At A Crossroads, Yet Again!

Spring is almost here. The Hellebores are about to kick into high gear. Cyclamen are appearing. Snowdrops are popping out of the ground. The garden is returning to life. I’ve seen my first slugs and snails of the year. Just in time Costco has Sluggo again.

I’ve been mostly busy inside. Working on a new novel and publishing things I wrote last year. I’m still quite a ways behind. But I’m under the illusion that it’s possible to catch up, so I keep trying.

Journey Into Darkness:JPEG:850X1288This week I got up a very long story written last summer.

Journey Into Darkness:

Melanthe is destined to be the next Queen. If she survives the passage to adulthood. This is her one chance to experience the world outside the domes at the bottom of the sea. After she makes the grueling swim to the surface, she has to survive on land. Will her magic last long enough to complete the challenge?
An Enigmatic Pearl Story.

This is set in the same world as one of the books in The Jeweled Worlds. It takes place years before that trilogy, but I don’t think it matters if you read it before or after.

It’s YA Fantasy, but I know a lot of adults who read young adult fiction, as do I. If you’re looking to escape into another world, give it a try.

So, crossroads.

We have a large garden, it used to be nearly half an acre. Then I decided that getting horses would be a good idea. So we spent years tearing apart half the garden. Moving some of the plants, giving others away. We made a wonderful horse space, filled with ground cover fabric and gravel in most of it, sand in another section.

Allergies hit me really hard a month after the horses arrived. The horses were awesome. Allergies not so much. I couldn’t even walk across the room because of dizziness. We finally decided it was the hay. It took a couple of years, but we sold the horses. They’re now living happily back east in the Great Lakes region. I see photos of them now and again and miss them terribly.

I don’t miss the awful allergies and dizziness and the stress of being unable to carry on anything resembling a normal life. It’s taken nearly three years for me to get better. And all that time I’ve been looking out at a vacant horse area. Which has made me unhappy. A huge reminder of failure. I don’t like to spend huge amounts of time blaming myself or my body.

What I usually do after failing is reassess, then pick myself up and do something about the problem. Three years is a lot of time to dwell on a problem without being able to deal with it.

Last summer we started moving the sand from the former round pen so it could be a foundation for the back patio. I’m hoping this year we’ll move the rest of it to the front yard and cover that with pavers.

But the big news is that I’m making a new fruit garden! I lost mine when we rearranged for horses. I’ve so missed wandering the garden and finding fresh berries. I didn’t realize what a big thing it was for me until I became totally obsessed with planning it over the last few weeks. And because it’s a sunny area, there will be more roses. English roses filled with fragrance. I’ve been lost for hours looking at online plant catalogs and garden books, making maps of the space. The kitchen table has vanished beneath the piles of books and papers.

Today, the gates begin coming down, to be sold soon, I hope. I’ll rake up gravel in places, pull up ground cloth and plant golden raspberries, blueberries and thornless blackberries for a start.

I’m so excited.

Much of the gravel area is going to become a home for containers and raised beds. I’m going to plant a fig tree in a large watering trough. I’m going to have figs again! And I’ll move the strawberries, which have been escaping their pot for a couple years now, into a permanent space.

So, I’m reclaiming that outdoor space and turning it back into a garden again. I’m so excited about the possibilities.

I’ll leave you with some of my Hellebore photos. I love these perennials. Each one is an individual. Our garden is filled with them because I buy at least a couple more every year. The doubles haven’t opened yet, so all the pictures are of singles.

 

IMG_3757IMG_3779IMG_3756

IMG_3760

IMG_3752



What are your thoughts?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.