Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because too many hopes and dreams are yet to be realised.
Allan Armitage
We wake to smoky skies in the midst of another record-breaking heat wave. It’s not smoky enough to keep me indoors and, after an appointment in town and a couple of other stops, I take my library books to the deck and spend a few hours in the gravity chair finding a measure of relief for the pain in my back. (I’m finally reading, and losing myself in, Kristin Hanna’s The Nightingale. Highly recommend, if you haven’t read it yet.)
And so life post-Camp G and G begins.
This morning, I’m harvesting green beans and—back pain permitting—canning lemon-garlic green beans. I’m thinking about the 48 bulbs of garlic that have been drying in the cool shade of the lower patio that need to be cleaned and trimmed, and the 50 pounds of field tomatoes I bought at the green grocer yesterday, and the beets in the garden awaiting harvest and preservation, and an assortment of other August things I feel behind in.
But I’m remembering that I resolved to do less of some things this summer, and more of other things like losing myself in a book on the deck, and that the most important work has already been done. And as the sun, blood-red through the smoke, rises over the mountain, and Gerry putters in the kitchen getting ready to head out for a morning of fishing, and this sweet day we’ve been gifted with begins, my first prayer is one of thanksgiving.
And it is well.
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This month, I’m posting a link every day to a blog from the eclectic collection I read regularly.
A neighbor said to me, not too long ago, “Oh, You’re STILL planting shrubs?” The implication was (I’m quite sure), that I wouldn’t live long enough to see them grow to full height. She obviously has a more limited perspective!