Didn't See That Coming!

Well, just when you think things are swinging along, life throws you a curve ball. This past week was a whopper. I am writing from Riverside Hospital, where I have been since, oh, about 8:00 a.m. Tuesday morning, when the Life Flight helicopter from our hometown hospital, where I had been since 2:00 a.m., touched down on the concrete pad.

Ending first: I am doing fine, I will probably (I hope) be discharged tomorrow. What landed me here may have been a thread of what hit me so hard in 2023; my doctors are still scratching their heads. But it is what it is.

So I have no gardening news. 

But I have great culinary shots of hospital food over the course of the week. When I first arrived, I was on a clear liquid diet only:

Then they advanced me to regular diet, but I was so out of the habit of eating that I just stared at what I ordered and nibbled around it:

This morning, however, I hit my stride. Bacon, blueberry muffin: life is good!

This whole episode reminded me of what I learned so hard a few years ago: how fragile and beautiful life is. I would be lying if I said that I just sailed through this. There was more than one night that had me staring out the window at downtown Columbus, thinking of my family, my friends, my garden, and my dear husband:

Pretty much a constant

I am ready to return home and get back to my daily life. There is a garden to tend to and a life to be lived. But for now, I just put in my lunch order...let's see how the grilled cheese sandwich is! 

*****

I am writing this on my Chromebook, not my Mac. Scratching my head at the formatting changes. Ehhhhh.

This Year's Gardens: Chapter 5

What a change a week can bring! We have had cool days, we have had drizzly days, we have had sunny days, we have had just days. 

And the garden has responded.

I have been heading outside to water the gardens in the early morning, usually between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. This quiet morning practice gives me time to take stock of myself and the day ahead. I listen to the earliest birds, I watch the sky change color, I note the clouds moving overhead, and I try (and often succeed) in staying rooted in the immediate moment. There has been a lot of overload lately on all fronts, so the quiet time has become an important element to my day.

This morning I changed it up a little bit. After finishing watering, I grabbed a couple of garden tools and—wait for it—actually did some weeding. 

April, weeding? Yeah. April, weeding. Check to see if the sky is indeed falling. 

Don't get me wrong. I think weeding is important. I think it should be done regularly. I just rarely (somewhere closer to never) get around to doing it. But something about the early hour, the hush, the quiet of this morning moved me to stay out among the garden, pulling up weeds, tending a little bit more than usual to the dirt and the plants.

And having done it this morning, I may just find myself doing it more regularly. Maybe. Possibly.

So here's where things stand at the end of the first week of June. The Hej garden is doing fine, especially the potatoes. I indeed called my aunt Gail about the potatoes and even sent her a picture of them, to her great delight. The photo arrived yesterday; Gail called me and we both laughed and laughed about the potatoes.

The Hej Garden

The kitchen garden is coming to life: the basil is finally stirring, the tomatoes are putting out blossoms (no tomatoes yet though). The peppers are holding back, demanding warmer weather. The back of that garden is a flower bed: sunflowers, cosmos (which I just broadcast each spring from the seeds gathered at the end of the prior summer), some zinnia and some wildflower seeds that I also just strewed about back a few weeks ago.

The kitchen garden 

And the same from the side

The kitchen garden is also where I have a small stand of milkweed; the blossoms are just starting to change towards their opening shades.

Milkweed blossoms forming

June has just started; we will see what it holds. I saw the first firefly two nights ago, we are starting to eat green onions from the red sets I picked up on markdown back several weeks ago. 

There is more to come in this year's gardens, from tomatoes to peaceful morning meditations. 

May I be open to it all. 

This Year's Gardens: Chapter 4

Red cabbages

As May closes out, I thought I would update the garden report. A lot has happened since I posted earlier this month. Despite May being colder and wetter than previous years, the seeds and plants are doing what seeds and plants do: grow.

The Hej garden is valiantly catching up from my false start of starting seeds inside and then trying to transplant them outside. There are cucumber and zucchini plants popping their heads up. 

And, to my absolute delight, there are potatoes! 

Potatoes! 

I talk with my Aunt Gail, my dad's only sibling, a couple of times a week. It is a way for both of us to share information as to Dad's well-being. We have grown very close over the last several months and we share more than just family updates as we laugh and talk. Gail has gardened all of her life, from Ohio to Guam to Chula Vista, California, and we keep each other abreast of our gardens' achievements. Being in far southern California, Gail has been eating fresh vegetables out of her garden for weeks now and, talking last night, reeled off a list of everything she has already been picking. She knows that we are weeks behind her; last night I told her what was up and blossoming. I did not know about the potatoes until this morning (we were out of town several days this week) and I am so thrilled to see them that I may call her just to announce that WE HAVE POTATOES!

