Lately I am walking around hating everything.
A week ago the rain gods finally took pity on us and sent two days of light rain. One of my favorite things. Except last week, when even that was pissing me off.
While it was raining I kept thinking “Why now? Why not a month ago when the earth desperately needed a drink? Why wait until everything is dead to rain? Thanks for nothing, Mother Earth.”
Ah, gratitude….
This weekend, I vowed to turn my garden into something nice to look at, even if I can’t keep anything alive. When I was digging in the dirt I was seething about what a waste of time my summer garden had been and hoping my Autumn garden will not fail as well. And then it hit me: I am angry because time is standing still. We have been stuck in the same season for 6 months. Summer bullied Spring away and now refuses to yield to Autumn. Nothing is changing and it feels like the earth has stopped spinning.
My own little world seems to have gone all wobbly on its axis as well. So many projects I started this year have failed. I did not keep a single new year’s resolution. Opportunities I was really excited about turned into dead-end roads. So much time wasted. I can’t really even call this year a failure, it’s more like a void. This was a year of hard work for me, with very few results.
I know at times like this it is customary to repeat the old mantras of “Life is about the journey, not the destination” and “It’s all part of the adventure” but sometimes the journey just sucks. What happens when the adventure isn’t really an adventure, just a series of disappointments?
Bleh.
Acknowledging that this year has been a disappointment actually helped my outlook. I can’t get back the lost time and energy, but I can acknowledge what didn’t work, like my lasagna garden, and make changes.
The newest backyard incarnation is a colorful rock/bottle garden with a few hardy herbs and root veggies.
I still have a lot of work to do, like weeding the rock garden and maybe planting the lavender instead of keeping it the pots. The blue circle and red triangle are mushroom beds and the tree between them is ginseng. My bottle tree thing is still evolving. My current plan is to let gooseberry plants grow around the frame of the bottle tree, kind of like a lattice.
My most exciting addition to the garden…
A carnivorous plant! This old girl is a pitcher plant and she traps bugs and flying insects in her deep pitchers. There is a nectar in there which attracts the bugs, and then drowns them. If you look closely you can see that one of the pitchers shut its lid, that means she caught something. Get ’em girl!
So it looks like my garden is just about sorted. This makes me feel a little less stuck. Just a little.
much more muchier 
Yup had those days, but honestly they really aren’t all encompassing… = what I’ve done is try and put little negative ticks on the calendar to see when they happen. Sometimes its hormonal, sometimes it just a few days. Your whole year was not a void, each little thing you did [ even not complete ] gets you where you are now and teaches you a lesson. I am in that hole right now where I’ve seen a pattern with my learning, I gather all the necessary study material and feel great then it sits I have little time so learning to speed read and actually process it is the only way I can manage. I share the shame, I feel the bouts of suck, but you’ve still done more than just a void. 🙂 Chin up lady. Loving the garden. The bottles remind me of some of the colored buoys in Boston I’ve seen.
I love your idea of the negative ticks on the calendar! I share your pain with the learning pattern, that is pretty much exactly what I am going through learning Italian.
If it makes you feel any better, your garden looks a whole lot better than mine. I wish I could send you some of the rain we’re having here, its boring now and I’ve only been home less than a week.
Please send the rain this way! It rained for a few hours last night, but now 0% chance of rain for a whole week. I had no idea how depressing it could be to see the little sun icon on the weather forecast!
Oh Erica, I so love your description of Summer. It is so true, what you described is a typical Louisiana Summer. So hot it makes me dread going outside. Even during a drought it is still so humid here, go figure. Seems like you’ve done a lot to your backyard since the beginning of the lasagna garden. remember, each morning when you wake is that much closer to Autumn.
you described is the typical Louisiana Summer. It can be har
I remember the hot hot hot summers of Shreveport and the humidity! Strange as it sounds, they didn’t bother me nearly as much as the hot summers here, I guess because I expected it to be so much cooler this close to the mountains.
Erica, I can see that your garden is truly an expression of you: beautiful, colorful, and a little art deco with character. It’s beyond me where you get your creativity but I love it.
Thank you so much Dad!!