Sanuk D

I don't know what I'm doing here, I should be someplace else.

The fourth stalk of the butterfly bush was unwilling to be trimmed back in the way that the first three had.  The whole bush had stood through the winter, looking like a rattling skeleton of it’s summertime self.  We have cut it back in the fall before, and it failed to regenerate with the vigor we had hoped.  Last year we did not trim it much at all and it threatened to take out the rhododendron and azalea with it’s aggressive foliage.  We left it up through the winter this time, and as the fourth stalk finally succumbed, I trimmed it back substantially but not as far as it has been trimmed previously.  Hopefully we are finding some balance.

For the last month or so, Tallulah and I have spend a substantial part of Sunday afternoon together.  Sort of father-daughter bonding time.  Several weeks have involved swimming at the W, but with a tattoo healing the pool is not an option.  Today’s warmth and light probably would have kept us out of the pool anyway.  Instead we loaded up the Bucket with 8 bags of mulch and came home to spread out the blanket of decomposition across the flower beds and garden.

There is also a pumpkin from last fall’s Beltain celebration slowly melting into the dirt.  We should have a lot more decaying matter to add to this small plot of land, but I have not gotten it together to plunk down the cash for a composter.  It just comes hard to think about laying out a wad of dough for something that makes dirt, even if that dirt is very special.

What I want is the beautiful garden, but not the terrible process that will produce it.  The food scraps that go into a dark dispose-all or garbage bag don’t remind me of the greens I am not eating.  There’s no turning, and turning,

and turning,

and

turning, and waiting to see what the outcome will look like.  I don’t want to spread the humus and hope that the rain will come in the right amount and the sun will come in the right amount and everything will turn out.  When I see a beautiful garden, for some reason, it does not connect that the gardener as gone through all of these steps too.  Just because all I see is the beautiful does not mean that some ugly has not gone into getting it there.

The trip to Lake Tomahawk began with great consternation.  Why do I get so excited about super-broadband access when there are kids who will be hungry today?  How do I respond when a person of my same religious creed refers to the Dude and the SubDude as reptiles on the newspaper website?  Who can I trust to advance the cause of sensible land use in the Land of the Suwaree without disenfranchising the Suwaree in the process?  These are not bad questions, but they are a bit hard at 7:45 on a Saturday morning.

And there is something in me that becomes suspicious when I value participation on an Internet message board above conversation with My Sweet Lady.  Being active in one’s community is not a bad thing, but since I have chosen to be a husband and father, perhaps my priority should be on getting Fruit and Fiber rather than Google Fiber.  It’s taken a lot of time for me to learn that being a good family man, working man, and man of faith is a full day’s work.

It’s also honest work, honorable work.  There are things I can’t do, at least not at this point in my life, and sustained participation in public discussions is one of them.  Other things I can do, and like Voltaire’s Candide, I want to cultivate my garden.  As I returned from the journey over the mountain and felt the warmth of the sun on my back, it occurred to me that the time to start some sprouts in a cold frame may have come.