Hello?

Is there anybody in there?

Just nod if you can hear me.

Is there anyone at home?

Come on, now,

I hear you’re feeling down.

Well I can ease your pain

Get you on your feet again.

Relax.

I’ll need some information first.

Just the basic facts.

Can you show me where it grows?

I am sorry. I abandoned you all. But I had good reason. I needed a break. A good long break.

My world, as we knew it, has changed astronomically since we last talked. And in a really, really good way. So let’s take a trip (not that kind of trip) in Hanna’s Way-Back-Machine.

When last we spoke, it was August. My husband was gone, my tomatoes were being ravaged, and I was working 70-80 hours per week. Life was interesting. And that is putting it mildly. Actually, it just kind of sucked all round.

Lots of things happened since that time. Some I will share, some just are not your damn business. But let’s just say that all of it culminated it me needing a break. A nice long break.

So let’s talk about good things.

Once upon a time I talked about dreams. And I am fairly certain for any gardener a giant dream is making money from gardening. Any “beyond my wildest dreams” dream for a gardener is making enough money to live off of gardening. Well, hold on to your panties ladies and gentlemen (and if you gentlemen have panties, return them to their lady owners ASAP or just don’t tell me about it), I am there. For the better part of 3 years, I put in the equivalent of a second part (and many times full) time job to be able to accomplish that. In August (note when I stopped writing here – sorry, I was tired of doing oh so much for way too long), I quit my day job and became a full fledged, money making, garden guru. How awesome is that?

My break from this blog can only be described to gardeners in terms of an August garden. You spent so much time up until August cleaning and grooming and working, that you just need a break and you let it all go to pot just so you can enjoy the beauty of what you have created.

So now, this is my life. I wake up every day now and all I have to do is write about gardening. Could you really ask for more?

It turns out you can.

My hubby is home. It was hard and it was worth it. If the last 12 months have taught me anything, it is that shit, even the good shit, does not come free. The real things in life have a cost, and the cost is worth it. I had a good marriage before. A solid marriage. But you always have questions. I don’t have questions anymore, and that means a lot in terms of marital bliss.

And, with all those questions out of the way, my husband and I (with the blessing of our three lovely male children) decided that while we had everything we could ask for, we were missing something still. So as we speak, and as I run around in frantic circles like a chicken with its head cut off trying to locate obscure but important information, my family is going through the process of adopting a child. A girl. I love my boys, but a woman can only take so much dinosaurs, Star Wars and swords before she decides that a future with the possibility of dress up, prom dresses and un-peed on toilet seats looks mighty fine.

And then there is spring. It is here and it does spring hope on an eternal basis. Today the temps in Cleveland were up over 60F. Don’t worry, it will be snowing next week, I am sure. But today it felt like it was time to get back out into the world. There were snowdrops blooming and the top on my convertible was down.

Welcome back world. This garden has missed you terribly.

I am a big fan of the Lord of the Rings movies. I am not afraid to admit (now that it is many years past) that I actually risked a very good job to go to the showing of the entire trilogy at a local movie theater. I walked out of work in the morning and hoped no one would notice that I was gone the rest of the day. It worked. I went with my husband to see the full 9+ hours of the LOTR movies on the big screen. The experience was amazing and (in the hindsight light of the fact that I did not lose my job) was worth the worth the risk.

Many people do not realize that a very large theme of the LOTR trilogy (books or movie) is about what is precious to people. Every character in the series is faced with dealing with what is precious to them and the trials that prove that what is precious is worth the cost. Rings, love, friendship, family, country and community. These things are precious to the characters and the series is based on examining these concepts. Gollum even refers to what is precious to him by this very word. The Ring is his Precious. He would go to the ends of the world, kill and even eventually die for it.

I am faced with my own trial of precious these days. Tomorrow, I will walk into a military building with my husband and I will walk out without him. For the next 2 months, I will only have minimal contact with him, basically whatever a drill sergeant deems necessary, which I am told is not much.

Tomorrow, when many of you are reading this, I will be releasing what is precious to me. And I am given something precious in return. I am given the rare opportunity to examine my life and all that is precious in it. I can understand just how very precious these things are, without the painfully messy divorce papers or horrific loss of a loved one’s life that normally comes with this kind of situation.

