A Moveable Garden

Weekly recap of my ritual of existence in this liminal space called life. (See here for more info.)

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• Weather

The warming trend (and the dryness trend) continues, with high temperatures this week averaging 51.4°F (high high of 60.3°F on Sat. and low high of 39.4°F on Thurs.) and low temps averaging 28.6°F (low low of 21.7°F on Friday, most lows in the 20°Fs, and a high low of 41.9f°F on Sunday). We didn’t get snow or rain this week, though obviously we had quite a bit of snowmelt. It was misty/foggy today, with rain forecast for tonight and tomorrow. I was able to wear my less-warm winter coat several days this week, hurrah!

• Beginnings/Firsts

First chipmunk seen in our yard since last year, near the heated birdbath on Tuesday. I also heard, and Merlin did too, bluebirds in the yard (or actually in an oak tree, I think) that day; they have been around town but I hadn’t heard them in the yard recently.

Bought first two bunches of asparagus this week since last summer. Saw first snowdrop in a yard of a lake house.

Bumblecat spent 2.5 hours sleeping in the sunroom on Sunday, when the thermostat in there hit 61°F. That’s the first time since last year he’s done that. Spring is coming!

We went to a new sugarhouse for NH Maple Syrup weekend, which was this Sat. & Sun.: 6 Saplings Sugarhouse in Wilmot, NH. They shared lots of interesting info, and we bought some of their syrup, doughnuts, and some maple candy for a friend (FN).

• Wild Things (Flora, Fauna, Fungi) in addition to others elsewhere in this post: Birds heard at the lake and in our yard this week

• Wandering 

I walked in town on Monday, Wed., and Friday, and around the lake on Tuesday and Saturday. Thursday I was in Lebanon again taking an acquaintance to Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (another visit to ophthalmology but a different patient) and visiting the regional co-op.

in-town

lake

terrain conditions a bit muddy:

DHMC: I liked the work, mostly landscapes, of this artist, John Lehet, and his artist bio. (Click any photo for larger view.) I also liked that DHMC provides colouring sheets in their waiting areas.

• Curiosity & Discoveries

We’re wondering why the ice on two nearby lakes/ponds has a muted brown-orange colour. I thought it might be incipient pollen or something dropping from trees but it’s almost covering one pond far beyond where any tree residue might affect it. Perhaps something below the ice?

• Creating

Oh, you know, when will I get to that? Except in my nightly dreams.

• Repairing and Maintaining (everything but the house & yard)

Body/Mind: I worked out four times (4 hours) this week and walked over 11,000 steps on five days, including three days over 12,000 and one of almost 20,000 steps. I had a negative Covid-19 test on Saturday. I participated in Dharma Sunday on Zoom with Kōtatsu John Bailes, a Zen practitioner, and about 20 other people on Sunday; he led us in a 45-min. meditation and then an explication of sorts — more of a slow reading accompanied by anecdotes — of story 77 (Yunmen’s Cake) from the Blue Cliff Record (which I think you can listen to, or download as an mp3 file, here.)

Vehicles: My husband hosed off the undercarriages of two of the cars on Tuesday. On Wednesday he removed two of the Healey’s wheels and took them to an auto shop to have the tires on those wheels replaced with new ones (he did the other two last year), and on Thursday he picked them up.

• Gardening/Yard: It’s back! 

I bought some seeds at the local farmstand on Friday — Mardi Gras Blend Bush Bean, Laxton’s Progress #9 Shell Pea, Astro Arugula, Santo Cilantro (all High Mowing) and Cosmos Sea Shell Blend flowers (Botanical Interests) — and spent some time on the online seed catalogs this week but haven’t bought anything from them yet. It’s too cool, dark, and dry in our house to start seeds successfully without additional inputs, so all my seeds are direct seed and I buy transplants from local growers or gladly accept seedlings started by friends for cherry/grape tomatoes, cucumbers, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I plan to also plant parsley and more annuals either from seed or transplant. Most of my veg garden is taken up with garlic these days and I’ve got perennial culinary thyme growing in various places around the yard.

• Nesting

Cleaning/Maintenance: Oofy (apparently its official name is Eufy but it runs into things so I call it Oofy) vacuumed the main bedroom and bathroom on Monday. My husband replaced the tub faucet the same day (it whistled). I did clothes laundry on Tuesday and Saturday. My husband made the dump run on Thursday and we also dropped off a plastic standing fan that couldn’t be fixed any more at the metal dump on Tuesday.

Below, the tub faucet replacement:

Supplies: Looked over the Amazon S&S before it ships next week and deleted some items. The Chewy autoship arrived this week.

Food: I made penne with asparagus (first I’ve bought since last summer), pine nuts, scallions, Pecorino, etc., on Monday and we had that most of the week (I made more of it on Thursday because I was enjoying it so much).

