Sunday, 17 January 2021
At home
My belated Christmas present came!
I had a few excuses for working on the willow grove today. It was chilly out, too cold for happy weeding. There was no wind, making it safe to work under trees. Maybe the second best excuse was that I realized that I should let myself do the project I most wanted to do. And the very best excuse was remembering that pruning should be done before bird nesting season.
Skooter appeared to have read my mind and was waiting for me by the south gate.
I was pleased that he stayed close (but not underfoot) during the first part of the project.
My mission was to cut the holly out of the willow grove and get started on pulling the ivy, and to make an access to the west end of our seasonal pond, just because it is there.
While I was dragging some cut holly into a pile, I saw Allan up near the greenhouse and called out to him asking for another chainsaw battery. He came to the grove to cut a few tough holly stumps.
Three hours later, almost dusk:
a couple of befores and afters :
I have two big piles of cut holly to deal with, the trunks of which can be campfire wood when dry. I can maybe feed some of the stems into the wheelie bin each week. Chipping it would be an idea, since shredded mulch would be good, but I’d end up with a path full of little points from the leaves.
I ran out of daylight and energy at about the same time.
Some large rotten wood from the willow grove went into a fish tote.
Allan finished installing the boat shapes and putting the fabric and wood in between to make it a solid screen.
The west side of the boat shapes bed will be a flowery gift to the neighbors.
Just before dark, I picked a mess o’ greens.
Reading
I finished a memoir on Sunday which was recommended in another modern memoir that I recently read.
It was good. It gave me insights that don’t really fit into this blog. I look forward to her next memoir which is imminent. But I will now digress to something she wrote about her cat.
I am hoping Skooter, who wandered off again today, comes home tonight because he has a vet appointment at the horrible hour of 8:15 AM. It will be embarrassing if we have no cat to take in, since the vet is doing us a big favor to fit us in. I’m still worried about him maybe having a toothache. I wish the author of Blackout had explained more about how she converted her cat to living indoors.
When Bubba is quite old, he starts to ask to go outside again. She decided to try taking him out on a leash, which he doesn’t like at first, but then…
Skooter did come home in time to be kept indoors before our bedtime.
I like this explanation of why memoirists explore their pasts:
I’m grateful that they do. Speaking of “that home where I once lived”, last night I looked up a house where Bryan, Wilum Pugmire, and I lived in the mid 1980s. I look for it sometimes hoping that it will be listed for sale so I could see the inside (I knew someone wealthy had bought it and fixed it up), and finally, there it was. I’d fallen in love with it while taking a walk down a dead end alley off a dead end street after a housecleaning job on Queen Anne Hill and within a couple of days, I had rented my own house to friends just for the experience of living in it for two years. It had no heat and the roof leaked. Back then, it looked like this:
This view from my bed, last photo above. would be where the wealthy owners had another deck built on top of the sun porch, fitting right in with the style of the house, as you can see here, at least as long as the real estate photos are online. I saved them all to ponder over. Here is a before and after, 1985 and then the modern photo from the real estate listing.
The basement which was dark and grim has become a beautiful living space. And it sold for over one million, eight hundred thousand dollars. That house where I lived was the scene of some of my best times and most foolish decisions. If I could go back in time to one era in my life to change the course of it, that would be the time. But then I would never have been the Long Beach gardener, and it does matter to me that I facilitated beauty for 25 years.
What a beautiful post. The ending had me in tears. You speak for so many of us when you write “That house where I lived was the scene of some of my best times and most foolish decisions. If I could go back in time to one era in my life to change the course of it, that would be the time. But then I would never have been the Long Beach gardener, and it does matter to me that I facilitated beauty for 25 years.” The specific details, of course, belong to your life, but the feeling applies to many of us.
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Thank you, Laurie. I often have to remind myself that I ended up in a good place with a good mission in life here that maybe I was born for. But other turns I. The road might have led to my having a family and grandchildren….or could have led to something worse….We never know. I’ve always liked the idea of alternative timelines.
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I like the idea of alternative timelines, too.
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Laurie beat me to it, what a poignant closing sentiment to this post. And yes, more so because it echoes in many of us.
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Good luck with Skooter. It’s worth getting the teeth checked, they can be a source of many problems.
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They were ok….I’m thinking the worst of his feeling poorly was a giant hairball that he horked up after we gave him hairball medicine, but I’m glad we took him in because his eye looked a little goopy and it did turn out he needed eye drops. He’s been surprisingly good about letting us dose him.
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Oh, this post makes me sad. The house is beautiful although I liked it better without the second deck.
I once drove 400 miles to see the house I’d grown up in. I called the mother of a former classmate and asked if the house still stood. She said it did, but she was wrong. It had burned down sometime after my mother sold it. I was heartbroken.
The following doesn’t originate from me, but a woman I used to know felt that houses have a soul. I know this sounds crazy, but I think they do. I really do. Or maybe we put the soul in them?
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I felt like my little Seattle house (not the big rented one that was in this post) was like a living creature. I am so sorry the house you wanted to see again was no longer there. How heartbreaking.
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The slippers look like a very good gift and the boat shapes have turned out very well.
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Thanks, Mr T!
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Love your new kitty cat slippers! That would put a smile on my face every time I wore them. Skooter sure loves being out in the garden.
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