Muchness

Wednesday was perfect. Today likely will be too - sunny and warm, filled with flowers, birds and bees. I worked a little outside and a little inside yesterday and my back let me with only minor complaints. And it smelled great, so good I can't describe it or inhale deeply enough. I took pictures even though I said I was done taking the same pictures I take every year. I couldn't help myself.

The woodland violets are thriving everywhere. This is their year.

Barren strawberries are as steadfast and lovely as always.

Sweet fragrant narcissus, the last bloom standing.

Lily of the Valley - takes me back to my childhood home.

I sat among them and pulled weeds and the scent was intoxicating.

Lilacs take me back to my childhood home too, and their scent triggers countless buried memories.

My four crabapple trees fill the yard with a sweet scent that blows on the breeze. It is everywhere, abundant.

I sat under them and watched the bees do their work. Few honeybees, but lots of big bumble bees.

I watched them dance in pairs, likely communicating something in that adamant buzz, then fly off in separate directions. I'm always on the lookout for their hive, but haven't found one in this yard yet.

I went out morning and evening and just sat under the crabapples, breathing it in.

I can't begin to find words to describe how happy they make me. I'll have to read some Mary Oliver or grab my old poetry book to see who's already said it better.

The pink crab is a few days behind, not as fragrant, but lovely to look at.

I was surprised to find this one little Forget Me Not, defiantly growing between the bricks on the patio.

It is the sole survivor from my garden, which, like life, is always full of surprises.

Oh and the birds are crazy with the singing.

I don't know my bird songs, or my birds very well, but the busy one sounds like a mockingbird to me. We also have robins, cardinals,doves and bluebirds, a cooper's hawk, maybe a kestril, and thrush or thrasher, a great grey owl and who knows what all nesting about. It is a glory.

You can sit a listen a bit if you want to. If you know your birds, please tell me who you hear.

xo

Can't explain why this makes me cry..

But it does.

Commander Hadfield comes home today from the International Space Station. Safe travels, Sir.

And then this happened...

Our Illinois Spring has been as crazy as ever, a roller coaster of flooding rains and temperature swings that make my head spin, forty degree swings in a day. 

80 degrees, 40 degrees -whatever, Spring. 

I made hay, though, while the sun shone and the skies cleared. I expanded my sad little edgeless garden, and my husband built me a cedar raised bed which I had to dig in and remove sod to complete. I loaded in 3 wheelbarrows of compost - black gold payoff for 5 years of benign neglect but faithful composting, added about 100 pounds of soil and 50 of peat and some sand, then maybe 100 pounds of mulch. I pulled grass, tilled by hand, dug, weeded, hauled and worked hard for days.  It felt good, the best sore I've been in years. I was pleasantly surprised my body would let me do all this. Beyond pleasantly surprised. I told my husband I was going to see how far my body would let me push it and get as much yard work done as I could. I was a little stiff and sore, and my right knee would occasionally play that little game where it would buckle underneath me if I put weight on it and leaned down, but I know how to be left kneed and all was good. 

I got on a roll. Bought seeds, plants, flowers, more soil, more mulch. Edged and weeded all the beds around the house, planted, transplanted, filled wheelbarrows full of weeds and trimmings, and refilled the composter, which was a bear to turn and work in, thanks to a silly design.

But I got it all done, and was feeling pretty perky and happy. Rejuvenated. Even took a lazy day of rest to watch volleyball and another to sit around the fire pit and drink summer drinks and soak up the view this weekend. It really was wonderful.

I lost track of time, and just soaked up the birdsong, the warmth, the rich soil, talking to my flower babies, offering them rich peat and compost, and apologizing for the missing mulch thanks to the monsoons that washed it away, and for the awful freeze thaw winter and last summer's drought. Tough year for the gardens, so I showed them some love.

I mourned the 30% of my perennials and shrubs that did not make it.

Especially the forget me nots.

Oh, that made me cry a little. I planted those right where I have a picture of Dad sitting, and the blue matched his eyes.  Gone, now, too.

The woodland wildflowers seen no worse for the wear, at least the Mayapples, ferns and trilliums.

And my introduced natives, the dog tooth lillies. Lovely.

Took lots of pictures, everything is in bloom, all at once it seems. And so fleeting.

Just like my functionality.

On Monday I woke up with a very stiff neck and thought, well, here this crap goes again.

I've had an Rx for physical therapy for the neck & nerve issues for two months but was keeping it in my pocket for when I really needed it, and I just didn't want to be in that process and patient life style again just yet, being sore and worked on and feeling broken in some strange way.