The kitchen garden is much more sedate. It looks cleaner and crisper (because it is) and the various vegetables and flowers are starting to thrive. 

There are already blossoms on some of the tomatoes, so there might (might) be a tomato or two by the end of June. That may be overly optimistic on my part: last year I did not have that first tomato until July 14; the prior year July 19. But when you never buy tomatoes from the grocery, only eating them during the season, that first tomato means so much.

Warren and I have spent time working on the flower beds, which we plant in perennials, and we have filled a few large planters with annuals for the deck. My children's earliest pottery attempts are back in the garden, from Sam's T-Rex about to be engulfed by a tidal to a very, very early fish by Ben.

Sam's T-Rex

Ben's fish 

Finally, no garden update would be complete without a photo of this:

What, you may ask, is that? That, my friends, is a Leysa pepper, the pepper I pinned my hopes to earlier this spring and got nothing in return, either from the starts or from the three I started after that earlier failure. A few weeks ago, laughing at myself, I tucked three seeds into a pot and said, "Do something."

And it did. 

Will this ever get large enough to move outside, let along produce a blossom? I doubt it. but there it is. 

The Do Over Mitts

Most evenings, I write a note of tasks for the next day: water garden, pull the trash. Yesterday I was planning to wash a load of laundry and I wanted to make sure that the oven mitts were washed. So I printed DO OVEN MITTS. Only in my haste, I had written "over" not "oven."

DO OVER MITTS.

I used to take regular walks with a friend who had a "do over" policy in her household. If her birthday failed to live up to her expectations, she would announce a "do over" birthday and expect her husband to honor her command and give her the birthday she felt she deserved. (Note: I do not know if the "do over rule" applied to anyone else in the house.) 

So I laughed when I saw my Do Over note. What a convenient accessory to own if a day did not unfurl the way I thought it should. I could just pull on my Do Over Mitts and get a new one! 

Lately there has been a load of overload in this household—not all bad overload, but overload all the same. I often get to the end of a day with some things completed, but always at the expense of getting to other things and, before I know it, the day has dissolved into night. 

Where's those Do Over Mitts when you really need them?

I wrote this post last night in bed—the least likely place for me ever to write. (As in "never.") I had gone to bed early, exhausted after a day full of heavy gardening (a lot of mulch, a lot of weeding) and other demands on my time, not to mention Warren's time as he did the heavy lifting on the garden front. (And he has his own overloaded days right now.) I had no Do Over Mitts to redo the day—maybe one with less mulch and more energy—but that's okay. That I managed to scribble this tiny bit of writing, using the pen and notepad I keep on my nightstand, was enough of a bonus to end the day on a solid note.

Even without Do Over Mitts.

This Year's Gardens: Chapter 3

It has been over a month since I last wrote about our gardens. Trust me, that was not because I was so busy that I couldn't squeeze in a post. No, it was because the two main gardens—our kitchen garden and the Hej garden—just got planted yesterday and today.

Read that again: just got planted yesterday and today. 

So why the delay? Well, we just had our last (light) frost last week. And while we are supposedly at or past our frost date here in Ohio, that threw a kink into the plans. But on the bright side, unlike last year, I got to Miller's Country Gardens early in May, so I did not get shut out of their best plant starts like I did last year. 

With Warren tilling the soil and me hobbling around (yes, the feet are still an issue; I am still in Stage 2 of what we hope is a four-stage process), we tackled the kitchen garden first, which is the one right next to the house. 

There are seven tomato plants this year. This is the very first year in a long, long time when I did not go hog wild on tomatoes. (I did say to Warren yesterday, when we were working on the kitchen garden, that I had tomato anxiety. Only seven plants? Only seven?) Perhaps to compensate, there are 14 peppers plants. (Hey, peppers freeze well.) The back of the garden, against the garage wall, has sowed seeds: sunflowers, wildflower mixes, and cosmos. There is then a line of red onion sets (more about those later). In the front of the garden, there is a lot of sown basil and lettuce. And that's it.