Veggie burgers with gobs of arugula, corn, and leftover-from-Wed-lunch-out french fries on Saturday. Amy Dacyczyn’s seafood casserole with peas in it on Sunday, and that should last a few days into next week; I noticed I hadn’t made it since April 2024 — most winters it’s a mainstay but it hadn’t appealed to me again until now.

Admin/Financial: Our household’s first social security check arrived this week! Nice to see something we’ve paid into for years return to us in part. I checked bank transactions and made sure my 2024 HSA contribution went through on Tuesday. I delivered the final piece of the tax puzzle to our CPA on Thursday and he called Sunday night with our final numbers.

• Sleeping & Dreaming

Sleep was good this week, with an average Fitbit sleep score of 88.3 and an average time asleep of almost 8 hours. REM sleep accounted for 14 hours 40 mins, deep sleep for 9 hours 40 mins.

I had such a vivid dream this morning, about my friend Marion, who died two years ago this month (on 25 March 2023). She visited me in the dream, because I had called her to me by missing her so much. She became present to me, as someone dead but otherwise fine. We talked as long as I wished, which was quite a while. I asked her if she could visit the living whenever she desired; she thought maybe she could but she wasn’t sure. I told her that one flower was already blooming this spring that wasn’t a potted pansy or geranium. I woke up missing her and glad to have connected on another plane.

• Reading / Words & Ideas / Listening / Watching  

Reading

BOOKS: Finished reading Stone Yard Devotional (2024) by Charlotte Wood, which I quite enjoyed. It’s a novel but reads as fragmentary memoir, written by an unnamed middle-aged Australian woman who, near the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, leaves her marriage and her job in species conservation to become attached to a small isolated group of nuns living on the stark Monaro plains in south west Australia, where the returning bones of a long-missing nun, the concomitant arrival of a famous living nun whom the woman knew in childhood, and the perhaps unrelated arrival of a plague of mice leads the woman to thoughts about her unknowable mother, the possibility and process of forgiveness, the choice of violence or of compassion, how pity and shame operate, etc. Now I’m in the middle of Reading the Waves (2025), a memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, which I also like so far.

OTHER

I read two long format articles this week, each of which covered a lot of territory in multiple directions. I recommend both.

The Wonderful River of Oz by Boyce Upholt & Rory Doyle in Bitter Southerner, which begins but does not end with discussion and history of the Buffalo River in the Ozarks, “the country’s only ‘national river,’ owned and managed by the Park Service to preserve its wild, free-flowing character. Locals have long decried an attraction they see as a 130-mile-long zoo.” 

and

The free‑living bureaucrat: Michael Lewis on Heather Stone of the Food and Drug Administration (gifted link) at The Washington Post. It’s about that, but its also about Amanda Smith’s search for a cure for her daughter’s rare and fatal disease, Balamuthia or granulomatous amebic encephalitis (caused when Balamuthia mandrillaris, an amoeba, infects the brain); and it’s about Joe DeRisi, a biochemist who developed the first machines to take a DNA sample from inside a human being and sift it for anything that isn’t human. Really fascinating piece of journalism.

Also, if you think “chemicals” are bad while “natural” things are good, think again (all from Dr. Andrea Love; click to enlarge images):

Also

And don’t forget

Watching

Mostly watching golf lately, on Sat & Sun. Otherwise, a little Jeopardy, a few house shows, and a few British comedies we’ve seen a thousand times.

Listening

Shazamed this week:

• Connections &  Community

Local Support: Shopped for food at the local co-op on Monday as well as for birdseed and a tub faucet at the local hardware store. Had lunch with a friend (RL) at an off-hour at a local restaurant on Wed. The cat and I both really appreciate beer-battered fish and chips.

Shopped at the regional co-op on Thursday. Bought maple items from localish sugarhouse on Saturday on request of out-of-state friends (JKN&FN). Attended our town meeting for over 4 hours on Wednesday night and voted on Tuesday for local officials and zoning amendments — chatted with a couple of people there (mostly ND) briefly, including some I didn’t know.

Relationships: Salon met on Friday with five of us for a little more than two hours. Took an acquaintance (LV) to her eye procedure appt. at DHMC on Thursday and had a couple of hours in the car to chat. Visited a local art gallery and had lunch afterward with a friend (RL) on Wednesday. Ran into a neighbour/friend (PA) while walking on Tuesday and caught up on the sidewalk for 5-10 mins. Texted and emailed with friends and family throughout the week as usual.

Donations: Renewed our Mass Horticulture membership on Friday.

• Endings 

the paperwhites are ending … and still uselessly beautiful

• All This Useless Beauty

from the art gallery —

first chipmunk at the lake

cat by husband