Let’s rewind a few weeks…  I planted a boxwood hedge in the front garden too close to the house and porch, and after a bunch of advice from seasoned gardeners, I moved everything.  Feeling like I was sure to make more rookie mistakes, I froze.  I had containers of English lavender in a plastic holder, as well as more pots of unplanted boxwood, sitting around the front garden for a couple of weeks.  I would put on my overalls, head out to do some planting, and I would just stare at the plants, hoping I would intuitively know what to do, and I wouldn’t get it wrong again.  Would I plant things too close together?  In the wrong kind of light or soil conditions?  Would I have to pull everything up and start over?  I ended up walking away from the front bed, and I worked on weeding, or cleaning

I’ve already shared about my love of collecting shells that look like they have a story to tell.  I like ones with holes, imperfections, and shells that have been repurposed by new owners like coral, barnacles, and bryozoan colonies until they were deposited on the beach. My sister-in-law called them wabi-sabi shells. One such characterful shell is this whelk. The points are worn off, smoothed by the friction of sand and water over time.  There are holes as if the surface had been slowly eaten away.  I also love that it’s a blue-gray color, which is my favorite kind of whelk.  The thing that really set this shell apart for me, though, was the way it grew.  Instead of the growth lines being smooth and uniform, an easy transition, there is a jagged line where the growth seemed to be knocked off course.  It almost appears as if another shell

I just turned 46 years old last week and, on Sunday afternoon, I mowed a lawn for the first time in my life. I come from a long line of lawn-mowing women. Well, I suppose two women isn’t exactly a long line, but there is a family history. Whenever my mom would talk about my great-grandmother, Rosa, she would say, “She mowed her lawn into her 70s!” In fact, the only thing that stopped her from mowing her own lawn was when her car, which she thought was in park, started rolling backward out of her driveway. She didn’t want it to hit anyone, so she tried to stop it and it ran over her.  That event resulted in a hip injury that affected her for the rest of her life. She was a really awesome lady, a force when it came to knitting, and a big tipper when grandkids