The Hej garden was a but more challenging, in part because I had a gigantic fail. Warren tilled it one last time yesterday, and got it fenced. He dug a potato trench for me, which I filled, and then I went ahead and planted three red cabbage. That was yesterday. Today I went out early and finished up ALL of the planting. 

There are some stories to tell.

I'll start with the potatoes. Several years ago (10? More?), we grew tomatoes when my down-the-street neighbor Scott gave us seed potatoes that he didn't want to mess with. We had some limited success with them, but not enough to do it again. This year though I had a bag of potatoes start growing eyes, lots of them. 

I had nothing to lose by planting these. Although these were organic golds, I purchased the bag earlier this year for a whopping 99 cents at the marked-down produce shelf at Kroger. We had several meals before they started growing more and more eyes. I figured we already got our money's worth, and if we get more potatoes from planting them, so much the better. A little work with a knife, and these babies were ready to go into the trench. 

Here's hoping!

Now to the red onions. We were at Menards on Friday so that Warren could buy plywood to finish bell cases for clients. Strolling towards the checkout, I see bags of onion sets, red or white, marked down to $2.75. There were 100 to the bag. Sure I bought one. 

Some of the bag went in the kitchen garden, planted close together and deep down for early green onions, which we buy regularly for salads and garnish. The rest went into the Hej garden planted shallow, for late summer big onions. And, as I sat down today to catch up my garden journal, I saw that the onions came with a 1 year guarantee: if they don't grow, mail the UPC code and the sales receipt back to the packer/grower and they will mail a refund. 

That ranks right up there with the 99 cents potatoes, as far as I'm concerned.

Now I come to the difficult part of the story: the huge fail. Worry not, I rescued the garden, but lesson learned. 

In my late March post, I talked about the seeds I had started indoors and how they were coming along. Yes, they were indeed. So well that I paid them no attention, except to make sure they stayed wet enough to grow (I had them in lidded containers). 

Easy peasy.

Well, easy peasy until I went to plant the zucchini plants this morning. No one told me (although when I reread the seed packet as I looked at my losses, I should have known) that zucchini seedlings like lots of room. LOTS of room. And that if you start them as seedlings indoors and have them too close together, the roots will tangle and your hard work will be undone.

True that. Out of all the zucchini starts, I managed to get one planted without the stems snapping. The rest were a total loss.

Fortunately, I still had several seeds left from the original packet, and so planted the zucchini rows like I always had in the past: one seed at a time.

The cucumbers I had started indoors were similarly tangled, but they seem to be made of sturdier stuff than the zucchini. So all but one or two went into the ground, and I seeded five in the next row as insurance.

The very last items in the Hej garden? Remember those Leysa peppers I had such high hopes for? Four sprouted. At the same time I started those, I also started seeds taken from grocery store peppers, which did considerably better than the Leysas. So I ended up planting one Leysa (the other three went into a pot indoors to see if they might grow even a little bit) and 10 peat pots of the other, just to see what might happen. If we get more peppers, great. If not, oh well.

The seeds from grocery peppers are on the lefthand tray.

Maybe we'll get a Leysa. 

When all was said and done, the Hej garden looked like this:

The potato trench is the lighter swath on the right, running front to back.

So  here's where we are at mid-May. Two vegetable gardens planted, and we should know in the next few weeks where things stand. 

Maybe.

A Long Bus Ride

The Justice Bus in Delaware in April 2025

In May 2024, I wrote about that month's Justice Bus and finding myself in full advising mode because of last-minute and unexpected shortages of our attorney volunteers. 

May 1 was this month's Justice Bus and guess what? 

Yep.

The Ides of March have nothing on our May Justice Bus days.

One of our regular volunteers had an urgent matter come up that forced him to withdraw two days before the May Bus day. I could not find another volunteer to take one session, let alone the four that the attorney who had to step out takes. So I swallowed hard and hoped for no-shows.

We are now in the fourth month of serving hot sandwiches at our Bus sessions and, as the cook, I spent Wednesday cooking (shredded turkey with onions) and making sure I had the other items—napkins, carryout containers, a tablecloth, rolls, and such—ready to go. While I cooked and prepped, I also thought about what the May Justice Bus might hold. We had a solid slate of clients, and I knew of at least one with an unusually complex situation.

Thursday dawned gray and damp. With Warren's assistance (he always shuttles me and the food and helps me get it inside), I arrived early, set up the food table, touched base with Judy, our law librarian, talked with Scott, the Justice Bus staff attorney, and took a deep breath.

