My Monday Morning Friday Dump

This is for my kids

A couple of weeks ago, my daughter commented, with both love and edge in her voice, that she could tell I retired because I was now texting all the time with my real time moments. 

I don’t think I was, but I think the contrast between the texting cadence in my professional life and now was noticeable.  She suggested I stash my effusion and release it all in a “Friday Dump”.  I was burned for a moment but, yeah, I get it. In my decades of professional life, I could barely hang on to minimum meaningful communication with family and friends.  The only reason I set up a Facebook page was to let my mum in on my whereabouts without my answering her email directly.  It was a shortcut, I know.  But every time I got a text or email I started to formulate the thoughtful response it deserved and could never get round to finishing it and that stressed me out. Yes, you could say my priorities were skewed. Work consumed the best hours of my day. And then I was tired. Tale as old as time.

So here I am now, channeling my mother and when I text these days, because I have mental real estate untethered from travel and work pressure, it is because I want to share my sparks of joy and inspiration at the same moment I experience them. I don’t expect a response. But I completely understand that for my adult children, in their intense career years, my text bursts can feel like interruption and something that requires a perceived call to action added onto a day that is already maxed out.  I know because I was there.

So, heeding the note, here is my Friday dump. 

School

I finished my final project and exam for my Arboriculture course.  This class was intense, engaging, consuming. I aced it. What I learned I am putting to solid use right here right now.

Finished it just in time, too.  I worked at it over the winter months but now I feel property time pressure in a way that I never have. Life right now in our little glen it is “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once”.

While I was working, we concentrated first on making the house livable and ordered. Now efforts are all property and garden related and completely season and weather driven.  There are deadlines for open burning, cold season planting, tilling.  Things like that.  The kitchen floors are covered in mud streaks and I haven’t cleaned the bathroom in weeks because I can’t care and there is no point.  I have perpetual dirt in my hairline and up my nose.  Spring is pretty and messy and that is just the way it is.

The Clean Up

There is still so much. So grateful for my truck.  We loaded up two truckloads of old tires to recycling.  The robins use the side mirrors for grooming and crapping. This is annoying.  

Buried in the front yard overgrowth was an old stone boat.  I tried to imagine an esthetic use for it but nothing came to mind so I posted it to the local Buy Nothing Facebook page and got an immediate response.  So, Ron and I cut through the brush in the rain and dragged the thing out for pickup by a Salmon Arm chap who has an appreciation for the heritage and industry of that time. That made my heart glad.

That was our first real corporeal effort of the season and even the best home gym can’t prepare me for the physicality of clearing, building and maintaining a property that has been left to its own devices for a couple of years.  Our first year here we had Ben, who was instrumental in getting this land to at least a manageable state.  More on that another time.

And last April, two of my brothers came to visit with fishing rods that stayed in the truck while they set to dismantling some of the potential death by collapse and impalement constructs on the property.

As did my sister, who visited with energy and muscle and enough homemade soup to fill half a freezer.

And of course, my Okanagan daughter and son in law who have been so generous with their time, labour and excellent humour but whom have not yet been consulted on using photo evidence of this here.

More on this, too, another time but needless to say I am deeply grateful to all for the borrow of their vigour and sturdiness.

In the meantime, I have spent the past couple of weeks hauling, yanking, reaching, pushing, pulling, squatting, bending in ways that no functional strength gym routine has ever prepared me for.  I drop into the dirt immediately when I feel a prodromal back twinge and cat, cow, frog and child pose in earnest.  My hands and hamstrings ache and throb. I am scratched, sore and bruised.  But I am starting to feel solid muscle under the layers of corporate, cortisol chub in my arms, thighs and core.  I have no idea if Epsom Salts baths really work but lately, I am all in. Literally. And I have never felt better.

The Garden

The garden is ready for tilling.  The deer fence is now up and gated. A herd of about ten of them still routinely wander through the property at around 8 am, have a graze of whatever is up and growing. Today it was tulips. They have a little drink from the pond and move on.

I have rescued and potted up my daughter’s hellebores, the rhubarb and a couple of poppies for replanting later.  I left the lovage. It has taken over the garden.  Forager Chef calls lovage “celery on steroids”.  My dad loved it and used it ALL THE TIME in his cooking.  In his late years I went to visit him.  He offered me some of his homemade soup.  It smelled unpleasantly familiar.  When he stepped out of the room for a minute his wife leaned in and whispered, “Your dad cooks for me all the time but everything he makes smells and tastes the same.”  Cracked me up.  Yeah, I am tilling that shit under.

Seeds have been started inside.  Moved the speakeasy furniture and replaced it with grow lights for the time being.  Tomatoes, snapdragons, scabiosa, alyssum, peppers, yarrow, tobacco, sweet peas and cucumbers are all up.  

The Burn

The last open burn ends at the end of this month. We have had a couple already this year.  Still trying to burn off the huge stumps left from the old, dead walnut trees we had to cut down.  Fires were big in my family on the old farm.  Feeding it was a collective effort.  I don’t remember anyone being grumpy on a burn day.  I hope next year to be able to share this work with friends and family with marshmallows and roasted sausages. This year though it’s more like let’s get through the mass of debris before the deadline.

In the moments between the clearing and the seeding, the burning and dumps, I am enjoying flowers the deer missed.

To those of you who checked in I wish you an excellent week.

To my kids. Love you!