The Pleasure of Rain

   

    We've had nothing but rain, rain, rain, with intermittent breaks of sunshine. I scooted out between storms to do some planting. I have to say we have the nicest neighbors. William is all about bartering for goods and services and, lucky for me, he is a landscape designer. So, for example, they feed our dog- I bake them goodies, I feed their cat- they give us produce, they mow our field- I give them  homemade canned relish and Steve helps with some mechanical/electrical stuff. This time, we fed their farm stock and William gave us a whole bunch of leftover plants from his nursery. It's a bonanza! He gave us six boxwoods, seven salvias, three astilbes, one blue indigo, three catmints, and three gardenias.  A few of them need a little TLC in the form of some fertilizer, but they are otherwise healthy. He assures me he couldn't use them and that I saved them from certain death. For me, this is an incredible amount of money we saved on landscaping. Alog gardening lines, I also had  fun potting some annuals. The gardens are settling in with all this rain to be lush and beautiful.
    

     I bought the evergreen shrub, above, on sale last November to use at the front door for Christmas. The saleslady was doubtful it would survive in a pot. It was so cheap that I decided to give it a try anyway. It ended up thriving in the pot and now I hate to take it out. The basket in front was a Christmas gift from Chelsea and Simon. It was filled with games and snacks for the whole family to enjoy. We played the games, ate the snacks, and now I have re-purposed the basket for flowers. I lined it with a piece of thick plastic, poked drainage holes in the plastic and then filled it with potting soil and assorted annuals. It's so pretty and it makes me happy every time I walk in the front door.
     Finally, I've worked all week at finishing our master bedroom suite. It feels like the project that will never end. The baseboard trim is finally all painted and we are ready to move back into our bedroom. We ran into a little snag in the master bath. It also needed a renovation, but we were going to put it off as a separate project. I thought I could just paint the vanity that got banged up from my mom's walker and it would be fine. Well, I failed to properly prep the vanity and it wouldn't take the new paint. Ugh! I am so ready to be done with all of it. So, we're going to bite the bullet and redo the bathroom now.
    It's been hard for me to work in the master bedroom suite. I'm sure it's the source of my melancholy this week. My mom's dresser still sits in the closet back there until we can move it upstairs. The dresser smells like my mom. I hid her pocketbook in one of the drawers. For some reason, this  pocketbook breaks my heart. I cannot bear to open it. I know her glasses are in it, her kleenex, her mints, and her wallet. How can a mere object be the source of so much pain? I thought if I kept going into the room each day, little by little I would get comfortable being in there, but it's much harder than I expected. A lifetime of love and pain and suffering have been funneled into this specific spot on my earth. I'm sure it's partly due to the level of care I was providing to her in those last eight months, but I had no idea the loss of a mother, given my age and her age, would bring the tears and broken heart of a child. Some things never change and the love of mother and child are ageless and eternal. How odd it seems to be both happy and content, yet deeply grieving.