The clients started arriving.

Four hours later, Scott and I each finished up within a few minutes of one another, with Scott then helping me sort out a stack of copied court papers for my last client to take with her. Our regular Bus schedule is four sessions of 45 minutes each (three hours), starting at 10:00 a.m. and finishing around 1:00 p.m. This day, because the final two clients had detailed and unusual situations that took extra time, it was a little after 2:00 p.m. before the last two clients exited and we were done.

When we were finished and met back up, Scott had that dazed look one gets from hours of intense focus and I'm sure my face matched his. We were both exhausted. And hungry. Scott immediately made and started eating two sandwiches. He and I talked briefly about a few Bus notes to follow up on, Judy helped pull down signs, Warren (who'd come earlier thinking, as did I, that I would be done earlier, so he had sat and waited) helped me break down and pack away the food, and I took one last circuit through the areas we had used to make sure none of us had left anything behind. Scott packed his gear up, and we followed him out the front doors of the library, waving goodbye to Judy, who was outside collecting the parking cones. Finally, some five and a half hours after I had arrived, I was on my way home (and grateful that we only live four blocks away).

I am writing this Friday night. I am still tired. It was a long Bus day. Not counting the Bus, there are a lot of extra matters piled on my plate right now, so that adds to the tiredness. Oh, and let's not forget my feet! I am on Stage 2 of what we (my podiatrist and I) hope will only be a four stage process to get them back to functional capacity. (Stay tuned!)

But—and this is from the heart—it was a GREAT Bus day. Any day I can work alongside friends and colleagues to help strengthen this community—with legal advice, with food, with listening, with our presence—is a great day.

P.S. As I looked back at the May 2024 post before posting this, I scrolled down and saw that I had posted a photo of the first spiderwort of 2024, noting that it had bloomed three days earlier. I started laughing. Just yesterday I took a photo of the first spiderwort of 2025! 

And here it is:

Some things are just meant to be! 

Sidelined Thoughts on Walking

Spring is springing! 

In recent days, I have been reminded, bluntly, that I am indeed disabled. This message came not in any dramatic way, but in the humblest of ways: my feet.

Seriously. My feet.

Back at the end of 2022, as I finished up several sessions with my podiatrist, he said words to the effect of "you don't need to see me again unless things change." I had shoes with far better support, my walking was back on track, and life was good. Even after the medical upheavals on 2023 and early 2024 (the hospitalization for acute pancreatitis, the broken wrist, the gallbladder removal, to name a few), I built my life back up, including walking. With the increasingly positive reviews coming out of Mayo, I was on a roll.

Until I wasn't.

I always have some pain/neuropathy issues with my feet. Specifically, my left foot. And while the neuropathy has abated the longer I go without treatment (20 months, but who's counting? Oh, I am...), there has always been some small pain issues in the toes (hammer toes, to name one), but nothing major. I knew from my past podiatry history that, like my beloved Aunt Ginger, the metatarsals were spreading apart as I aged, making that foot more prone to arthritis. 

"Genetics," said the podiatrist back then. I could live with that.

But earlier this year, I started to be aware of pain—different pain—in my right foot. Not in the same place as on the left, and not what I had been aware of before. It interrupted my sleep and, worse, it started interfering with my walking. I knew I should call my podiatrist but didn't get to it until two weeks ago, when the pain became so severe mid-walk that I came to a complete stop, tried to breathe through it, thought of calling Warren to pick me up, then finished the walk, limping. (So why didn't I call Warren? Because I was two blocks away from home and was EMBARRASSED to!) So a call to the podiatrist, an appointment last Tuesday, and, well, here we are. 

Nothing horrible mind you, but definitely not a minor "don't worry about it" either. 

The short version is BOTH of my feet are currently wrapped and taped. I am taking ibuprofen, not for the pain, but for the inflammation, which is considerable. (It even shoved the arthritis to the side both in the discussion and on the x-rays.) What I thought was a callous on my right sole was bursitis pushing out through my foot. (Who knew?) I soak the wraps off at home this Tuesday and go back to see him the following week for more follow-up. There will likely be a custom support for the right foot in the near future and probably a new pair of my regular shoes with different supports (I wear Hokas, which are not cheap). 

Oh, and NO WALKING until I see him on the 28th. And then we will see.

NO WALKING. 

Oh,  I can walk "a little," as in around the house or to the car and into a building. Short, necessary bits of walking. But NO WALKING as in "get out the door and go walk to clear my mind" walking. 

