Dreamy Dream House And So Forth

It has turned into the most absolutely fabulously gorgeous day one could imagine. The sun is making up for lost time and it is, and this is the truth, at least eighty degrees.
And no, I didn't die. Every now and then, maybe every five years or so, I do that thing where I get the migraine-like ocular stuff but I don't get the headache so it's just a matter of waiting for it to pass, which it did, but of course I am like Fred Sandford every time, This is the big one! I'm dying! I'm coming to meet you, Elizabeth! but I keep it all inside and I didn't die at all but quietly sat and watched one of the weirder episodes of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and then went outside and did a bunch of yard work.

I tell you I sweated like a race horse. I had to peel out of my thin long-sleeved shirt down to my tank top and I was still hot as could be but it felt good in a sort of masochistic way. I planted a few caladiums which don't look fine enough to even take a picture of because that area of the yard needs SOMETHING and after nine years here I still haven't figured out what that might be. Maybe if I had planted fifty caladiums instead of a cheap, paltry half dozen it would look better but perhaps they will spread. Or perhaps they will die like almost everything else I plant there in the deep, mucky shade.

I picked up a bunch of fallen branches and sticks in the front yard and stuck a few impatiens in the hollow log where Buddha sits. 

He deserves better but they will grow fuller unless the chickens eat them (and I am here to tell you that they love flowering begonias down to the very root) and there are ferns already there which will come back. 

I planted some zinnias and mint and lemon balm in the trash-picked red wagon and it's ridiculous in that it isn't really deep enough and where I have it sitting isn't going to get enough sun but I can wheel it out to the garden where hopefully it will get enough sun but for right now, I love it right next to the house where I will pass it fifty times a day.

That, too, will fill out, I hope. 

After those small decorative things were done, I went out to the garden and pulled the bolted arugula and weeded a few rows. Slowly, it is all coming together, the garden. The potatoes are coming up a glory. 

That row on the left was already sprouting like crazy when I set the potato pieces in which is why it's bigger than the row on the right. Our friend Tom brought those sprouted pieces over and they were leftover from the potatoes he planted last year. He had so many he kept some for seed and so we shall see how that works out. There is a richness in having a good crop of potatoes. Must be the Irish in me that feels this way. 

The peas are up and the collards are finally growing a bit. I have no idea why they didn't do shit this winter. They are usually magnificent by this time of year. Perhaps we did not water enough. I do not know. I have been gardening for thirty-nine years and I really have no idea, still, what I am doing. 

One of the cabbages, ONE I TELL YOU, is really showing signs of heading. This is just depressing. 

Oh well. How much cabbage can we really eat? 

After a few hours in the garden I came in and collapsed on the bed and fell asleep for a few moments. A tiny perfect nap. And then I got up and took those pictures and also these:

I can't seem to stop taking pictures of wisteria which to me is almost an enchanted flower. The individual parts of the overall blossoms look like lady-parts and they smell so sweet and the bees rush them like drunks and they remind me of the most intricate and expensive of Chinese hanging decorations and some of them are tamed on my arbor and some of them climb up into the trees, ten, twenty feet at least, some higher than that. They are all beautiful.

Here is a man-cardinal.

And here is my hallway on a beautiful spring afternoon, the doors wide open from front to back, the afternoon sunlight painting the walls, the floors, making it all look better than it really does but in real life you have the breeze which is so very fine and fancy today, you have the feel of smooth wood on your bare feet, you have the sense of outdoors coming in and the lines between the two being blurred which is the way I love to live. I am so grateful for this graceful old house which allows such a thing, especially comfortably on these days when it is the perfect temperature to leave the doors wide open, the days when it is completely appropriate to do just that. Days when to not do so would be to show a mean spareness of spirit. To my mind, at least. 

Eyes open today.

Heart open today. 

Doors and windows open today.

So that all which is fine can rush in and be noted, cherished, and appreciated. 

I wonder who built this house. Not the name of the man who HAD it built, but the ones who actually built it, from the beams underneath to the beams overhead, who designed and fitted the staircase, the bannister, set the windows and laid the floors. And also the ones who hand-cut the boards, the beams, from the very hearts of the big pines from which it was made. 

Today I am thanking them from the bottom of my heart. And I would be remiss not to thank my husband who was not as enchanted as I at the thought of living in such an old house but who now thanks me for finding it, for wanting it so badly that he capitulated and let me live in my dream house. Not only that but he tills our garden, he plants our plants, he fixes the pump so that the garden may be watered, he does all of this and he lives here with me and it wouldn't be my dream house if he did not.