real time alert:
Our plant sale and open garden days are today and tomorrow, from 10-5. Just look for us between Pearl and Advent in Ilwaco. You’ll recognise the place. I hope the weather is better than it was on the afternoon of May 16th!
Thursday, 16 May 2024
at home
I was expecting company at two, someone I had not seen for maybe forty years, so was pleased to see nice weather rather than the predicted rain. Better yet, the forecast called for no rain till three P.M. so I figured we would have time to walk around the garden in the dry. And the dry not windy day meant that I could get started on a weeding project in the Bogsy Wood swale first.
Before:
I got this small area done but didn’t remember the after picture until the next day, from a different angle.
Maridee, whom I first met at a journal writing workshop in 1976, arrived at two, and at that exact moment the rain began. It was light enough at first so that we were able to walk around the garden.
In the much nicer midmorning weather, I had taken these photos of some of the plants we saw.
Calycanthus ‘Hartlage Wine’:
Enkianthus:
Drymis winteri:
The accursed bindweed that keeps visiting that area from next door:
This is the plant that visits from my garden over the fence to next door, a beautiful clematis that mostly blooms on the neighbour side where I can’t see it.
Rose ‘Radway Sunrise’:
Maridee exploring the garden, looking at the plant table by the Wayback Sit Spot:
After our walkabout, the rain got a little heavier. My Covid precautions, as I had warned my friend, were back in overdrive because I can’t get sick before the plant sale that I have been working toward for a year. We sat on Alicia’s covered patio, which is out of the north wind, and caught up on all sorts of news about many women I used to know. When the wind shifted to a south wind, making us very cold, we moved into our garage with the front open and sat around there till 5;15, joined by Allan after it got two wet for his weeding project in the front yard. He and M had a good talk about kayaking, a shared interest.
This was M. with her journal in 1976. She said she had asked me if I still write a journal and I said no, but she says this blog counts as one! I don’t reveal all the little miseries one might write about in a journal here, just the bigger miseries.
I almost always have some anxiety when someone from long ago visits, or someone I don’t know well, or probably anyone other than my old friend Carol who has visited enough times that I don’t worry about how it will go. As usually happens when I have worried, this visit went well…in fact, exceptionally well as we had no trouble finding topics to talk about and would have gone on talking had I not had a zoom (about local sea level rise) to attend at 5:30.
Left: In this photo from 1976, she is telling me a “pocket story”, where you take whatever is in your pockets and tell a story about it. Middle: me in 1976. Right: M and me today.
I am feeling very sentimental after this visit.
Allan took these photos of his project, unfinished because of rain:
And these of driveway garden attractions:
Faerie had spent the day snoozing.
I wonder why her claws were out!
After the zoom, I had time to read another fifty pages of The Garden Awakening. I haven’t had time to open it for many days. Still 100 pages to go and it is due back the day before the plant sale.
More cuteness from Faerie: When she is not sitting on one of our laps in the living room, she often lies in the middle of the room like this:
I felt sentimental after the visit too. I won’t wait so long before the next one. It was great visiting with you and meeting Allen.
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Thank you, Maridee. I look forward to another visit.
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Oh my, it is amusing that we can look like we always did. On the way to and from down south, I stopped to see an old college roommate who I had not seen directly since we graduated in 1990. I knew what he looks like because I see him online, but I was amazed that he recognized me when I went to his office without an appointment! It was funny.
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