. Spinning .

What a joy this morning.  The male hummingbird braved my presence and came to the feeder.  They always did, never minding me sitting on the back step (despite thirteen chairs around the patio) and even coming up to greet me now and then to hover in my face.

We believe what we want to and I had decided that they were the same ones (likely) that were back here over the years.  I believed (unlikely) that the female who often came to me was the same one that I rescued from the neighbor’s shed. 

But these are new, perhaps the young of those good friends.  Cautious, until the scent of nectar makes them bold.

And then, without my glasses on I see two orange flashes light upon the maple tops.  Before I get the glasses on or begin to reach for the binoculars, they are gone.  The orioles I try so hard to welcome to our yard.

Bright shiny day, sunlight setting rainbow fires in drops of last night’s storm upon the lawn.  Bright shiny day.

I have always felt a connection with the outdoors, to the point where sun can make me smile in the midst of a depression, and by three days of gloomy grey I am beyond tears.

Last year I did nothing with the gardens, weeded some at first and then abandoned them for gardens that belonged to those who couldn’t tend them for themselves.

A garden untended even for a year becomes a jungle.  This year, I felt the pull of growing greens and call of soft brown earth again, without the guilt and with the promise of a rainbow in return.

But weather guides the planting and the cold forbid the seeds, and then the heat brought with it threats of burning tender leaves.  And me.  And the time of perfect planting coincides with other things more urgent such as job and tests and trying to get away.

The backstep is a-planted though and this at least can cheer me up enough and on again to planning more to do.  I shall, at least as soon as I can once again wander further out from the center of the home to the perimeters of yard, add color here and there with paintbrush plantings.

I need that for my happiness.  I need that for my soul.

Today is our fifteenth wedding anniversary.  The warranty has long since expired–I must have missed it, or didn’t care.

Last year, instead of going out to eat or our traditional celebration, I drove to Hartford Hospital to see if Jim was still alive after a car accident.

This year, we will have King Crab Legs added to our meal of lobster and a salad.  No nasty bread or potatoes to take up precious space that lobster meat can fill.  Another addition, our friend, Gus.  After all, he spent some hours alone with Jim on our wedding day, so was as vital to the celebration as was I.

They left the reception together to fly to a dentist who was willing to come in on an emergency visit to fix Jim’s tooth, broken on the prime rib wedding meal.

Today I must behave myself.  No playing games, no having fun.  No writing except to complain here, and no reading except about lousy carrots and calories.  I have to prepare for an exam to take by Friday, and I’m nervous, of course.  I did get a 100 on my food safety assignment, however.

And in the frameshop, I think I may have taken in about as much as I’ve put out these past few weeks of working Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays when I’m closed. 

But I played in dirt this morning, so that has fed my soul, though seeds aren’t in, I hand-pulled weeds out of about a third of the garden.  It was cold and drizzley this morning and the weeds had set their roots in firmly in the slowly moistening soil.  It was a battle, but I kept it up till weary and my watch revealed only a few minutes left to shower and get into the shop.

I watched the soil wash off me and run down the drain.  And suddenly I wasn’t susie-farmer any more.

Guess what!  I just saw Jesus in the clouds.  I ran to get my camera but found Dylan floating by.  Bob, that is.  No harmonica, but I can tell you it was him.  After all, I knew Jesus when I saw Him and He didn’t have His cross.

In a comment below, Garnet offers this: "Ah, the veritable concreteness of gardening. Where mistakes can usually be grown back. Where whims are encouraged. Where you get something even if you don’t give."

It is also a physical release for the thinking man.  I stink with sweat and lines of garden dirt roll down my face and arms and legs.  Unsexy, unpretty, yet I feel beautiful as the green herbs and flowers and ripe red tomatoes that will share the soil I am a part of.  There is a sense of goodness in the physicality and grossness of working with the earth, a sharing of a common ground.  It will absorb me wholly into it some day; for now, I dabble in its depths and sneak away complete.

Sometimes, in the much too early morning light of still-hidden dawning sun, before the nests have stirred beneath a mother’s yawning, there is a presence to the air that weighs with more than mere humidity.  Early riser sits with curling smoke that lazily rises to its flight from steaming coffee and a cigarette.  Breathing in the sense of day that settles circling around and pilllowing a heavy heart.

Soon the orange slice of sun, returning home, stumbles up the threshhold from its drunken night in China; sets the horizon wavering with its heat, and young maple leaves quiver in their height from branches at the very tops of trees.  But human life is limited to raising coffee to its lips and blowing rings of streaming grey, and eyes that dart about and take it all in.