I've been reveling in these clear breezy nights to garden. This includes cutting lavender, and soon pruning lavender. Planting lavender has passed and there will be a post about that later on.
Last night as I was watering the herb garden, well after sunset, my mind kept wandering to 5 summers ago, 2016. I was convinced as I watered that today June 16th was the 4 year anniversary of the re-opening of Main Library...but the magnet on the fridge told me this morning that it was June 25th. As I write this on June 16th, who knows when I will post this. Time is just a construct when it comes to blogging.
See, I told you. More words and less pictures.
This, I took at 9:49 p.m. last night as I watered the herb garden and vegetable beds.
Never an early riser by choice, I do my best gardening and thinking afternoon and evening. I have always enjoyed watering by twilight or under the moon. Four years ago, in mid-to late June the lavender had already been cut and I had spent weeks at Main Library wearing a hard hat, safety googles and yellow construction vest to help unpack books to be shelved. My back was hurting so badly at that time that shelving was largely beyond me and I withdrew books that had aged poorly in storage and would not be returning to the shelf for the shiny opening day but to be sold on the Friends of the Library book sale.
The only restroom was accessible by a twisting and ever changing route through the building to avoid back stairs that were being painted and other construction. A round trip to the restroom often took 20 minutes at a time. There wasn't access to a refrigerator so it was packed lunches. Also, most stressful to me was the sensory overload of the repeated testing of dozens and dozens of smoke/fire alarms. I put my sunglasses on to mute the constant strobe lights flashing since every time an alarm went off, they all went off that was the whole point. I probably wore ear plugs to to mute the sound of the wailing sirens throughout the building. I remember that most of these week nights I would come home and do five things; take care of the pets, take care of the chickens, have some sort of dinner, water the garden, and do some restorative yoga poses. And shower. That's six things I guess,
supported child's pose
a variation of this basic legs up on a chair pose
The grand re-opening of Main is a blur to me now. I remember it being hot, and I was in a good amount of zinc sunscreen that made me look ghostly under a straw hat because I wasn't sure how long I would be outside.
I couldn't see anything because I'm so short. I got separated from my youth services colleagues in the hubbub of taking the marble Carnegie stars to the front lawn but managed to find a shady spot under the largest tree in the lawn and was beside a friend from another department. Important people spoke. A ribbon was cut. It was hot. Cest la vie. (Yes I know there is an accent in there somewhere.)
Andrew was in nursing school, and had one more semester to go. It's a blur now. On nights that he was at the station, watering in the cool of evening was one of my more contemplative chores around the house.
I remember sitting on front porch seat and watching the stars come out and also watching the hummingbird hawk moths float/fly around the evening primroses in the herb garden. They were quite a site and always reminded me of the floppy butterfly Muppets on Sesame Street.
I'm not going to lie, the intro to this video is bizarre, but you will get the idea of how big these moths are, and just imagine a half a dozen of them swirling around my garden in light just bright enough to see them. And this picture will give you an idea what evening primroses are.
Just a few weeks before in May, Andrew and I had traveled to Virginia for a vacation where we tent camped for multiple days at Chippokes State Park. We were only one of three campers on our wing of the campground and the only tent campers. I had the beautiful cedar paneled bathroom to myself and it had a skylight and didn't smell so I was pleased. There was a beautiful historic farm at the park including an elaborate rabbit hutch housing a buff colored mini-lop named Peter Rabbit.
Everyday we took the ferry across...I think the James river to go to Jamestown, Yorktown, or Williamsburg. We passed an osprey nest on one of the concrete platforms in the water. The only thing I liked about Jamestown was the wetland that a bridge carried is over where we saw dozens of turtles of many sizes and a few species. I liked the tour of the Rockefeller's summer house at Williamsburg.
One of our tour guides was comically flinty and harsh...as if the lack of social skills made her seem more colonial. I bought a straw hat option without the garish shiny ribbon one can find out Wal-Mart but added a 6 dollar mark up to the hat and was shocked those were the only two hat options On our last night of the trip we stayed in a hotel and spent the evening in Charlotte. We went to this lovely independently owned cinema and watched Avengers Civil War. The theater was so clean and I liked the color scheme of light purple, one could say it was lavender, and gray. As we waited for the previews I realized that I really liked the music the credit flashed quickly and all I could gather was "Heloise and Abelard" but the second song followed me. So much so that when we returned home I emailed the theater and tried to give them as much details as possible. The lyrics, the title, the movie we watched and when.
A short disclaimer This song link below is the not entirely appropriate for youngsters.
I mean it played in front of Avengers movie that I think is PG13 but young readers you have been forewarned.
I didn't imagine anyone would get back to me and felt actually sad that this moment of music I had barely registered was so important to me to find out. But in a couple weeks I did get a reply. The artist is Kate Powell and she has done many songs but I still like these two the best, and Calla Lily is on my phone bookmarked, ready to play anytime. I find myself playing it though mostly in the summer, and who knows how many times I listened to it five summers ago. I don't relate to the character's lyrics, but I love her voice in this song and the quirky percussion. At the very end a neighborhood church's bells ring in the background. I listened to it for the first time this summer last night.
So much has happened these past 4 years. Molly my beloved tortoiseshell cat died just 6 months later in December just a couple weeks after Andrew's graduation from his RN program. The next summer (2017) I would have just started my new job as Youth Services Manager at Bexley Public Library. I didn't yet know it but this is where I would make a lot of friends, meet some amazing new families, and and connect with an incredible yoga teacher practically right next door.
As I write this now, a cool breeze tells me it's nice enough to go out and prune some of my lavender plants...the old ones that I couldn't get to in the spring and on a lavender farm they would have been replaced 5 years ago. I can hear the drill Andrew is running on the back forty on his latest building project for the property. He starts his Bachelor's in Nursing this fall. Rather than tent camp, we have a TAB trailer that provides more privacy, less ambient noise from partying campers and (angels sing) air conditioning. And we have Tutu, a dog I could not imagine having, who now seems like she has always been here, sunning herself as I type.
I haven't had evening primroses for two summers now. Something that just appeared in the herb garden every since we had an herb garden just slowly died out even when I planted seeds. I'm not sure why. Maybe something changed in the soil and they don't like it anymore. I hope to have them again someday but for now, I'm enjoying what I do have in my garden. The evening work calls, I will publish this now.
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