This Year's Gardens: Part 4

 

Blossoms on the Cherokee Trail of Tears Pole Beans 

Sometimes, a picture does say a thousand words. 

This Year's Gardens: Part 3

My last garden update was about four weeks ago. My, how the time flies. And yes, there is activity in the gardens!

I am starting to see the first tomatoes. The peppers are thriving; so are the red cabbages. (As well as the broccoli and cauliflower.) The zucchini are starting to spread their leaves.

The first sowing of basil was pretty much a disaster, as in "nothing happened." I wasn't even sure I wanted to try it again. But I did: I resowed the bed, announcing to Warren that if this didn't work, I would just buy basil at the Farmers Market to make pesto this year. (Well, that and the two basil plants I bought as a pitiful backup.) 

It worked, apparently. It seems I will have a basil crop after all! 

The basil is coming up!

The all-star in the vegetable gardens this year is the Trail of Tears pole beans. They are already reaching new heights and tomorrow I will be crafting more routes for them to spread up and over.

The pole beans reaching for the sky

My biggest surprise? Last year, I sprouted and planted four small patches of globe thistle from seeds I had harvested the previous fall from a healthy patch just down the street. I got nothing; the starts all withered away. So imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when I was doing some light weeding in one of the front beds and came across something that looked kinda sorta familiar. It was one of the patches of globe thistle, making an appearance this year!

Globe thistle! 

I am having some serious conversations (with myself, with Warren, with a few others) about how much capacity I have in terms of time and energy, both physical and mental. My capacity impacts what I do, have to do, want to do, am willing to do. Yes, all IS stable in Cancerland, but I have no illusions about how far out I am on the survival spectrum (way out there) and how much my body has endured over the last 19 years. So seeing this plant, which I had given up for lost, come up unexpectedly, gave me a little boost. I still have a lot of thinking to do and I may be writing about some of that in the weeks to come, but for now I am looking forward to seeing the globe thistle bloom. 

Early June Update

When I posted a garden update in late May, I mentioned the outside stresses on our schedules here. A lot has happened since that May 24th post. 

The Symphony office DID get moved; the very last items left on May 31. There was a great team of volunteers, with Warren spearheading and planning the whole event. Warren, Office Assistant Sharon, and Music Librarian Laura are still settling into the new space (Warren's comment when he came home yesterday: "I just needed a binder clip to hold some papers together. Couldn't find one anywhere.") but with 4th of July up next (a free outdoor concert that some 7000 folks attend), we are all relieved to have the move done. 

On the heels of the move, we headed off to Mayo. It is about 660 miles from door to door, and this was another rocket trip, leaving Monday and arriving back home at 1:05 a.m. Thursday. This is likely our very last rocket trip; I will time the next appointment to be later in the afternoon, spend the night in Rochester, and then drive back during the day. All is well on the cancer front: the myeloma is stable (still!) and the secondary cancer (from earlier treatments) seems to be just sitting there (which is what we want). 

But our travels are not yet over, not by a long shot. This Wednesday, we head to Pittsburgh for the national conference of the League of American Orchestras. Pittsburgh is only four hours away, not 11 or 12, so I am not dreading the driving. There is more travel in July, but I will save that for later. 

I will update the garden in a separate post. The early summer continues to be very, very dry, causing some issues with some of the plantings. 

The physical toll of traveling aside, June has been good. A former colleague from Juvenile Court stopped by on a midafternoon break yesterday and we caught up. (Dana was out walking and called me out of the blue to drop by. It was great.) He is about to retire, and he said quality of life was one of the big factors in his decision. I understood immediately—like me, Dana has enjoyed his job at Juvenile Court immensely, but there are other things he and his wife want to do and he is just looking for the time and peace of mind in which to do them. Some of those things are travel, but some of them are as simple as sitting out on their patio and enjoying a glass of wine. Yep, yep, yep.

And as we sort our way through the weeks and obligations right now, I am reminded daily (heck, sometimes hourly!) of how grateful I am that I am sharing this journey with Warren. Not just the love and the support and the encouragement (and I could go on), but also this perfect response that rolled out of his mouth as we were getting ready to head to Mayo. I needed to make a very quick run to the grocery for something for the trip, and I asked him if we needed anything else. Warren was working in his shop, and after putting down the tool he was using, he looked at me and said, "No. And if it turned out we did, I'm sure we could figure something out with what we have here."

It doesn't get better than that.