slowly she turned

Here I sit at the computer, with Pablocito in the chair next to me that I put there for Diego to use months ago. Otherwise he would have annoyed the hell out of me. Pablocito is very good at annoying the hell out of me as well, but he has been behaving much better in the past few weeks. Maybe because when he demands attention, he gets it? Anyway, we have spoiled him badly. It’s going to be hard to leave him alone in the house for a few days, even though we have a great pet-sitter who loves him and lives two doors down, so he pays many visits. I hope that we will be over this anxiety by the time we leave for Scotland in late September for two weeks.

June was the driest month on record for North Carolina, and it has been hot and humid in July, but with very little rain. I’ve had to water my little front garden almost every day. I didn’t do it yesterday because we were under a flood watch and there was supposed to be heavy rain. Nope.

Mostly I have Juliet tomatoes that I planted from seed using the winter sowing method, in upcycled plastic juice bottles. I also used this method for the “bird and butterfly” mix of wildflower seeds as well as two varieties of snapdragons and coreopsis. Unfortunately I think it was the snails and slugs that got the coreopsis. I also did black hollyhocks, but then I realized that I really had no good place to plant them. (Fact check: she did, but she didn’t want to do the work of cleaning out a space in the back.)

What I am doing here is cutting down the large rosemary bush in the center of what used to be an herb spiral. I have rosemary elsewhere. In its place will go the clay totem sculpture that I’ve been working/playing on in a class at Creative Aging Network with Jennifer Donnelly. This class and the stitch meditations and therapy are the things that have kept my mental health functional in the past month or so.

I cleaned out a lot of the hellebores that had taken over the front shade yard and were hosts for a huge invasion of aphids. I’m still working on taking out as much of these as possible and I’ll find other plants to fill in. Probably native ferns and more hostas. I’m going to research native plants. We put in a lovely birdbath and I mulched around it with landscape fabric and pine needles. I like pine needles because they don’t move much, and they remind me of the pine forests from home. I still need to do the part of the garden next to the sidewalk, because the one big rain we had washed the topsoil down the little slope there. I’m moving stones from the back yard gardens to the front, little by little, and will terrace the bare area.

Another thing I did to lift my spirits is that I bought a solar fountain for the porch. Originally I planned to put it in the birdbath, but the birdbath is too shallow and it dries out very quickly. So I put it in a big bowl on the front porch with the stones and sherds and shells that I brought back from Cornwall.

Okay, I’m going to move over my Substack posts from earlier in the year to here, and back date them. I think that I’ve finished by Substack experiment for good now.