Report From PIA – October 21
In the old days I used to be a weaver. I wove art pieces, clothing, wall hangings, and home furnishings, enjoying the process of blending the colorful and varied yarns together.
Today there were echoes of the weaving process, although my hands never touched a loom. It was a day that wove my garden and gardening life in with people, pursuits, aspirations and imaginings.
It was a perfect, sunny, warm and windless Wednesday. On such a day in October, everyone should get out of work and spend some time in the garden. Is there a way we could put this in the stimulus plan? I took advantage of the weather, and spent the morning placing shrubs and perennials in the ground.
While I was planting, my cell phone rang. It was a call about my former neighbors, who are in their nineties. I’ve told them that we are neighbors for life, and so I see them every couple of weeks and try to assist with bills, shopping etc. Now they’re having problems and I wrestle with how to best help. It’s complicated.
My mother-in-law is sick with a virus, so I spoke with her a couple of times. After one of these conversations I walked the dog down the road from Poison Ivy Acres and passed by a house that is for sale. My own mother, who now lives in Wisconsin, would love this house, I suddenly realized. I need a miracle so that I can buy it for her and move her in down the road.
Later in the day I went to the post office, and stopped off in a nearby store where, within ten minutes, I ran into a couple of friends, three readers of this blog, some consultation clients, and a woman who goes to my church. It sounds like a lot of people, but two of the blog readers were also consultation clients, and the other is a friend: I love knowing that we’re connected by many threads.
Tonight I reviewed grant proposals for the Barnstable Education Foundation. It felt good to be able to help with some of these projects that tax dollars wouldn’t cover. It was sad that we couldn’t afford to fund them all. Returning home, I put ointment in The Dog’s eye, and sat down to digest it all.
So many diverse threads ran through my day, and this isn’t unusual, I think. We are all weavers, and our days combine work, family, community, difficulties, and dreams. We strive toward some measure of balance. We plant, and cultivate, and move toward creating these rich tapestries and diverse gardens that are our lives.
This photograph of the side garden kind of sums it up today... we plant a variety of colors and textures, and things come together more or less. There's always something functional there, such as the wood shed, and things like the blue tarp that detract from what otherwise would be a nice picture. There are some things we've done right, and others we need to work on.