While it may seem trite, my husband and I have what I have always thought of as the rare and elusive true love. We adore, idolize and desire each other, even after 12 years of being together. Life without the other is unimaginable. For god sakes, we still talk the sickeningly sweet, cutsie baby talk to each other.

But in true Holiday Golightly and butterfly fashion, we are separating because dreams should be followed and love does return when it is real.

When it comes to what is precious to me, as you may have surmised, there is my husband. My children are precious as well. All of which I have given much thought to lately, thankful that I have them, but now more keenly aware that in a heartbeat they could be gone.

Then there is my gardening. It is also precious to me, though in a different way. It is my escape and solace. Right now, I have more seedlings growing than I know what I will do with. I just keep packing cups with dirt and shoving seeds into them. One after another, like it will make a difference that I bring tiny lives to life while mine gets turned upside down. And maybe it does make a difference. Doing, not thinking, is a very precious thing about gardening.

J.R. Tolkien also made big of gardening in his books, considering that one of his main characters was a gardener. Hobbits were people of the earth, and plants were precious to them, maybe for reasons why it is precious to me. Gardening reminds us that we have power over our world, no matter how small and powerless we are or feel. It is a precious thing to know that you can bring food to the table, joy to the heart and life to the world in spite of everything the world can throw at us.

As some of you may have noticed, I have been lax in posting since my vacation. I just did not feel like posting. I came home to cold and dreary. Death had firmly settled on the world around me in more ways than one. And I was feeling just a bit petulant about the whole order of things. Death is not supposed to happen, not in the garden, not to my grandfather.

I came home from vacation to learn that my grandfather had been admitted to the hospital and was not expected to leave. My grandfather was a proud man and age had slipped in like a taxi cab in New York in the pouring rain. A few months ago, his vitality had been whisked away by emphysema in an rude rush, leaving him standing on the curb, short of breath and forlorn. Then, these past few weeks, a common cold took advantage of his stunned state and snatched his life like a common thief.

To be honest, my grandfather seemed to me to be made of mythic materials. Each part of him seemed bigger than me, and it made it hard for me to feel close to him some of the time.

I am told that when he worked in the steel mills, he was renowned for his ability to understand what misbehaving steel was wanting. With a touch of his hand, he could draw out the very soul of the cooled steel in front of him and recommend a correct solution. Indeed, he was so accurate that he was loaned out to other steel mills around the country to correct their smelting processes as well. When he retired, he was replaced by a slew of chemical engineers who accomplished the same thing, though with far more test tubes and fancy machines than my high school educated grandfather ever needed.

He was also an accomplished singer, whose voice was tempered and true as the steel he had cured. He sang for many years in a group that traveled around from church to church raising voices and souls.

He was a man who was dedicated to his faith and his God in a way that I could never hope to understand. God came before everything, except for perhaps his wife.

And, most importantly to me, he was a suburb Uno player, at least minds of his grandchildren. So often did he win, that we frequently accused him of cheating when we were children who knew no better. This grandchild/grandfather bond of Uno was immortalized by the fact that my grandfather will be laid to rest with a pack of the cards at his side. It amuses me to think that some day, thousands of years from now when future archaeologists discover my grandfather’s grave, they will ponder the significance of a pack of brightly colored cards.

As always, since this is a gardening blog, I must remember something from the garden about him. I don’t remember him being a gardener beyond what was necessary to keep the yard up, but I do remember one thing and that was the red raspberries. Along the back fence there were several bushes. And if I was very good, I might be rewarded with a few. And they were a very sweet reward of which my grandfather was very proud.

For as much as I rail against death, I know it is necessary. I may not like it, but death must happen to my garden and to my grandfather. It is wearying to live a full life and we must grant all things their final rest. The beautiful flower, or the wondrous man will live on in memory long past the time that their spots in the world have been covered in snow.

We interrupt our Tomato Tastings to bring you news of Hanna’s life…

I don’t often share the intimate details of my life with this audience. You may know when I lose a dear one or that my children have started school. But beyond these small details, my garden blog is dedicated to… well… gardening things.

Today, I need to share with you one of the most difficult decisions that I have ever had to make in my life. And I can say that with 100% honesty. Nothing was harder than this.

Several years ago, my husband shared with me that he had wanted to join the military. Like any sane wife, I said “Absolutely not.” After all, babies are hard to raise and I certainly did not want to be raising them by myself if I could help it.

