We were out early on this Dia de los Muertos. We had to drop off my car as early as we could in order to have snow tires put on without an appointment. (I made us thirty minutes late, which put us so far down the queue that we had to wait almost five hours for my car to be done. That cost us $220 in extra shopping, plus breakfast. My bad.) The first thing I saw out the car window, while I waited for my coffee to kick in, was a large black dog frisking around a graveyard on Main Street. Seemed eerily symbolic for the day that it was, until I saw the guy sitting on the ground, cross-legged, having a moment with one of his loved ones who is no more. I knew in that moment that I wasn't ready to let myself celebrate this particular holiday. My losses of the last year and a half are still too fresh for me. Maybe by next November first I'll have a little scar tissue grown over those wounds. I'm too thin-skinned right now.
I can't tell whether waiting to harvest the last of the green tomatoes was the right call. It gets cold enough at night that the plants themselves are dying back, and the days, while unseasonably warm, are not providing enough warm sunlight to turn the tomatoes anything but a sickly greenish yellow. The few that seemed ripe also look damaged from the cold nights, with their skins looking oddly glossy and translucent in spots, like they have frost burns. The weather turns this week, with a wintry mix of precipitation due on Wednesday. If I want to try to artificially ripen the tomatoes, and keep any kale in the freezer, I need to bring them all in tomorrow. Time is running out.
Once we made it home from getting snow tires, Mr S-P immediately jumped into a project that had been holding up a whole cascade of progress. He put up another set of shelving in the garage, and after a brief but unrestful nap, I helped. This set of shelves was necessarily not only to provide space where the Jeep will eventually reside, but to put a shelf directly under the glass block windows on the south side of the garage where I am going to try to overwinter plants. Living in Charleston provided my first real understanding that annuals don't have to die before Thanksgiving. I'm going to attempt to keep a couple geraniums, some coleus, a gerbera daisy, and a few other things alive in the garage. I sort of have space in the house where these could go, but I also have cats who think that collections of houseplants are salad bars. Depending on how well or poorly it goes this winter, I may work on keeping a lot of plants normally reserved for warmer zones. I killed a few of the ones I tried to bring as pets from the Park, like the potted hydrangea, but my tea olive isn't dead yet. I plan to keep it that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment