 51-second video created by my new friend, Jim Hines), where I had dragged sixteen cinderblocks and pounds and pounds of soil and compost to create my little piece of harnessed sunshine, my goal to do it all for less than $50. Yes, I'm planting in the holes--the sink hole and the cinderblock holes, and perhaps, a certain hole in my heart, about which I will tell you, in January, when it is time.
I had lingered there, at the garden, looking at the blank slate I had created, imagining. I was reminded of January, my favorite gardening month here in Atlanta, when I take hoe to soil and smell the sweet earth and bask in the still of a fresh dawn on a new gardening year.
And so the seasons change here now. The new blank slates on which I will write have been prepared. And the world's energy, which it seems has not called me to Kate's in France this year, has called me where I need to be.