Back in 2014, I wrote about seeing the movie Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago and the powerful impact it had on me.  Last night I caught a story on CBS about walking the Camino in the 21st century. I watched it by myself first and then Warren and I watched it together. When we finished, I turned to him and told him I was a bit sad seeing it. My answer surprised Warren. Why was I sad? Because it reminded me of how, grateful beyond grateful though I am to still be here a decade later, I still will never walk the Camino and that loss will always be in me. 

A few weeks after seeing the movie in 2014, I blogged about the act of pilgrimage in and of itself, independent of the Camino. I went back and reread that one in finishing today's post. For me (me, not anyone else; I don't pretend to know what motivates others), my life has to have a strong element of pilgrimage to be meaningful. It is tied up with my commitment to tikkun olam and to strengthening this community.  

And I can do that even while sidelined from walking. 

But I really, really want the walking back. Stay tuned. 

And at the End of One

As I have done for several years, and as many other blogger friends do, I track our grocery spending annually. "Grocery" means food bought for home preparation and consumption, and common household items such as toilet paper and laundry detergent. I do not track our eating out expenses. With very rare exception, we don't eat out, and "eating out" includes getting takeout meals or an ice cream cone. Those costs almost never exceed $50.00 a month, even when we head to Mayo, and in any year, we might eat out (except for the occasional ice cream cone) maybe, oh, four of the twelve months. 

So, looking at First Quarter 2025 grocery spending, the results are...

Eye opening. 

At the end of three months, our grocery expenditures were (drum roll, please) $436.10, or an average of $145.37 per  month. Of that amount, a whopping $13.65 was household: parchment paper and toilet paper. That is 3% of the overall spending.

3%. 

The rest was for food: perishables, some stock-up shopping. Okay, there was what I will call a "splurge" from our trip to Mayo in late February. Between the Kwik Trip cinnamon rolls, which have gone up in cost (what hasn't?) and hitting the Rochester Trader Joe's (the only Trader Joe's we shop at, period), we bought and brought home $31.94 of groceries on that trip. 

Okay, okay, we can live with that kind of splurge. As I go through the notes I make (yes, I keep a spreadsheet and make notes as to what the purchases are), I see I wrote "This is NOT about deprivation." We eat well. Probably the biggest change in our diets over recent months, as a result of aging (both of us) and as a result of my major hospitalization and the physical/medical fallout from it in 2023-2024, is that we simply do not eat as much as we used to. So food just lasts longer. 

How much less do we eat? Here is a recent rare meal out (it was a special Warren/April anniversary): we bought two lunch plates (and a tamale) at a local Mexican restaurant. We brought home what we did not eat and ate the leftovers later. From the whole event, in addition to the lunch at the restaurant, we got two more lunches and two more suppers at home. So that was five meals for two adults or ten meals total. To stretch it, we also had a small salad each on one supper, tortilla chips with the lunch, and a side of rice with the last supper (and there is still rice left to make another meal from). Small additions to the overall initial lunches, trust me. 

We are concentrating on "eating down" the food in our upright freezer (100 cubic feet) and that too keeps costs down. There are still frozen vegetables from 2024 (zucchini, sweet corn, pesto) that we hope to finish before the 2025 season starts. We have one turkey (Justice Bus!) and one ham still frozen. With Easter coming up, we hope ham prices drop enough that we can buy a few for the freezer. And I am wishful (but prepared to not have this one granted) that egg prices will drop even a little bit for Easter as well. 

Who knows? Who knows anything about grocery prices in these turbulent times?

First quarter is in the books; let's see what the next three months bring! 

This Year's Gardens: Chapter 2

The zucchini at full speed

Oh my. What a difference ten days make. 

On the seed front, zukes and cukes are going great guns:

And the cucumbers are right there keeping pace with the zucchini! 

On the pepper front, the lowly little seeds I had dried from store-bought sweet peppers are starting to rear their tiny heads. I do not know what to expect from them as I am no doubt dealing with hybrids and who knows what this next generation will hold. But at least they are coming up! 

Who knows what they will produce, but at least they are growing! 

But my Leysas? The seeds I bought in search of a "truly" sweet pepper? Up until Wednesday, my answer was have been simple. Zilch, nada, rien. And then this one poked up, barely:

Look close in the upper right cell

Okay, maybe hope does spring eternal.

