She's ALIVE!!

Gasp! Gasp!  Here, grab my hand a pull me out for a minute and I'll explain everything.

Things got really hectic here and you fell off the priority list.  Of course, you're not on the list today.  And I'm learning that whatever doesn't go on the list has a better chance of getting done.  The list is like a nightmare of things I SHOULD accomplish.  And the rest is just me floating along/drowning, keeping my head above water and trying to breath.

Obviously, this type of hecticity would only happened after I put this quote up on my facebook page: "Beware the banality of a busy life" attributed to Socrates as discovered in a magazine article from The Greater Good.  I had to double check it wasn't The Onion.  It's hard to imagine an ancient Greek sage using English words like banality and busy.   Were the Greeks busy? Bustling about in their bed sheets and laurels?  "Oh gosh, Thelma, seriously, I'd LOVE to help sheer your sheep, but I've absolutely got to bring this up the Athena's temple for sacrifice today.  It's been way too long and what with the wooden horse I've got in the back yard and the Spartan camp out, I don't think I can fit it in.  And Ethos has a play date tomorrow with Eros and we've rescheduled that 12 times already this moon!"

Despite my misgivings about the quote's origins, quoting Socrates is really classy, so I took it to my public page, which is like begging fate to hurl way to much to do at me. And so I got smack upside the head with summer "vacation".  A tidal wave, rearranging my shorelines and cabanas.  Ah... the irony.  Socrates is laughing.  At something.  Either being mis-quote-attributed, or the tsunami of busy-ness that hit me just when I was bragging I wasn't.  Thats the Greek mythology for you.  NEVER EVER BRAG!

I can't even remember most of the stuff I've been doing.  I have a vague feeling it's been fun, however.  And this summer is WAY WAY WAY better than last.  I know people here in this town.  Fun!!  And the kids are a little older and less whinier and haven't just moved all over creation 2000 times in one year, so they're happier.  We're still adjusting to this new life here.  EVERYTHING is so very different than what we've experienced before.  The finances are as tight as before, it turns out, but they're a totally different style of suckiness, which has been an expensive understanding to come to.  And we've developed a whole new accounting method.  This thing with Huck gone all day and sometimes all week is also very difficult for me to get used to.  Not that anything here is any harder than it's been.  It's just different hard.  Which is harder, in the beginning.  And all these acres and this big house, nice, but harder to manage that I expected.  Which is fine.  Life always seems to be harder than we expected.

I am going to suggest to the Dispute Resolution Center that they do a summer camp for elementary to high school aged children with siblings.  Working titles, "Spend your summer not in your room."  "Indian burns and hair pulling, how not to escalate,"  "Avoiding Juvvie,"  "Siblings: manipulate, don't mutilate."  "Quietly seething: a guide to not disturbing your napping mother."

And what of the garden?  Everywhere I go I hear people complaining that this has been the worst year for gardening.  And so I feel obliged to keep my mouth shut in public about this:  My Garden ROCKS!  (the fates sooo did not hear that, right?) I thought this would be the year I made all the bad mistakes and learned from them.  I gave myself permission to fail miserably, completely and terrifically.  I girded my psyche for sickly vines, withered leaves, earless corn twigs, monuments of weeds.  And what I find instead is Eden.  It was all a flat, dry pasture not even a year ago.  In it's place I have built 14 raised beds, 20-25 feet long each, with wood chip pathways in between.  I have squash, winter and summer, which are already 10 times larger than any I've ever grown before.  My corn, said to be impossible to grow here, was thigh high by the fourth of July.  My tomatoes are already ripening.  My freezer is overflowing with blanched snow peas.  I have a rocking chair in the orchard, my weed viewing perch. I sit in it and gawk.  Is it the manure?  Is it that I learned all the hardest lessons with my three small raised beds in Pullman?  Is it beginners luck?  Is it that I followed all of the advise in my three books on gardening and ignored the naysayers who nay sayed every week that I'd just royally messed up and would have to replant?  What is going on here?  I'm in total shock.

What I do know is that I've been waiting for this moment for a long time.  I've been dreaming of this garden my whole life.  My engine was revved and I was ready to go. But I think, no, I KNOW, I've bitten off more than I can chew.

Not going well?  The mysterious row in the garden.  My garlic.  Funny, that's the one thing I've been good at before!  And my herb garden.  It was a bold move I stuck in the middle of the lawn and now it's this dessert of struggling baby plants.  I know how to fix it: manure!!  But my energy is slipping.  My dreams are biggering and biggering and my energy is shrinking and shrinking.  I think I need to stop the dreaming for a while and just catch up.

And the lawn mower finally came back from the dinky repair shop and that's helped.  The "lawn," such that it is was already 4 feet tall.  I'm not kidding.  And mowing it down was like curing a blazing headache.  I felt like I could suddenly see and think.  The fuzz was gone from the edges. And I found so many garden tools!

So, here it is.  Summer.  Fresh carrots for lunch.  Kids all over the place.  A lake-side swim and I've wandered out over my head.  I'm trying to back float.  To breathe.  To taste this dream even as it threatens to drown me.