The stiff neck went away, and I settled in to do some desk work and some serious piddling around on the internet. Several hours go by and when I try to stand up, my back twinged in excruciating pain until I was completely upright. Seated, ok, Standing, ok. Bending or transitioning, whimper inducing. What. The. Heck.

 I'm in day three of can't bend over, can't get up or down easily, can't get comfortable, can't stop the feeling of defeat and frustration that pop up when I feel like I cannot catch a break with this body. I'm already running crazy wild in the imagination, what if I ruptured a disc, what if I have to have surgery, what if this backache and weight gain is really the big C, what if I end up broken, in a walker, with a cane, what if, what if, what if. Or the more mundane dreary thought, that this is as good as it gets, a few fleeting functional days, warped and smashed between the Wheel of Misfortune, what's not working today game I'm stuck playing.

My other joints are joining in the cacophony. My big toe joints ache. My shoulders don't want to move in the morning. My fingers are stiff and slow. I am 53 and I am not happy about the way I am aging. At all.

I'm trying really hard to be inspired by relatives and friends who have persevered beyond much worse fates than this, but the relativity game is wearing thin as a coping mechanism.

So I'm left with whining. And Wine. 

I'm not going to lie. I will take some ibuprofen, maybe use a heating pad or ice pack, but I won't take the muscle relaxers or pain pills in my cabinet, I just won't. It's a long sordid story. But I will drink 3 glasses of wine to dull the edge on this pain tonight, just like last night. I have a comfort level with alcohol. It worked for my pioneer relatives, it can work for me, for now. Just need to make sure this is a short term thing, not a bad lifestyle choice.

Whine and Wine. The wine helps me not to whine so much.  

And iced green lotus or jasmine tea, or some white peach flavored tea, for balance.

And because it's 80 degrees, the first week in May. 

And I've flip flopped just like the weather from happy as a lark to miserable old crone. 

Wonder what I'll get to be next.

Hopefully not flat on my back looking up, but able to bend over and get up and down for a good close look.

For the record, we are a full month behind last year's bloom dates. My picture file tells me so. I take the same pictures every year. The one above is May 7 2013, and I took an identical one April 7 2012. 

What that means, I'm not sure, but it feels off kilter. Or maybe it's just me.

Here's hoping our bodies hold up while we need them too.

Until then, I will Chardonnay away.

xo

Spring Diversions....

I've been crazy busy,

spending every spare minute outside, working hard,

soaking up the colors, the warmth, the sunshine.

The intense hues of the flowers that sprang from nowhere to full bloom

in just days hurt my eyes with their brilliance.

We've had amazing, strange weather.

The plants and trees are happy,

and so am I.

xo

Sometimes

Sometimes you just have to leave the world and the rain and the floods and the news and the achy bones behind and just take your dog to the park.

This is one of the highest points in my county, a prime example of the perks of living in my country, my state - beautiful public spaces, safe forever from concrete or corn, thanks to taxes and local conservation. This is the headwaters,  a glacial-gouged rise in the plains that feed the streams that feed the rivers that feed the ocean. You can see for miles. On a clear day you can see the skyscrapers of Chicago, some 45 miles away. Only Johnson's mound, a mysterious glacial remnant, forested in old growth Oaks marks the landscape between here and the great lake. What a surprise the lake must have been to those early travelers, who could not imagine such an expanse of fresh water. On warm days, the clouds gather over the lake like a mountain range, but it is a land journey of weeks from here to reach the true mountains. I can't fathom how wagons ever crossed this, or those mountains to reach the Pacific Ocean, but they did.

Every time I come here I see back in time, to pioneer farms, covered wagons, tee pees, buffalo, horses, the great American frontier, land that Lewis and Clark mapped, that thousands traveled to stake a claim, to seek gold, to settle the west coast, to make this country. The Oregon trail's remnants are a mile or two from here, many of our roadways paved over the old army and wagon trails westward.  Maybe it was those Little House on the Praire books that made such an impression on me, that keep me stuck partly in the past. 

It is only a blink of an eye in time that brought us roads, cars, trains, planes, this modern shrunken and often disconnected world. Maybe that's why I like coming here so much, to reconnect, to take in the view, to imagine, and to be grateful for this strange new world by reminiscing about the treacherous and difficult old ones. Some days I'm amazed humans have survived at all in the wild and I'm forever grateful mine were hardy, resourceful and likely lucky.

But here we are, miraculously. 

April has been a bitch, as she often is. 

But today the rains stopped, the floods receded, the winds abated, the sun shone and life was good.

Very good, excellent even. Sometimes I get days like this, and they carry me through the others.

xo