Outside, the weather has been March erratic. Warm days, then cold. Light frosts, then nothing, then light frosts again. All the same, and knowing that we are in Zone 6b (last frost date is mid-April), we are starting to do outdoor garden work. Warren suggested we till the kitchen garden and we did our first tilling today (Thursday).

It's electric. It's lightweight. It showed me who's boss.

Warren did the first pass. I raked the garden over, raking up the weeds the tiller had uprooted and then I did the second pass with the tiller.

Holy moly.

Talk about a wake-up call as to how far I have yet to go before I am capable of working consistently with our lightweight tiller. After about 30 minutes wrestling with it, I finally got enough of the hang of it that I could kinda sorta handle it.

As I started in on the garden work, I set my kitchen timer for an hour out of the gate. As I told Warren, until I build up my energy and my reserves, I need to watch my time. And I am glad I did; I was ready to gather up my tools when it went off.

We have ambitious plans to clean up, clear out, restore, and expand our two front beds, the back perennial bed, and the small bed that hugs the back side of our house. And of course there are the kitchen garden and the Hej garden to turn our efforts to for this year's vegetables.

Here's to more tilling! 

First tilling done! 

Update

I wrote this blog out by longhand Thursday night, while I sat at an evening rehearsal of the Mansfield Symphony. This morning, before I came upstairs to type this post, I took a look again at the sluggard Leysas and this is what I saw:

The second little head is in the lower left corner of the lower right cell. 

Two are now poking up their heads! 

Here's hoping.

Small Notes, Small Moments

Weaver Leather Supply: best smelling store ever. Ever.
(Photo from the store website.)

Monday Warren and I went out of town for Hyer Percussion matters that he absolutely needed to tend to. After starting my day getting my 2nd Covid-19 2024-2025 shot (I get two because I am so special), we took off in the car headed to the Millersburg area, which is known as the Heart of Amish Ohio. We were not there to sample Amish country, although it was all around us; we were there for the business matters.

During the day, we stopped at Keim Home Center in Charm, at which Warren found the sycamore board of his dreams (seriously); Keim was great but we went there only because I failed to catch the county road turnoff to Yoder Lumber after we had been to Weaver Leather Supply, which was our first stop of the day. 

Although it was a business trip and ended up taking longer than we had anticipated, in part because of missed turns, it was a great day. It was good for both of us to get out of town and away from the house and all of its demands. With a pen and paper, I captured a few notes about what we saw:

• A church sign at the Methodist church in Danville: "We stand tallest when we stoop to help one another." Be still, my heart.
• A yard with several blue, 5-gallon water jugs, upside down and firmly fixed to wood blocks, with holes cut large enough for the chickens that populated the yard to each have her own apartment. (Don't ask me about the rooster; I didn't see him.)
• Electric bikes being ridden everywhere by Amish women carting children, groceries, and such. Solar panels at Amish farms. 
• Passing several yards with small or large apiaries and my recognizing (from reading books on beekeeping) that the hives were still under their winter wraps. 
• I love draft horses and they are big (no pun intended) in Amish country because the farmers use them instead of tractors. I saw a team of four pulling a plow to turn the soil. My favorite was a team of two Belgians, harnessed to a large farm wagon, steadily pulling up to the stop sign on a side road and waiting for us to go by, their elderly owner sitting on the seat; the horses knew what they were doing.
• Having the best brown bag lunch ever maybe, which we ate in the parking lot of Weaver Leather. Of course, we took our own lunch. We had the best lunch ever because Sunday afternoon was a Symphony concert, and by the time it finished and Warren and friends got the timpani and other percussion instruments home, we were cold, hungry, and exhausted. A quick trip to City Barbeque solved that issue; we each saved half of our delicious Sunday night pulled pork sandwiches as the foundation of our Monday parking lot lunch. Great move.
• An Amish buggy parked in front of a Dollar General, quite possibly the only "general store/grocery" in the area, and an older woman, dressed properly in the long skirts and covering cloak, a kapp on her head, headed to the buggy with a full bag on her arm. [Note: Amish women drive buggies; they do not need a man to accompany them. We passed several with often two women chatting away as one drove.]

By the time we got home at 5:00, I was tired and my arm was sore, but the day was a huge business success. (In fact, this morning, Warren was on the phone with Pat Weaver of the aforementioned leather company, about a custom die they will be making for him after we all met yesterday and determined whether it would work.) We had a frozen pizza in the basement freezer, I made a quick salad, and that took care of our supper, which we ate while we both relaxed and talked over the day.

