I expected another stormy day off and instead woke to sunshine. Hoping for nothing worse than a few showers, we decided to finish the mortuary garden (Penttila’s Chapel).
On the way, we stopped in at our accountant’s office to sign our tax return.
At Pentilla’s, I did a bit more detwigging of the dead bits on the coral bark maple.
I felt lightheaded enough while pruning to finally get the nerve to call the neurologist’s office for my test results…only to find, through a series of phone calls to his office and the hospital, that he had not been sent the results. NOW he has them but his office is closed tomorrow, so perhaps I will hear on Monday.Oh, good, three more days that I can indulge in Ostrich Syndrome. If the results are good, he’ll tell me on the phone. If bad, we have to go to Aberdeen again. (During the worst of the lightheadedness, which did pass, I thought, well, I’m already at the mortuary, that’s convenient!)
Our main focus today was the north side of the front garden.
The kinnikinnick is a horrible ground cover as its stems are loose and sprawling, giving plenty of room for weeds to come through, and its humped up centers are treacherous foot catchers. There are ground covers that I think do the job much better: Geranium macrrorhizum and epimediums come to mind, and since we yanked a bunch of kinnikinick today, I think I will bring starts of something better to add to this garden.
Why the kinnikinick is so bad:
I got out huge mats of the white grass roots; this involved a lot of standing in one place and eventually my knee hurt like blazes.
With some time left in the day, we deadheaded at Long Beach City Hall…
We got rained on hard thrice during the day, including when we went to city works to get some buckets of mulch for one of the parks.
While working with pain, I tried not to think of the doctor’s word “collapsing” about my knee. As the upcoming total knee replacement, and how it affects gardening, weighed on my mind, I remembered the ridicule of a (former) friend toward a former neighbour (also a gardener by trade) who sought Facebook sympathy for his hip replacement. I thought to myself weakly at the time that anyone, no matter how unlikeable, might validly seek sympathy for such an event, but did not speak up. However…My narrative flow here is not about getting sympathy; it is about the interesting (to some) chronicle of the progression of age on the full time gardener. So I might go on about my knee on occasion, and that is just the way it will be.
I am reading a good book called Being Mortal by Atul Gawande in which he quotes Philip Roth: “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.” For my grandma, knee pain was chronic from her mid 50s on. The massacre of extreme debilitation came at about age 78; for my father, at 79 and for my mother, at 85. Both mum and grandma had a son or daughter or granddaughter to help them live pretty well from 75 on when they began to weaken. Childless, I wonder how that will go for me. Many of my friends are childless; if we were together, we could help each other, perhaps.
Upon our arrival back home, the beauty of the garden was cheering, as was my greeting from Smokey:
In the back garden, I picked a bouquet to take to Salt Pub.
Then we were off to Salt Hotel to meet Dave and Melissa for our weekly garden club meeting.
I had a Black Forest Ham melt in honor of having been working on a blog about my grandma’s recipes; she loved a ham dinner.
I almost forgot to take a photo of Melissa’s crab cakes.
With Penttila’s erased from the workboard, nothing but bad weather and deadheading and doctors can keep us from the beach approach and berms.
Ginger’s Garden Diaries
from my mother’s garden diaries of two decades ago
1997 (age 72):
March 24: Don brought another check which makes more than 12 grand [for selling toy trains that had belonged to her husband, who had died in 1995]. He followed me over to the Texaco station down the road and I discovered they don’t have that thing on the hose that makes it so hard to put gas in the car so I should be able to pump my own gas! Got gas for chipper, too.
1998 (age 73):
March 24: Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower seeds are up in 3 days!
Your yard looks wonderful!
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Thank you.
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Don’t worry about the knee. It will go well. Old age is another thing though.
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Thanks, Mr T.
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