Today was a day of contrasts.
I watched five hours of college football with the guys and played horse during halftime. We pigged out on snack food and yelled at the television.
Then I spent the evening with the ladies at craft night. Yarn and glitter, cross stitch and crochet hooks. And lots of chocolate.
Whew. Talk about whiplash.
This Christmas mend a quarrel. Seek out a forgotten friend. Dismiss suspicion and replace it with trust. Write a letter. Give a soft answer. Encourage youth. Manifest your loyalty in word and deed. Keep a promise. Forgo a grudge. Forgive an enemy. Apologize. Try to understand. Examine your demands on others. Think first of someone else. Be kind. Be gentle. Laugh a little more. Express your gratitude. Welcome a stranger. Gladden the heart of a child. Take pleasure in the beauty and wonder of the earth. Speak your love, and then speak it again.
-Howard W. Hunter
Yesterday’s post was hard!!! It includes a lot of stuff that I have been wanting to say/express for a while, or at the very least a beginning…
I wrote that post and then I drank a cup of coffee and headed outside. It was 70 degrees by 9:00am – which is awesome for October 4th. I had spent most of the previous day weeding, cleaning out my garden, preping a flower bedand taking stuff to the community waste pile. Today’s task was to plant.
And plant I did! I first cultivated and then broke up the dirt in a 4×12′ bed and planted 100 tulip bulbs (yellows, whites and purples), 100 crocus bulbs, 50 wolf’s bane and 50 white squill. The last three are all early spring flowers and I’m just dreaming about the little white, yellow and purple flowers dotting above the snow! I also carefully marked out space in that bed to add some other perennials in the spring. I need to split my sedum plants, and I want to add some delphinium and salvia. I’m hoping that this will be an easy to care for and maintain sort of area!
In the other large flower bed I have, I spent the afternoon planting 100 more tulip bulbs (oranges and purples here), 50 allium (metallic pink), and again, the spread of the early flowering bulbs. I also dug up and replanted my irises that are in this area to help them be more evenly spread over the whole area.
I think the best part of my day came when this wonderful woman across the street asked me how it was going. All the bulbs were in and she THANKED me… She gets to look out her window at them in the spring, too, and she THANKED me for all the hard work I did. I guess I hadn’t quite thought of it like that, but what I’m doing right there brings joy to other people, also.
I finished up the evening by taking some of the green tomatoes I pulled off the plants yesterday and making fried green tomatoes. YUM. I ate them with maple chipotle glazed chicken tenders and some pasta salad. So delicious.
My shoulders ache… my left hand has two majorly huge blisters that are severly hampering my ability hold things… and the fruit of my labor is still five to six months away… but it was the perfect way to spend two gorgeous autumn days.