But babies grow up and this year they are all grown up enough to go away to school, for the entire day. My husband did not ask, but did look at me imploringly with very convincing puppy eyes. (He has amazingly convincing puppy eyes.) And after saying no like at least 20 more times, I finally said yes.

And so my husband and I decided that he would join the National Guard reserves. After a massive diet and exercise program, a small letter writing campaign, and 2 months of back and forth with a lovely recruiter who seemingly goes only by the one name “Santiago”, at 11:15AM today, my husband was sworn in as a member of the National Guard.

He will leave me April 7, 2009 for a little over 6 months for basic and specialty training. In this current political climate, it also means that it is inevitable that he will be called up for active duty where he will eventually be away for much longer.  Right now, I consider basic to be the training wheels version of deployment.

Since this is a gardening blog, I have to relate this back to gardening, right? Well, what it comes down to is that I will be losing half of myself. While my husband is not an active gardener, as many couples will tell you, your other is an essential part of your garden regardless.

They may do the heavy work, they may lend a helping hand in the creation of yard and project and they may even be an active participant in building a garden masterpiece. But the most important part is that they are an ear. They listen patiently to your triumphs and tribulations, no matter how trivial. They understand that your need to vent about vine borers and slugs is essential to your mental gardening well being. They happily open their mouths and accept the communion of our gardens, whether it be a freshly picked zucchini or a still warm tomato. They understand us. That is what a gardener spouse does better than anything in the world.

And I will lose mine right at that most important time of spring. For the gardening year 2009, I will turn to ask him to mow the lawn or try this fabulous tomato and I will find that he will not be there. He will be in Missouri, doing drill or shooting a gun. Which is so far from my garden on so many levels…

So where does this go? Why did we do this if it hurts so much? Because at the end of the day or a lifetime, a person should be able to stand up and regret only the things they did, not the things they did not. The one hope is that in living like this, you have nothing at all to regret when everything is said and done.

When I was growing up, way out in the boonies of Clermont County, a stray animal would wander through my mother’s garden at least once a month. Which would explain why we never had less than 2 dogs and 6 cats in the house at any one time. Now that I live in the suburbs, I just don’t see stray dogs. We have a very efficient dog catcher. He points that out to me each time he returns my dog to me.

So this past week, when an unfamiliar dog wandered into my garden, I was surprised. Not only was this a stray dog, but he was a starving dog. Which was strange. Frankly, dogs just don’t starve in the suburbs. There are just too many trash cans. Upon closer inspection, we discovered he had a collar and an odd temporary tag from a realty company in North Carolina, of all places.

The dog came with me easily enough and we fed him a bowl of food right away, to try to keep him from fainting from hunger right there. As I am with all strange dogs, I was a bit wary. But within a day or so, it became obvious that this was the biggest teddy bear there ever was. My 4 year old was dragging this dog, who is nearly as tall as he is, around by the collar and the dog willingly goes.

The more the week has gone along, the more it has become apparent that this dog was once loved by someone. He may have been starved, but he had never been abused. So where does a dog starve in the suburbs but not abused? My husband and I have two theories. He came from the MetroParks or he came off a train from the nearby train yard. Either way, we are fairly certain that someone misses this dog a lot. And so the search began.

We posted ads in the Plain Dealer (free for found ads), CraigsList.com, FidoFinder.com. I started emailing every lost ad with a matching description of this dog. We took him to the vet to get him scanned for a microchip.

We even called Outer Beaches Realty to ask about the tag. It turns out they only give them to people who are staying in one of their houses with a dog. Cheryl at Outer Beaches was as concerned as I was. She pulled the entire list of clients from Ohio who had dogs and started making calls. (If you are looking to vacation in North Carolina I would highly recommend them. If they are willing to go to this length for a former renter, imagine what they will do for a current one.)

And the end result after a week of searching and answering emails? Our lost dog is still a lost dog. *sigh* Maybe we have the real life equivalent of The Incredible Journey but we have no way of finding him safely home to the people who loved him. The best we can do is find him a new home where someone new will love him as well. Right now, we have 2 people who would like the dog so there is no fear that he will not find a new home.

There are some (ok, many) things that I regret about living in suburbia. One of them is chickens. I can’t keep chickens and it is something I would love to try.