The trip was good as a getaway, and as an important step forward for Warren's business, but it was good for another reason. We are starting to plan a trip out to Portland/Vancouver this summer. When we got back home, I told Warren that I really loved spending the day out driving and doing, but I think the trip convinced me that driving cross-country, timing issues aside (because we have matters here in Delaware that we cannot just set aside for several weeks), is out of the question for me physically unless we stop a LOT. A WHOLE lot. Warren said he felt the same way about both of us. So we talked about starting to sketch out some date and start looking at flights. That was a hard realization, but I reminded myself that while I am about to turn 69 chronologically, 20 years of treatment plus that fun little episode in 2023 has aged me by at least a decade. (And those are doctors speaking, not April feeling sorry for herself.) 

It was a great day full of love, full of talk, full of being together. It doesn't get any better than that.

This Year's Gardens: Chapter 1

What my kitchen looked like Saturday

Hope springs eternal. At least when it comes to gardening.

It is mid-March and while it is still too early, even with climate change, to plant outside, my mind has turned to the coming year's potential. Warren has thoughts and ideas about our flower beds and the two front beds; my focus is on the possibilities in the vegetable arena. I have been making mental notes, looking at seed catalogs online, reviewing past years, and dreaming about this year's gardens.

So following through on my eternal hope, I just started seeds. Well, to be truthful, I started a lot of seeds. After last year's lackadaisical gardening performance due to my still recovering from the fall/winter medical messes, my just not being up to it, getting to my favorite go-to garden center, totally local and community-committed, for the garden (Miller's Country Gardens) way too late to get the good stuff, doing a mediocre job of even taking care of the garden—forget the weeds, I'm just talking about the plants, dealing with moving my dad into assisted living, and having the gardens WAY TOO CROWDED (again, always, even more so), I am set to make this year different and, I hope, better, 

I spent a chunk of Saturday starting SOME (SOME!!!) seeds inside. For the most part, I had stopped doing a lot of seed starting inside, other than zucchini, some years ago. So what was different about this year? A few reasons. One, there were some varieties I wanted to try that the likelihood of my finding them potted at Miller's or anywhere else was slim at best. I ordered a particular sweet pepper that caught my eye, and an heirloom zucchini and heirloom cucumber that had waved to me. (I had also saved some seeds from some sweet peppers that I'd bought at Aldi in the winter. Why not try them?)

The sweet peppers I am eager to try

The other key reason to starting them NOW, ignoring the timing issue with the last probable freeze date, is I am early enough that if the seedlings don't take off and thrive like they need to, Miller's opens April 7 and I will be a regular visitor as the spring opens up. Usually they bring out their "cold" plants out first, like broccoli, cabbage, and then their warm plants, the tomatoes and peppers, a few weeks later. I will get my tomatoes at Miller's because they are a pain to grow from seed at least for me. 

Zucchini-to-be, I hope! 

While I was dabbling in the dirt in the kitchen, Warren came in from the shop and expressed surprise. "I knew you were planning to do that soon, just not today." When I told him it takes 10+ days the seeds to sprout before I could see what I have to work with, then I can figure out what to do at Miller's, he understood immediately.

Warren and I will be tilling, spreading some compost, and tilling again in the next few weeks to get the vegetable beds ready. (Okay, we'll deal with some of the flower beds too. I love flowers, but they are not vegetables!) By late April, I hope to have some plants in the ground. (We're in Zone 6b here, so that is about the earliest that the USDA charts say to plant without fear of deadly frost.)

Hope springs eternal. So do gardens. 

I can already taste that first tomato! 

Time

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

16 years ago today, I penned my very first blog post. If I counted correctly, this will be my 926th post. 

925 posts behind me and 5844 days between that first March 17th and today. In those first early years, I was very prolific. After that, I seem to have hit a rhythm of 40-50 posts a year, except when I fell totally off the wagon and only posted 8 in 2021. (8? Eight? I still can't figure out 2021.)

A lot has happened in those 16 years: changes in employment, changes in family (Ramona! Lyrick! Orlando!), changes in health. Over these years. there have been losses along the way, most poignantly Aunt Ginger and dear Doug. 

Many other things have stayed the same. I am grateful beyond grateful that Warren and I still continue to share our lives and our home and our dreams. I continue to be very, very rich in friends.  I continue to give my heart to this community. 

