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 high temps this week were progressively warmer each day from Monday to Saturday (Sunday’s dipped), ranging from 45.3°F (Sat.) to 25.3°F (Mon.), averaging 32.9°F. The lows were much cooler, ranging from 4.8°F to 20.8°F, with four nights in the single digits; the average low temperature was 12°F. Monday was windy and we had about 2″ of snow overnight from Sunday into Monday, plus another inch or less on Wednesday.

Our length of day (between sunrise and sunset) bumped up to 11 hours on 23 Feb. and by 1 March it was 11 hours 16 mins. This was our last full week of Standard Time until next November — we turn non-smart clocks ahead by an hour early next Sunday morning (8 March).

• Beginnings/Firsts

Two goldfinches apparently watching the sunrise (the beginning of the day) on Thursday at 6:30 a.m.

• Wild Things (Flora, Fauna, Fungi) in addition to others elsewhere in this post

TOP row: goldfinches in finch feeder, goldfinch on shepherd’s hook; 2nd row: goldfinches and American tree sparrow, goldfinches and purple finch; 3rd row: pine siskins; 4th row: grey squirrel on motion camera, Carolina wren; 5th row: two Carolina wrens, red-breasted nuthatch; BOTTOM row: junco, black-capped chickadee.

Goldfinch tries to oust white-breasted nuthatch but is unsuccessful and takes leave itself.

• Wandering 

I walked in town on three days, at the lake on Sat., and in Hanover, NH around Occom Pond on Sunday. We wandered to White River Junction VT on Sunday to have breakfast with friends.

in town

WRJ VT/Hanover NH area

lake

• Curiosity & Discoveries

Gosh, there were a few this week, including the Keogh’s intriguingly flavoured Irish potato chips seen at the regional co-op.

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Some sort of crane fly (genus Trichocera), one of several swarming together in temps over 40°F at the lake on Saturday. (It’s much smaller than it seems in this photo.)

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These two mourning doves look like they’re in an Ingmar Bergman movie.

Maybe Persona?

or maybe Woody Allen’s Interiors, which drew from Bergman?

or possibly French & Saunders’ fabulous Bergman spoof?

Actually, they often look like moody émigrés from Persona …

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Birdfy likes to ID our birds as things like bushtit, lesser goldfinch, scaly-breasted munia, white-winged dove, brown-headed nuthatch, all manner of birds we don’t see here in the northeastern U.S. But this was the first for an African silverbill (that’s really another American goldfinch).

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This gave me a good laugh, in response to my asking AI for adjectives to describe vines:

• Creating

On Saturday, I finished my 28 days of writing a poem and am amazed to say that I wrote one every day (evening, actually). One was a substantial edit of an older poem but all the rest were entirely new. It’s reassuring to know I can have absolutely nothing in mind to write about, as was the case on a least 20 of those occasions, and yet within 0-10 mins. of sitting down to write, words flowed and I let them, wondering where they came from and where they would take me. I love being surprised by what’s being written on the page. It’s sort of like dreaming: I’m the source, ostensibly, but I’m not in charge of what’s happening. It’s wild.

• Repairing and Maintaining the human(s), the cat, and the cars

Humans: I worked out three times (3 hours) this week (strength training with weights, stretching, dancing). I walked more than 9,000 steps on six days, more than 11,000 steps on five days, more than 14,000 on two days, with a high on Thursday of 17,356 steps. I treadmilled once, for 22 mins, 1.5 miles. I finished the month-long Real Happiness Challenge with Sharon Salzberg (meditation) on Saturday. My husband cross-country skied on three days this week. We ping-ponged for 2 hours 10 mins this week.

Cars: On Sat. and Sun. my husband diagnosed and fixed an undercarriage noise in one of the vehicles, which turned out to be a ripped or cracked belly pan (aka engine cover splash shield). The rip needed repairing and pan needed several screws added or replaced. Below, two photos of the damage:

Cat: He has an appt to have his nails clipped next week. Shhh. Cat tax:

• Nesting 

Cleaning/Maintenance: I cleaned the family room carpet on Tues., watered houseplants on Wednesday, PUT AWAY CHRISTMAS DECOR and did towel laundry on Thursday, and did a load of clothes laundry on Sat.

Yard/Garden: My husband cleared the driveway snow with the snowblower on Tuesday. On Friday I worked on our Garden Plans 2026 shared document online, adding more detail and thinking more about what to relocate, what to add, what to remove, and also on Friday I placed an order for spring pickup with a local native plants nursery. We’re really going to have our work cut out for us this year in the garden.

When we hit 45°F on Saturday, I was able to get out and stir the compost to aerate it and make room for more food scraps; I also was able to remove the packed snow and ice from the wooden heated birdbath rim, tip the dirty water out of the pan, clean the pan, and add fresh water to it. It looks so much better now.

Financial/Admin: On Monday we scheduled our annual review with our investment advisor for later in March. Wednesday evening we attended a “Selling in Winter” workshop with a local realtor in town. On Friday and Saturday I reviewed our identity/data protection measures and set up credit report freezes online (to protect the reports from unauthorised access) with all three credit reporting agencies; set up a password manager; and added two-factor identification to more of my logins. I backed up my failing laptop a couple of times this week. I walked our final tax form to our CPA on Thursday. While I was putting away Christmas decor, I ended up taking inventory photos of them and the entryway for insurance purposes.

