A Return to Life

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” – from lyrics by John Lennon.

As 2020 drew to a close I intentionally took a temporary break from this blog to re-evaluate and “make other plans” in response to the new normal that Covid-19 has brought to our world. Voluntary and mandatory social restrictions, face masks, isolation, quarantines, and a ‘wait and see’ attitude may or may not be an ongoing necessity, but what will happen in an uncertain future? I don’t have that answer. The best I can do is ask myself how I can combine the immediate needs of care-giving for my elderly, dementia haunted mother, the ongoing needs of food, transportation and housing, and making difficult decisions regarding my future career. What would my future look like? I felt a few weeks or a month of earnest planning to hammer away at these questions was certainly justified, and decided the world-wide interruption had given me time to make preparations to move forward. However, as if to prove the lyric quoted above, while I was making those other plans, “Life” decided to deliver a few hammer blows of its own.

Starting in late December, a string of unfortunate events struck the family. Inescapably advancing dementia, strokes, a broken kneecap, several Covid infections, a recurrence of bladder cancer, cardiac arrhythmia, injuring falls, even a broken neck struck various family members, all following one on the heels of another. Luckily, none struck my person directly, but before I realized it over eight months had passed.

Still, I managed to keep working sporadically in the garden. In early February it had been moderately warm, so with high hopes I planted a bunch of seeds for carrots, radishes, broccoli, asparagus sets, sweet potato and onion slips, trying to get an early start. I planned on covering everything with mulch and plastic sheets if we had a cold snap, but like all of Texas, I didn’t plan for historic single digit temps for almost 2 weeks. The mulch and covers I planned might have worked for the short term, but two weeks of intense cold seeped through my cover, and the resulting freeze killed most of my early start. I managed to save the asparagus sets, the sweet potato slips, and some of the onions, only to lose the onions later to a mysterious rot. By late March I managed to get some Chinese long beans and Okra in the ground, and a really tasty yellow pear tomato unexpectedly “volunteered” from some compost I spread earlier. I’ve been enjoying the results since mid June.

I’m not letting one slow garden season this year bother me too much, because I’m still in the 3-4 year period I had planned on for “building soil,” so any food I manage to harvest is just a bonus. I’m continuing my raised bed and soil building by putting down more cardboard, soil and compost over this fall and winter to prep beds for perennials and in anticipation of planting fig, lemon, and orange trees in my next phase of landscaping. I intend to replace a pointless box wood hedge with a couple or maybe three Kumquat trees, like the one I remember from my childhood. It produced enough orange-like fruit to make about a dozen jars of tasty and exotic sounding Kumquat Marmalade each year. I’m even eyeing potential locations for at least one Japanese Persimmon tree and two native Texas Persimmons. Landscaping you can eat. It seems like a good idea for an uncertain future, and maybe, just maybe we can make that happen. The time for making plans is coming to a close, and it’s time to start making life happen.