The safest bet is that this spring, there will be very few days I feel like getting out and digging in the dirt. It's a shame, because that's one of the things that has brought me the greatest joy over the last decade and a half. This morning Facebook showed me a photo from seven years ago in Charleston, after I had dug out an eight-foot diameter circle around the smaller of my two crape myrtle trees, ringing it with bricks, filling it with a dark, rich soil, and planting flowers. The only flower I remember was a large pink carnation, that rooted well and lived for years in that bed. Some of the others were annuals, and others just never thrived in that spot. I replanted it often over the three years that followed. I was so proud of that flower bed. It was probably one of the last solo victories I had before illness started curtailing how much I could achieve at once (different illnesses, some identified, some not for years). I certainly couldn't maintain it alone, much less the entirety of the Original Smith Park, a quarter acre of trees, shrubs, flowers, grass, spiders, swamp rats, lizards, and mosquitoes galore.
We go in fits and starts with gardening here at Smith Park West. The Mr, when he is here, will crush it for a period of time, but he has overwhelming obligations away from here also. While I'm barely able to work, he's pulling double duty to get the bills paid. He has a full time job and an almost full time side hustle. Me, I can't be in the sun, and the medications for lupus make me even more sun sensitive now. With cancer, fatigue has been growing like a snowball rolling downhill. I get breathless when I walk in from the car, or go all the way from my room to let the dogs out the back door on the garage (the farthest I can walk inside). I failed completely to keep up with my flowerbeds last year. I didn't know what was happening. Never once occurred to me that with everything that had gone wrong, I'd have cancer too. I mean, really. Who expects to have a string of bad luck that goes this far off the rails?
The weather was gorgeous today. I got myself out to prune roses, while they are still mostly dormant. I had a narrow window of opportunity before it warms up so much that they start growing in earnest. I have a large rose installation up front, with three different pinks planted in the same ring, and a medium one out back where the big white rose was taller than I am. There is another soft orange rose against the south fence, which was starting to sprawl like a rambler, but I didn't want to change it too much in case I could attach it to the fence and make a rose wall out of it. The bigger ones, though, really got it. I cut most of them down to between knee and waist level. There were only a few canes that were allowed to stay more than a meter tall, and then only barely. While I did this, the Mr went over and dug up three grapes from a house two over that's being flipped (with permission). He placed one in our raised garden under T's now-dead black walnut tree. A second went right on the property line, next to the Unless Garden, right next to the path we've worn between the houses. The last will go in T's back yard tomorrow. We don't know what sort of grapes these will be. Probably table not wine, but it remains to be seen.
I didn't spend a whole lot of time outside, and I was careful not to move too fast nor carry too much weight (other than the smaller of the two grapes that were planted today). I still got tired, but it wasn't too bad. It was worth it. I won't get to do nearly as much gardening as I will wish to do, not this spring. By summer I may feel better, but unless it's not too hot, I won't be out there. I hope we are able to get enough worked before the surgery. It's already starting to come up. We're on the clock now.
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