As I have mentioned many times on this blog, I grew up in farming country. 4-H, FFA, county fairs and combine traffic delays were a part of everyday life. As were intolerance, racism, ignorance and heavy drug and alcohol abuse*. When I was old enough, I packed up my stuff and was happy to watch the silos and cows fade into the distance behind me. I swore I would never go back except to fulfill my familial obligations (the parents have to see the grandkids sometimes).

I am kind of regretting that statement now. I live in the ‘burbs now, which is something I didn’t really want to do. I wanted to be a city girl. I wanted to be hip and cool. Then I had kids. The city does not really provide room for children to run around. They are a lot like Golden Retrievers. They need a yard to run around in. So we moved to the suburbs because it was not the country.

And you know what I found – intolerance, racism and ignorance. No drugs and alcohol abuse… well, there is but at least they keep it discreetly behind closed doors and only talk about it behind cupped hands.

This past summer, I started sending my sons to spend half the summer with my parents. There are memories I have that my children are lacking and only the country can give them. Memories like finding magical kingdoms in the woods, playing hide and seek in corn fields, bike rides that ranged for miles (with no adult supervision) and freedom. True youthful freedom.

Here in the suburbs, I get the long eye down the nose and an unspoken threat of a call to Children Services if I let them play in my own yard without standing over top of them. Heaven forbid that our children be off our apron strings for a minute, to develop things like courage, an adventurous sprit and common sense. (Gosh, you mean doing that really stupid thing on my bike ends up with me scratching the hell out of my knees?!?  I think I will remember that for next time.)

These days, I toy with the idea of moving back to the country, back to places where I can keep chickens and no one cares if my Christmas lights are up till June (mostly because they can’t see the house from the road) and nobody will say a damn thing if I plant a vegetable garden in the front yard. And, more importantly, I could keep chickens.

Maybe the whole farming community living thing is not that bad. Maybe no matter where you live, you will run into issues and problems. Maybe I just need to weigh the good with the bad and see where the balance weighs out.

*It is a little known fact that drug and alcohol issues are more prevalent in rural areas than in their nearby urban centers. For example, the second largest drug bust in Ohio when I was a kid happened in a little nearby town that had a population of about 200. Think about it, wide open spaces for growing (marijujana) and fertilizer availability (meth), make rural areas ideal for production. The fact that it takes you a freaking half hour to drive to ANYTHING, and so most teens and poor adults have nothing to do, makes it ideal for consumption as well.

I don’t get sick. At least I didn’t get sick until this past week when I had the flu. Holy shit, is the flu a real endgame for things like working and playing and it puts a damper on breathing and a sex life as well. You can do both when you have the flu, but neither is all that enjoyable.

I can just put down the flu as one more reason why winter sucks. Cold, snow, no plants AND illnesses that make you wish you were dead. It is a wonder that anyone lives where it gets cold at all.

I am missing my garden so much right now. It is still a smidgen too early to start seeds, my houseplants are all dead, the weather here in Cleveland can’t decide if it wants to be record high or record low. Things just seem desperate.

I suppose that I could trot on down to the Home and Garden Show (because if I drove, I would have to pay $8 for parking even though there is NO WHERE ELSE TO PARK), but frankly the thought of having to trudge through a mile of As-seen-on-TV, how-did-you-live-without-it, buy-this-because-I-talk-with-an-accent garbage just to look at a half hearted attempt by a Home Depot manager of the month to create a whole new garden using every fertilizer and plastic lawn adornment known to man or at least for sale at Home Depot is enough to make me want to take a greenhouse hostage with a spray gun.

In case you could not tell, I am in a foul mood. I don’t have the winter blues. I have the winter blacks. Screw you, Winter, and the damn horse you rode in on too.  I can’t wait for Spring.

Now with the holidays over, I can sit back and relax and take in the humorous frenzy of everyone else. My family and I celebrate the Solstice as opposed to Christmas. Our celebration is not that far different from most other people’s Christmas celebration. Santa still comes*, we still have an evergreen tree decked in lights and baubles, we eat way too much food and drink way to many eggnogs, we even mostly call it Christmas, more out of habit than anything else.

Now, our Christmas date was changed due to a sad fact of modern society. Divorced with children. After witnessing one Christmas holiday literally ripped in two for the benefit of a court drawn paper and the needs to two adults, I told my husband (then boyfriend) we needed to make a few changes. As my husband is atheist and I am… (well, I don’t know what I am, but it is not Christian), we decided that we would simply move the date. It was only a number to us. That way we get a holiday that resembles what I remember from my childhood and my stepson never has to feel guilty about which house he spends the holiday at.

