Tonight makes 3 times it’s rained this week, and the green has grown taller and taller thanks to the cool relief.  While the snapdragons wind down, the cosmo feathers keep stretching towards their full height.  Zinnias are popping like polka dots,  Not going to worry about whether the seed-grown dahlias turn out to be glamorous or not.  It’s been just like Christmas to see something so bold and self-assured emerge from almost literally nothing.

Can you spot the salad in this collection from the garden?

See the soft waves of green on the right?  Yep.  That’s lettuce.

I found it in the compost bin, bolted and wilting – but the loveliest shade of, well, lettuce green.  “What the hell,” I thought.  “It’s so pretty.  It’s part of the garden today.  I bet it just needs a drink.”

And I picked it out of the bin and brought it home.

After a few hours soaking in a wastebasket full of cold water, its sumptuous ruffles revived just like you would after a nice dip on a hot summer day.  It was every bit as tender and juicy as I hoped it would be.  (No, I didn’t eat it.  Don’t get me wrong.  I ate some squash I rescued from the compost bin last summer and lived to tell the tale.  But you can’t peel lettuce.  So, no.)

These are almost the last of the lisianthus – and the first of my seed-grown dahlias is peeking out from behind the zinnias, its yellow petals streaked with red, like summer flames.  I love it!

I can’t take full credit for these petals.  Cosmos and zinnias, yes and yes. From seeds under lights in April to these pollen pin cushions, flush with color as the warm days hang on –  I helped them get started.

The lisianthus (the pink rosey blooms) and the snapdragons, though – someone else started those seeds back in January or February, and I bought them from the nursery in May.  I squeezed them closer together than the recommended spacing.  I tried to keep them cool, with water on the hottest, driest days.  And I watched skeptically as they hardly grew at all.

Then, one day some of the buds were more colorful than a few days before.  And then, yesterday, there were so many spires of yellow and white and sunset pink – and goblets of petals untwisting in rose and coral, that it was time to bring them home.

Summer, finally.

The community garden’s cherry tree has surprised everyone by ripening a bumper crop of full sized, juicy Montmorency cherries out of no rainfall to speak of.  The snapdragons and lisianthus took diligent watering, as did the hot pink zinnias. But the cherries are a gift from summer rains past, and I am deliciously grateful.

I can’t say I did nothing as successfully as last weekend.  For example, late yesterday afternoon, I was weaving a peripatetic cat’s cradle of twine between garden stakes to keep the taller flowers and over-performing tomatoes out of the dirt, sweat stinging my eyes all the while.  This does not count as nothing, although it was extremely satisfying to see all the flower patches ready for their next leap upwards.

But I know now that I can and must have a day to just do nothing.  And accept that no one else thinks this is even slightly lazy.

Doing nothing continues.  Some of the problem is between my ears, but there is no overlooking my plain need for time without any particular purpose.  Sorry, Puritans.

Meanwhile, please join me in the garden – where things are bone dry.  I keep watering, and the sun keeps shining in the mild, cloudless sky.  We’ve had less than 25% of our normal precipitation.

These are my first snapdragons of the summer, and a few more will pop this week.  The cosmos and zinnias are trying very hard to bloom at about half the height they were last year.  I keep pinching them back but I think they just don’t have enough water to get excited about being tall.

Lamb’s ear and grapevines are unperturbed by the drought – and no one at the garden knows what the gorgeous purple things are – but they sure are vibrant..  The petunias I planted outside my building match the fading roses left by neighbor Alan, who moved out late in the fall.  Did you know I love petunias so much?  Not more than peonies, but close.  Their fragrance is everything summer to me.

Last Sunday morning, I found myself confessing to Pammy that despite having a very bad chest cold, I didn’t think I would be able to get myself to sit still. Do nothing.  Rest.

This admission surprised me, because I don’t see myself as especially loyal to any work ethic or biassed toward achievement.  Quite the opposite.  I like to be aimless, to waste time, to push the boundaries of how little I can commit to doing in my free time.

But somewhere in the move, the broken heart, the stingy budget, and the work of working with all the smartest kids in algebra class, I started using the flowers to try to keep up.

