Category: gratitude

Dirt

Shirleyjdietz1 Comment

I have noticed that I feel so good after spending a day outside working in the yard, and I’ve decided it’s the dirt. Therapeutic dirt. I always make sure I have a lot of contact with it – wear my sandals and shorts, and somehow manage to get smudges from head to toe.

Today’s dirt was AMAZING stuff.  Two years ago it was a huge leaf pile and now it is all broken down, dark brown with nice fat earthworms crawling through it.  It grows healthy looking weeds, which I pulled out and put in next year’s compost pile.

In Florida it’s the time of year to plant the spring garden.  At the vegetable stand where I get the weekly fresh things for our meals, they also had tomato plants so I decided to get some instead of growing my own.  An interesting aside – the stand is at our church and is “donation only” for whatever you want to pay and goes to the orphan homes in Cambodia that I visit. I call that a win-win transaction when I can support my special kids and get something to eat at the same time.  I know the farmer who supplies it and he farms very successfully. Bet his tomato plants are going to do wonderful things for me this season.

So I pulled my earthboxes to the only sunny spot I could find in the oneacrewoods.  It happens to be right near the fence line.  The neighbor has cut down a lot of his trees and has a much sunnier yard than I do and some of the light sneaks through to my side of the fence.  I think that my somewhat “iffy” results from the gardening I do is because there is so much shade.  Good for keeping cool, bad for growing plants.

The other outside chore for today was harvesting my carrots.  They have been growing for a whole year and are pitiful.  This is what happens when you don’t thin out the seedlings.  I’ve never been able to get carrots to germinate in my Florida gardens so I was really excited about all the fluffy greenery and couldn’t bear to pull any of it out.  This is probably why they are so small after a whole year! (could also be the shade, or the inconsistent watering, or the general inattention they received).

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So, other than the fact that some bug is eating all the leaves off my strawberry plants, things are looking much better in the garden today. And I feel great.

Winter comes.

Shirleyjdietz4 Comments
the cold season
the cold season

Hayward, Wisconsin is a place where it snows. The flakes were flying as we drove into town last Thursday for Thanksgiving.  The white blanket covered the ground and the fallen logs where we walked through the woods the next day.  Every gust of wind through the branches of the pines sent snow raining down all around us. At first, the cold was frightening but as I stayed out in it and worked up a sweat, I got used to it.  Now, four days past Thanksgiving, it is snowing again and this time it’s a storm big enough to deserve a name. Cleon.

Our trip into town proved the roads were icy with wet slush.  The sky is one solid, gray cloud that descends down to meet the horizon, cutting the visibility to about a quarter mile. Variations on muted gray, black and white with a little brown thrown in are the only colors nature has today. Things would seem dull if it weren’t for the colored lights and Christmas decorations up and down the streets. Hayward is a small town, a very small town, but it is the only real town in quite a large area of forests and lakes. And it is large enough to have a Walmart, which was a very busy place today.

I grew up here, in the country outside of Hayward.  I left and came back after I was married.  My children were born while I lived here and although I’ve been away again for more than twenty years it is still very homelike to me. My parents and my brother and his family still live in a development on the edge of town, on land that once belonged to my grandfather. We visited Hayward last June when it was all shades of green, brilliant blue skies, fields full of flowers, flowing rivers, and more than it’s share of the world’s mosquitoes. Now it is different.  It is white, very quiet, dark a good deal of the time, and there are no mosquitoes at all.

It is really quite magical to be able to stay in one place and have it change all around you. You would think you had been transported. I’m just sayin’ I am glad to be here for this first big snow of the year.

white on the road
white on the road
white in the woods
white in the woods

Unusually Long Silences

Shirleyjdietz1 Comment

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sunny gift from a guest
Unusually long silences in which readers get bored and lose interest are a dreaded reality for me in my blogging life.  I think I speak for many people when I say that sometimes the things we generally like to be doing (writing) isn’t what we want to be doing most (entertaining out of town guests) or have to be doing (work).  But it is crucial that we avoid guilt over things not done if we are being true to our priorities.

What I’ve been doing:

– a pre Thanksgiving event for the husband and other friends and relatives that I won’t get to see on the actual Thanksgiving Day.  This took me days of prep, planning, cooking and cleaning. Twenty two of us had a great time and a good meal.

thanksgiving thoughts from guests
thanksgiving thoughts from guests

– reconnecting with a long time friend and her family, visiting from afar. We kayaked, walked the beach, swam in the ocean, braved the mall, and ate several meals together. Oh, and Mexican Train up to number 7.

dining out with Cheryl
dining out with Cheryl

– worked for my employer, who is having trouble with staffing right now.  I am a so called resigned, retired nurse who works about as much as I did before I resigned. Go figure.

– spent  much enjoyed time doing music for my church (for my God).  Volunteered a little more than usual since others were out.

-spent hours and dollars on my computer, resurrecting it from death (or near death). Now if I can just figure out where all the missing files are, we’ll be fine and functioning.

– put out my fundraising letter for medical supplies for the Cambodian orphans.  I don’t want to go empty handed. God will supply what is needed, but I have to ask.

– overseeing major house washing.  Who knew it could take a week to pressure wash a house? It looks great again, except in the places where the paint needs to be replaced – but we knew that would happen.  All the accessory trees got trimmed too.

In the big picture, I think I made good choices,

putting God first,

people second

and things last.

I have to say, being a consistent writer is not easy when you have another life of any kind …

Get Out!

Shirleyjdietz1 Comment

I’ve been out in the oneacrewoods, which is what I call my yard because… well, you know why.  It’s the time of year in Florida when outdoors is like a very, very big room with perfect air conditioning and perfect lighting and pretty much perfect everything else.  On days like this I just want to live out there.

I was out weeding the strawberry beds before the husband left for work this morning.  I got it all done. And in preparation for possible colder weather in December and January, I re-positioned my greenhouse supports to better fit my square foot garden boxes. I took down all the shade cloth since we now have the opposite problem of not enough sun.  I raked, hoed, got dirt under my fingernails. I smelled the arugula and the citronella. I watched the squirrels (population explosion there).  I tried to figure out where all the bees were coming from (still don’t know…) I counted how many different sounds I could hear – 10, counting the far away traffic.  It was a sensual workout.

As lovely as it can be inside our houses, I think we were meant to be outside a good deal of the time.  In practically every part of our world, life of some kind thrives outside where there’s sunlight and water and nutrients. Quite remarkable really, that everything we need is here. After a couple hours of fresh air and sunshine I feel like I’ve had an attitude adjustment as well – there’s something freeing about all that’s going on out there without my having to be in control of it, or even give it a thought.  I’m just sayin’, I wish everyone could be here this morning (although it would possibly get a little crowded).  I think I’ll quit writing and get out.

square foot garden beds
square foot garden beds
strawberry pineapple patch
strawberry pineapple patch
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salad patch
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flower frenzy
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texture and color