If you had asked me back in 2009 when I first started writing if I thought I would even be alive in 2025, given my incurable myeloma, I would have been blunt: "No." (That answer would have based on what my body was doing, not what the statistics were. My longtime oncologist here, Tim, told me the very first time to ignore the statistics on life expectancy with myeloma and I always have.) 

But here I am after all. And here's to another year. Thanks for being with me for another trip around the sun! 

And Just Like That

After several days of going back and forth in my mind, I finally took the plunge,  deactivating my Facebook account and canceling my longstanding subscription to the New York Times on the same day.

And just like that, I felt better. 

Let me peel those two activities apart: Facebook first, then the Times.

My Facebook friends span the political spectrum from way left to way right. I have not unfriended any folks for their voting choices. Ever. Period. For the record, I have very close friends and family, near and dear to my heart, who vote very differently from me. They are not the reason I deactivated my Facebook page. 

I deactivated my Facebook page because of the friends with whom I share many similar political views (liberal, to say the least). I know how I feel about the current administration. I strongly feel our nation and our democracy is at risk, and, at a personal level, that my family members and I are at risk. That being said, I don't need to be shrieked out several times a day with posts about what the Orangeman said, what his administration is doing, and how outraged I should feel. I am beyond tired of living in an echo chamber. 

And just like that, I was out of the echo chamber. 

Stepping away from the New York Times was a different decision involving a lot of moving parts. One, Warren had stopped reading it much at all months ago because of overloads on his personal time; he had (still does) more pressing matters to deal with. Looking back, I realized I had pared way way way back on how much I read it. So neither of us were getting much out of it. Two, there were the recent editorial losses: longtime columnist Paul Krugman left because the management was leaning on him heavily with edits he could not tolerate; Charles Blow left to take a prestigious fellowship at Harvard but also because of management leaning on him; Peter Coy (my favorite economist ever) left saying he was "retiring" but I wonder if it was more than that. Three, yes the overload. The overload the  overload the overload. Four, the cost. If we were reading it more regularly, I wouldn't look hard at that cost, but for not reading it, yeah, it's a tad pricey. I was paying $25.00 every four weeks, or $325.00 a year. That's way more than a lot for a subscription we were not using. (Interesting now that I have canceled, when I do open it while our current paid subscription time runs, they are offering me a full subscription at $1.00/week.) So I canceled my subscription.

And just like that, I didn't have to keep up with the newspaper anymore.

I let Ben and Alix know about both decisions.  (Sam eschews social media, so he is not worrying about whether his mom is on Facebook.) Because of Alix's job, he has to follow the national press, but he totally got my reasoning.  Ben's response was even more direct:  "The media cycle is overwhelming and all the outrage in the world isn't getting anything done." 

That comment about outrage not getting anything done struck home. Where I can make a difference is here locally, which is why I posted a photo of a slow food cooker at the start of this blog. Yes, the hot sandwiches to go program at the Justice Bus is running well. We just repeated it for our March Bus. My next door neighbors have started supplying the Bus with fresh-baked (as in "just this morning") sourdough loaves. Trust me, warm food, a loaf of bread, and welcoming our clients are all needed right here, right now. So when I arrived to set up for the Bus Thursday, I posted this sign:

And this one:

And just like that, we were off and running. 

We do not ask clients their political views before assisting them; hard times do not care about your voting pattern. As a long-ago, long-deceased friend reminded me back in the late 1970s (a lifetime ago) when we discussed activism, "April, it's hard to show up for a rally or a protest meeting when you are working two jobs and trying to keep a roof over your head." I feel that neither major party cares about poverty—food insecurity, hunger, housing insecurity, homelessness, medical care—because at the top, they do not have to worry about doing without. (Who do I agree with most of this topic? Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted and Poverty, By America. Here is a very recent appearance by Desmond on the Daily Show talking about poverty and our abysmal record in this nation: just watch it.)

From time to time, I will still check in on Facebook because there are a few family members I only see photos of on Facebook. It amuses me that the only person who has contacted me about not being on Facebook is a cousin whose minster's wife (a high school classmate of mine) reached out to her to make sure I was okay because she was thinking of me and couldn't find me. (For the record, my cousin and our mutual connection do not share my political views.) That just reinforced my thoughts about the echo chamber: if all one does is screech, one does not see the community. So I emailed my cousin an update and told her to share my note with our friend.

And just like that, I went on with my day.