As I just mentioned, I am not Christian. The reasons I gave up the faith are many and complex and better left for a different kind of blog. But while I gave up Christianity, because I am a gardener, I could not give up God. One only has to witness the seasonal dance, or the delicate crafting of a flower blossom to know that there must be some greater force directing all of it.

We settled on the date of the Solstice because of my religious beliefs. Solstice is the date of the longest night of the year. It is a promise, in a sense. It signifies that the worst of it is over. That from here on out, the sun will visit for longer and longer periods each day and eventually the flowers and plants will return. This has strong meaning for me as a gardener and it seemed fitting that that promise should be incorporated into my personal celebration schedule.

No matter what your religious background, I hope that you enjoy(ed) your winter holiday as much as I did! Joy and peace to all of you, many high calorie meals and many dreams of gardens for future garden beds.

*Although we do not ascribe to the idea he goes around the world in a single night. We are well aware that he visit children in Spain on January 12th, children in Holland & Eastern Europe on December 6th and is like this for many other dates and places. Our kids just happen to have parents with an in with the big man in the North Pole who pulled some strings to get them moved up on the delivery schedule.

My husband’s grandmother passed away this morning. She finally succumbed to the massive stroke that she had suffered from a few weeks ago. While normally I try to be light hearted on this blog, I do feel obligated to note the passing of those who are dear to me in some way and who I feel leave the gardening world a little less by their passing. Grandma Mary was certainly one of those people.

Literally half my current garden comes from the bittersweet kindness of Grandma Mary. When she became too ill to care for her own garden, she offered to let me have whatever I would like from the yard. I carefully dug up plants and moved them to my own garden. Miniature irises, daylilies, peonies, a beautiful dinner plate hibiscus and a great many other plants came to my yard to live on. She was sad that she could not care for them, but glad that another gardener would be able to enjoy them.

Grandma Mary’s garden was the stuff of horticultural legends, so I am told. A cottage garden of cottage gardens, to hear my husband tell of it. Whatever she saw that took her fancy, she found a home in her garden for it. No rhyme or reason to their placement, just a cacophony of beautiful things to look at. Everything flourished under her hands.

My husband has often spoken of the fact that he thinks that I am a lot like his Grandma Mary, which honors me greatly. He speaks fondly of her vigor for life and how she was a strong woman. Frailty of the heart was something that took her body and beloved plants away from her, so I think that she is happy in the peace that she has now found.

Somewhere up in heaven, there is an empty plot of land that is rich in good dark soil that only wanted its owner to finally arrive and tend to it. She has arrived and I bet if we could see her now, she would be planting her very first flower in her new beds with hands that are once again strong.

I know that sometimes my husband’s Uncle John stops by to read this blog, so if you are out there Uncle John… I am so sorry for your loss. She was a wonderful woman.

Do a happy dance. Pumpkin Patch is over. Not that any of you care (thanks if you do), but much of my free time for the past month has been taken up by the annual festival at my kids’ school, which is called the Pumpkin Patch Festival. It was this past Saturday and was very successful, but the python that it was has been lifted from my life and I can get back to the important things like mailing seeds (sorry if I owe them to you), posting on my blog and gardening.

I have heard more than a few times that gardening is dying out. At one point in time, I believed that. But now I know the truth. Gardening is not dying out, is a luxery afforded by those with spare time (i.e. you lack small offspring at home and/or you don’t have a demanding job).

The rest of us snatch spare moments. Spare moments and spare time are like pennies and dollars. Sure, one adds up to the other but one doesn’t buy nearly as much as the other.

Then what do you do when your spare moments get stolen? Are you really suppose to tell the teacher no? The boss no? The bill collector no? Just because you want to pull a few weeds?

Don’t get me wrong. I do say that sometimes. I feel really guilty, but my garden looks better for it. I have turned down 2 playdates, one husband date and 3 dates with friends so that next weekend is mine, mine, mine. The weeds have won and I have to muster the forces or else this spring will see my garden buried so far I will never dig it out.

Gardening should not have to take a backseat to the rest of my life or maybe it should, but it seems really damn unfair if that is the case.