More than keep up.  To make up for my deficits, and maybe even carve out some territory of accomplishment.  And to have a reason, certainly, not to feel the despair of how little I can really do to make anything better where I live, or how I love.

But wheezing coughs have a way of grabbing your attention and narrowing your choices.  Pammy insisted I had to do absolutely nothing all day.  “I really need a day off every week,”  I said.  “Yes. Yes, you do,” she agreed.  “I mean – not doing ANYTHING.  Not pictures, not housework, nothing.”  “That’s right,” Pammy said.  “Nothing.”

I don’t know what will happen here next week.  I’m not re-thinking the blog, or deciding on a new direction for this project, or anything half so deliberate and organized.  I just need a day to do nothing.  To feel some thing other than compelled.

The peonies flew by, running fast from another too-warm May.  These scarlet ladies were fresh and blooming in the shade of my friend’s back yard.  I could have spent the week doing nothing but rescuing peonies from generous friends, and fixing their moments into memorial images that slip away as quickly as petals fall.  Instead, I got a cold and had to work for a living.  It is what it is.

The weather finally cooled off last night, so I didn’t have to rush to the garden this morning to water before the heat set in.  Sunflower seedlings the size of quarters and half dollars have poked up, and little rows of extra cosmos and batchelor buttons are coming up.  Last year I learned to just keep planting, and the plants will keep growing if they can.  Things do not have to be perfect.  Things can be down right wrong, in fact – and still work out.

The cooler weather is gone, and honestly I might miss the garden peonies altogether, it will be so warm this week.  Peonies do not like the heat.  Case closed.

Carmine running through new growth – the fresh grape leaves, emerging strawberry red as they unfold, the hanging pendants of columbine and bearded iris draping their ever so tender petals for just a day before they seemingly melt away, and the bloom progresses to the next bud on the stalk.  Yellow crowns of Golden Alexander (Zizia aurea) – a new one on me, from the border of pollinator plants, and chives, the most cheerful and insistent of garden friends, who will not go away once you let them in, and earn their place by being both delicious and purple.

I cut a few for artistic purposes. I believe that is covered under my poet’s license, which permits a morsel of spring to contain an entire garden.

I had to push myself towards the lilacs this week – even though I wait all year for heaven on earth at sundown in the Arboretum, when hundreds of mature bushes sing with fragrance absorbed from the day’s warmth.  I went after work, after dinner.  After I knew there was only so much light remaining.  I knew I couldn’t skip it – and yet the thought of one more thing added at the end of the day drained me.

That all fell away as I turned into the first row of lavender, wine and white colored plumes reaching overhead into the blue spring evening – and reaching toward me with their tender, cascading bells to be caressed and inhaled.  There they were, some of my sweetest friends.  I’ve been visiting these creatures so long, camera in hand.  Searching their dense greens and radiant pendants of flowers for the invisible portal between what I see and feel and my longing to be here, to be loved, to be known.  Because in their presence, existing as they do for no purpose other than delight, I suppose that part of myself can’t help but step forward.  And she has a camera, and has painstakingly failed her way to occasionally using it to see what is not there otherwise.

Iris and dicentra spectabilis from the apartment driveway.  Tulips from my community plot.

It was a cold, soaking rain for Mother’s Day, but I doubt that stopped anyone from taking Mom on her annual pilgrimage to the Arboretum, to stroll the acres of pink and white crabapples or breath deeply among the long, fragrant rows of lilacs.  I did not venture there myself, although I very much need to visit the lilacs soon.

Instead of shoveling soggy wood chips with my friend onto the community garden paths, we took the less heroic route of kaffeeklatsch in the quiet morning hours of a Mother’s Day with nothing to do.  We agreed that the black-ice road through Covid and cultural catastrophe is crowded with friends, all just as shocked as we are by the slide and crash of our own unforeseen hazards.  And the great challenge seems to be allowing the inevitable joys and contentments to arise in parallel to the heart-stopping hairpin curves.

A dilemma that would feel familiar to so many women.  Mothers who wake up dreaming how they can make things better, make things alright for their children, no matter how icy dark the night.