A little slow, but oh so glorious!

I have a garden!!! It's all my own. I worked the land. Bought the dirt. The flowers. Dug and weeded and planted and the results are...

Well, I guess a lot of you know what the results are. I can't believe I've lived long enough to have a daughter taking the bar exam and I've never weeded a garden. Or planted flowers on my own. I had no idea that the end result of beautiful flowers to look at is only the icing on the cake.

It started out as a curb appeal thing. We're getting ready to sell the small house to buy a bigger one. And after three months of living in this small town in the midwest, I've realized that houses - the ones you want to look at - have flowers. But this isn't the desert where you put pretty varigated rock in your yard, plant some sturdy stems, turn on the irrigation system and walk away. This land doesn't just take trimming every couple of weeks. No, here you have grass everywhere - whether you want it or not, where you want it and where you don't. And it has to be mowed. Sometimes more than once a week. Not only that, grass begets weeds. Lots of them. Some that can grow a foot in a week. They're big and hairy with thick roots that go way down to you know where. Scary. They spread and take over and if you just go about your business they will eventually climb into the windows of your home and strangle you. I'm sure of it.

Not good for curb appeal. A bunch of weeds butted through windows and threading around their dead.

And...there are NO irrigation systems. At least, not the automatic kind. Here in this place YOU are the irrigation system. In conjunction with the faucet and the 100 foot of 200 pound tubing you attach to the faucet and then have to drag everywhere you go.

So you see how it started. Once again, I saw my fate. Grumbled about how it wasn't like this in Phoenix. Pictured my blue skies and sunshine and mountains. Counted the days until I'm back there again - nine to be exact - and went out to find some flowers to stick in the ground and cover up whatever else might be there so the house looked good from the curb. I bought marigolds (a favorite from my childhood.) And deep red petunias and pure purple pansies. And for the twenty-four foot diameter circle in the backyard I bought orange and gold lantana (my favorite from Arizona) and Arizona sunflowers (never even heard of them when I lived in Arizona.) I bought eight seventy pound bags of miracle grow potting soil. I planned to come home and dump the dirt - covering up all the blemishes. Dig some shallow holes, drop in the plants, cover them up and leave them to their business of doing whatever they do.

The next day I got up early, ready to spend an hour getting this job done and then get in to work on the pages I had to complete that day. Twelve hours later, with a back that ached so badly I could hardly stand, and a bruise the size of a baseball on the palm of my right hand, I had the front of the house READY for the dirt I'd bought. But at that point, I wasn't even sure I wanted to dump my store bought, premanufactured dirt. There was a new, clean, unpretentious garden lining the front of the house. Oh, it didn't have any flowers in it. It didn't have anything in it except a couple of metal garden decorations I'd bought the first week I was here. And a big porcelain duck. (I named him Lee.) But it was clean. I'd attacked that which was threatening to overtake me. One by one I'd faced my challenges, even spoken out loud to some of them. I'd told them that they weren't going to get the better of me. That I could handle them. Some of them were pretty determined. But when my little hand shovel couldn't dig deeply enough to get to the root of the problem, I went for the dig a ditch shovel. I worked hard. By the end of the day, I'd conquered every single one of them - and even stopped to get some at the side of the house, too. I was looking for weeds at that point. Bring them on. I can handle them. I was addicted to the feel good of holding the defeated root in my hand. Addicted to the knowledge that I could persevere. And succeed. I'd done good.

The next day, worried about all the money I'd spent on those flowers, I hauled those heavy bags of dirt (my man had left them in stragegic places for me, but you know that never works as it should) I slit them open and I dumped them. I took a hoe to the results, spreading the mounds of healthy soil. And then I kneeled. For a really really long time. With a sore hand and a sore back I proceeded to dig more than one hundred holes. And painstakingly and loving lay each little pod of roots in place, scooping dirt with my hands to cover them, pat them gently and move on to the next.

In the end I had a colorful array that brought tears to my eyes. It might have been the back, or the hand - or the knees. It might have been the lost time, or the fact that I missed Phoenix and the heart that I left there. It might have been. But it wasn't. These tears were thankful tears. They were grateful tears. Because out of every bad, horrible deathly thing that happens, there's a flower garden waiting to be born. If you're willing to do the work.

Now anybody got watering tips???