spring – Page 3

Goat! Reading! Purging! Oh my!

June 1, 2015 Marie Leave a Comment

I can’t believe we’re in June already!

There’s not a lot to report around here. Friday the munchkin and I had a day out to the zoo with Nana which was very tiring for us all. He’s very much all about animals lately and wanting to pet everything – the dog, the neighbor’s sweet cat Callie (I need to get a picture of her, she’s seriously the prettiest), the wild bunnies in my parents’ yard when I drop him off in the mornings while I go to work, the the goats at the Zoo’s petting area… if it’s furry and moves, he wants to touch it.

The husband and I took some time Saturday to clean off the back patio and try to finish more of the garden. All the straw we lay down as mulch gets blown up onto our patio, making such a horrible mess. I’m not sure what a better option is – wood mulch is significantly pricier and lasts just about as long. Perhaps I’ll forever be sweeping straw off the patio? Anyway, it feels really great to have it cleaned off and now I can go back to using it in the evenings to knit, watch the birds, and have a beer. It’s something I’ve really missed this spring. Our clematis didn’t make it through the winter, along with several of our other flowers, so it’s not quite so cozy, but it’s home.

I downloaded Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things from my library’s online system and have been reading it every chance I get. I hate e-books, and very much prefer the real thing, but my local library didn’t have it available and I didn’t want to buy a book and bring something else into the house. It’s fascinating, mostly in that I can see a lot of myself in some of these chapters. I’m not nearly (ok, the husband would say not even close) to the level of hoarder, but I have a lot of tendencies to hold onto things longer than I need to and sometimes I find it impossible to part with things if there’s sentimental value. It’s interesting to see the feelings expressed by some of these people reflected in my own life. And it certainly has me thinking hard about my attachment to certain things and why I can’t seem to get rid of them. It has really helped me with learning to recognize why I’m holding onto something and then give myself enough of a push to just let it go.

I’ve been trying to keep track of my numbers of things I’ve removed (or have put in a pile to remove) from the house, and right now I’m over 100. I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep up my 5 things posts horribly long when I’ve got this kind of motivation to purge all at once. Though, to be fair, right now I’m getting rid of the “easy” stuff – the stuff that I’ve held onto for too long, the stuff I’ve decided I won’t use and – if I do need it later – I can re-buy. Once I get this initial clear-out done, though, it’ll be much harder and that’s when a whole lot more of the soul-searching comes in.

Snowballs

May 26, 2015 Marie Leave a Comment

The first house I remember growing up in was this little ranch on a cul-de-sac. The front of the house was lined with hedges, there was a crab apple tree in one part of the front yard and a birch tree, maybe – I don’t remember what it was, actually, in the opposite corner. If you were looking at the house from the street, my bedroom was on the very left corner, with two windows – one looking out to the street, another looking at the white house next to us. All of our yards were fenced in, and if you looked down between our two houses, right in front of the fence, there were these “snowballs” growing. I didn’t know them as anything other than snowballs for the longest time. I remember watching them each year and being fascinated by them and how the ants all loved to climb and eat at them.

We moved houses when I was in middle school and my mom dug up the plant and took them with us. I never really knew why, I just figured she loved them and didn’t want to let them go. For years and years they grew at my mom’s house, right next to the foundation. And then, a few years ago, she decided she didn’t want them anymore. I’m not sure why, other than maybe just wanting to do something different with her flower beds. So we dug them up, and I brought them home with me. I planted them in the front flower bed, not realizing that they needed a lot more sun than the front bed gets. They almost died but I managed to rescue them in just enough time to move them to another location.

A relative of mine is big into genealogy, and she likes to post up stories occasionally about my great grandmother (who I didn’t really know). Do you know why we had white snowballs (peonies)? Because those were my great grandmother’s favorite flower. She’s the one that called them snowballs. Years ago I was determined to plant roses in honor of my grandmother (Her middle name was Rose). I wanted to have something in my garden in honor of her and to remind me of her. I’m not, apparently, the only one who felt planting flowers was a great way of honoring loved ones and my mother had already beaten me to it years ago with these peonies.

Easing back into routine

May 18, 2015 Marie Leave a Comment

We arrived home yesterday, much to my relief. By Saturday I was getting home sick and missing the baby, to the point where that night I packed as much as I could so we’d have less to do Sunday, and then Sunday morning we were up and out of the apartment by 9am. When we arrived homeI unpacked, did the week’s laundry, and soaked up all the snuggles I could get from the Little Mr. Today we’re easing back into our routine and I’m trying to prep my lunches for the week so I’m not tempted to eat out to make up for all the eating out we did over the last week.