On Sunday evening I updated my exercise/workout list for the first time in more than three years. I have access to about 400 Body Electric exercise shows on VHS tapes, DVDs, and through a paid streaming subscription, and I keep track of when I’ve done each workout, what weight increments I use, etc., and since my workouts always pair two shows (which requires matching them to minimise duplication of body parts worked) it gets a little complicated and the whole thing took about four hours to update.

Supplies: I placed a Nuts.com order on Monday for macadamias, English walnuts, dried pears, and dried Turkish apricots and they arrived a few days later.

Food: Dinner on Monday and Tuesday was leftover seafood casserole, with carrots, radishes, red pepper, and celery with Maine Harvest celeriac humus dip. On Wed. my husband had the chicken-veg-rice soup he’d made, with cheese toast, and I made a red bean, corn, orange bell pepper, onion, garlic, rice, and cheese dish. Thursday I made the penne-asparagus-pine nut dish, which my husband had with grilled salmon, and we had carrots, radishes, and peppers with the humus dip; we had the same thing (adding celery to the raw veg lineup) on Friday. I made a spinach-leek risotto (using our farmstand-grown spinach and leeks) on Saturday, which was my main dish and my husband’s side dish along with grilled tuna, and of course we had raw veg with humus, and we enjoyed it all over again on Sunday.

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I have not made this but it looks good:

• Sleeping & Dreaming

Other than on Wed. night, when I had a 78 sleep score, sleep was good this week with the rest of the scores ranging from 87 to 95, averaging 89.3. Overall I averaged 7 hours 27 minutes sleep per night, with REM accounting for 13 hours 50 mins and deep sleep for 6 hours 34 mins.

• Reading / Words & Ideas / Listening / Watching  

Reading

BOOKS: I finished Stewart O’Nan’s Evensong (2025) this week. It was OK. It’s apparently the final book of a trilogy, but I haven’t read the first two, and perhaps having had would have made this one feel richer. The plot is set during one year a couple of years after the Covid pandemic began and it follows the main members of a group of older women (ages early 60s to 90ish) in and around Pittsburgh PA who offer support mainly to members of a church they belong to. When leader Joan takes a serious fall, the others — Emily, Arlene, Susie, and Kitzi — have to realign and step up to handle the many errands and caregiving tasks the group provides, including to an eccentric musical couple with a house full of stuff and dozens of cats. I appreciated the unsentimental perspective on aging and the overall emotional maturity of the women as they work together and separately to handle their challenges and make their lives what they want, no matter how much or how little time is left.

OTHER

I read a bunch of things that interested me this week.

I’m still reading this one, Inside voice: what can our thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness? : Scientists and philosophers studying the mind have discovered how little we know about our inner experiences by Michael Pollan in The Guardian. From which:

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Rosecrans Baldwin’s short piece on Literary Style: Reading Fiction Line By Line resonates with me. “I like fragments; I like space between fragments.” Not only do I prefer non-plot driven books, I prefer non-plot driven film as well, and have for most if not all of my life.

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I appreciate all of Zed Zha’s ‘Ask the Patient’ pieces in her newsletter, including this one, The Patient Outside the Box: Notes on Assuming Normal:

“The thing about having to explain yourself is that it implies you are inherently abnormal. It is one thing to be considered out of place at a party because you misunderstood the dress code. It is quite another to be labeled deviant from the norm in medicine. In medicine, deviation becomes data.” and

“The mind, uncomfortable with ambiguity, reaches for containment. If the pronoun doesn’t align, if the gender marker doesn’t match, if the accent slips, something must explain it. And it must do so quickly and thoughtlessly. Foreigner. Other. Nonbinary. Intersex. Abnormal all the same. In Epic, the software did what humans often do. It encountered something that did not fit the binary architecture it was built upon. Instead of expanding the structure, it compressed the person, folding a human into a dropdown menu.”

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I really like this piece, Serendipity, from Hugh Hollowell’s newsletter, in which his father drives him home a different way, because “if you go a different route, you just opened another door for things to happen to you that wasn’t there before. You made room for luck, or serendipity, or providence, whatever you want to call it….”

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This, from one of Kelton Wright’s Shangrilogs posts; it’s a good thing to ask oneself on walks or at other times:

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Something, maybe Evensong, reminded me recently of this hymn we sang often at a UCC Church in Maine. I love it.

Listening

Some songs that went in one ear and out the other this week, Shazam’d.

Watching

Watched another Poirot, another Death in Paradise, some House Hunters, some old British comedies. And some golf at the weekend.

• Connections &  Community

Local Support: I shopped at the local farmstand on Friday (2 bags of their spinach, 2 Maine Harvest celeriac humus dips, scallions, shallots, and chocolate wafers) and on Sat. I bought three leeks there. Sunday we met friends and their friends at 10:30 at a local restaurant in White River Junction, VT for breakfast followed by a short walk. Afterward, I shopped at the regional co-op.

Relationships: As just mentioned, our longtime friends (RVN and ChN, who live in Baltimore), came through our area with two of their friends (BK, MT) on their way to cross-country ski in Vermont and we met them all for a leisurely breakfast on Sunday morning in White River Junction, which was so nice.

Salon met this week with six of us for two hours, and two of us walked there together. On Tuesday we spent an hour or so visiting at friends’ (T&ND); my husband brought them half a sourdough boule he’d made over the weekend. A friend (CF) had surgery in Boston on Thursday.

• Endings 

Did you hear me? I PUT AWAY THE CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS this week! (Except the outside wreath, which I’ll do soon.)

• All This Useless Beauty

more ice blocks and light

female cardinal in snow on Monday