18-19 April: rainy day reflections, and after rain

At home

Monday, 19 April 2022

A storm kept us at home. With the week’s forecast being nothing but rain and wind, I feared we’d fall way behind on work again.

However, a reading day must be appreciated! I began with a last perusal of a book that I must return to the library, looking at the pages where I’d stuck in bookmarks.

This passage from an essay by spoke to me, although I cannot find the lyrics to this particular “filk song” (meaning a song based on some sort of science fiction or fantasy or other fan-beloved source).

From an essay by Erica Frank

Here comes some blathering on. Jump ahead to the photos because it’s probably pretty dull. Two friends have previewed this post and assured me that it does not sound whiny. I hope they are right.

I’ve given some thought to the often large amount of energy I have in the past put into other people’s businesses instead of promoting my own, creating a “brand”, and all the business-y things one is supposed to do. I would fall in love with someone else’s business like falling in love with a person.

When Robert and I moved here in late December 1992, I devoted a year to my love of a vacation resort, working for a low wage and putting in a garden there on my own time and generally making it my life mission to give my all to the place. Robert would say, “I’m ready to leave when you are!” This was followed by a brief sojourn at another resort (and the creation of another garden) where I felt the same mission to support the owners’ vision, till a video by Ryan Gainey gave me a wake up call that I needed to be in my own space again. My then-spouse and I bought a wee house in 1994, and Robert was relieved to stop following other people’s dreams.

Gardens I made at two resorts.

This tendency to promote others revived, though, when Facebook came along. I picked a worthy cause to start with in 2009, making a page for the Grass Roots Garbage Gang Beach clean up group. (Wendy Murry now does a great job on their social media.) That’s one I don’t regret spending time on.

We did the beach clean ups till vertigo made it too hard to walk on sand.

But I also devoted so very many hours (2009-2014) to making a Facebook page for and photographing and promoting a local cafe that I liked.

There were five years of photos of cafe food, events and customers, and bouquets I made.

And same for the local garden tour; we created and did the photos and write ups for the Facebook page for five years. And ten years of administrating the Discover Ilwaco page (during which we often went to photograph events when I really just longed to be at home, gardening, and Allan could have been boating.) I only quit Discover Ilwaco in 2020 because I wasn’t comfortable promoting tourism during a pandemic. (The pandemic freed me of several obligations.)

In winters 2013-14, we created the Peninsula Cash Mob project which inspired groups of shoppers to go to special shopping days at local shops and restaurants over the course of a year’s off-season months. Again, I was in love with other people’s dreams.

some of the cash mobs

The cash mob is the other volunteer project I don’t completely rue the time spent, simply because one shopkeeper told me that she was now able to pay her utility bill because of the profit made that day. That made it worthwhile. The project fizzled because I ran out of shops I love! I’d like if someone else were to take it up again.

Allan helped me out with the photographs of all these social media things but sometimes questioned me on why we were doing it. Looking back, I question it myself. Although I tried to be an extrovert during those years, my peopling skills weren’t up to it. “Awkward” and ”fish out of water” come to mind.

And then something changed, I embraced my own life, semi-reclusiveness and garden dreams, even though I worried that it was selfish to be happy to just do our two volunteer gardens, the Ilwaco post office garden and Ilwaco fire station garden. (The boatyard garden also started as a volunteer project.) It’s better for me to volunteer with gardening rather than social skills. Allan was happy to stop following other people’s dreams.

It’s really something how one paragraph in a book can crystallize thoughts that have been percolating for a long time. Someday I might reread my own blog and figure out why I valued other people’s dreams (and livelihoods) more than my own for so long.

So after all the navel-gazing inspired by “Reflections”, I churned out the three blog posts before this one and read 250 pages into the massive tome of Patricia Highsmith’s diaries, an almost 1000 page small print book from the library written by one of my favorite authors…a very difficult person with social skills decreasing over the years. That feels familiar to me.

“10/15/47 On rereading a few of my notebooks: they are a mirror of a rather bad mind floundering with incredible perseverance, indefatigable curiosity, in all directions at once, never pursuing one direction long enough to think any one subject through.” Patricia Highsmith

Tuesday, 19 April 2022

Amazingly, I woke to sunny weather and took a tour of our garden before work to see how much water had accumulated. All the swales were full.

Pulmonarias

Horsetail is back, but I may have decreased its vigor by years of weeding.

And then we were off to try for a day of work.