Tomorrow it’s back to the daily grind. A little sad, but for the best. Routines are my favorite and while it was nice to have a break from routine it’s also nice to be able to go back to them with a fresh attitude so I can adjust them as needed.

More than a vacation

May 14, 2015 Marie 2 Comments

I had a lot of anxiety about this trip. I’ve never been to Chicago. I’ve never really been to a big city like this. Let alone the fact that I was going to be on my own for a large part of it while the husband is in a conference. We rarely traveled as a kid. I remember at one point we went to the Mall of America and my mom freaking out while my dad was driving as we drove through Chicago because my mom doesn’t deal well with traffic or big cities. So I suppose I had a lot of that anxiety transferred over to me. It didn’t help that, when my parents found out about this trip, I was told “Chicago isn’t a good place to be right now” – even at 30 years old my parents think I shouldn’t be off doing something on my own without… a man, I guess.

Anyway. I’ve been on my own both Wednesday and now today. I’ll be mostly on my own again tomorrow, though I get to travel the red line north to see my old high school friend. I’m happy to report that I haven’t yet been mugged, attacked, stolen from, etc. I’ve seen some things, and I’ve done some shopping. I got coffee at a shop on Michigan Avenue and sat on the patio and knit and watched the world go by. I sat this morning and knit at the Daley Plaza while watching people shop the local farmer’s market. I’ve been mostly unbothered by anyone. I feel like I’m just another Chicagoan, even though I’m not. Which is, really, kind of a big deal considering I’m a woman from a smallish town who rarely travels.

This trip, I’ve discovered, has been more than a vacation. Sure, it’s about seeing and experiencing new things, but it’s really been a lot more than that for me. It’s been a learning experience. I’m re-learning how to be on my own, something I haven’t had to be for many years. I used to be incredibly independent, but at some point – probably after years of being married – I lost that ability.

There’s also something about being away from all your things. I packed for the week with essentials: some clothes, toiletries, and knitting. The apartment we’re renting is very minimalist. The whole thing has me rethinking my entire life – just how much stuff do I need? How many clothes, how many shoes, how many decorative things, how many cooking utensils, etc do I really even need? I’ve constantly dreamed of being more of a minimalist and I feel like this week has given me the chance to live it more than I’ve had a chance to before. Do I really need all the things that I own? How often do I use it? Is it really worth spending the time to clean it, clean around it, organize it, etc? And how much of that time is being taken away from my time interacting with my environment – being out in the world rather than hiding at home from it?

Beyond seeing and doing new things, this trip has me completely re-evaluating my entire life.

Spring-ish

May 10, 2015 Marie Leave a Comment

Spring has come and gone, it seems. We had lovely spring-like temps and rain and then suddenly the furnace was turned on around here and we’ve been hitting 85+ degrees. And, of course, our air conditioner broke. Trying to suffer through the heat with a baby is not fun at all.

I managed to capture the glory of our weeping crab apple tree at peak, which I rarely remember to do until it’s too late. The blooms lasted all of a few days before all the petals blew off in the wind, and now we’re back to just a plain ol’ tree. But for those few days it was the most beautiful thing in our yard. I need to remember to look for flowering things that will stagger our garden blooms. It’s sad to watch something fade and not have anything left to replace it.

The husband started cleaning up the garden in preparation for planting. We haven’t yet planted it – that was supposed to be today but it’s just too darn hot. Maybe tomorrow I’ll pop the tomatoes in the ground before it rains. The chives are blooming and going to waste – I didn’t realize they’d come back year to year until last year or so, and now that I know that I just haven’t really made the time to find out what to do with them to preserve and then use them. It doesn’t make sense to dry them or anything if we’re not going to use them. I might just have to rip them out and gift them to someone else. We certainly don’t need 4 patches of them. Or I suppose I could just move them and mix them into the landscape elsewhere. Kind of mix and match edibles with non-edibles. My rhubarb apparently hung on from last year. I’m not sure how, and it’s severely behind on growth – it shouldn’t be that tiny in May. But it’s there. I need to make a better effort to keep those stupid morning glory vines from choking it out.

I think my clematis is dead-dead. There’s no growth on it, either. I’m not sure if it’s the harsh winter that did it or the fact that I kept forgetting to water it. So it looks like I’ll be buying more of that to re-plant this year. I really do want this lovely trellis of vines growing up the side of the patio, that way I don’t have to look at the neighbor’s house when I hang out back there. I don’t mind living in the city, but I’m not the biggest fan of how close we are to the neighbors. Nor am I thrilled by the fact that our yard is impossible to fence in. It is what it is, though, and I still love my house despite the faults. I just have to be a bit more creative with the landscaping to make it the cozy back yard I want it to be.