Progress

My progress as of three days ago. I have to find the battery charger for my camera. It is in the new place that I decided would be the logical place that I would look for it the last time I lost and found it. Maybe I need a hypnotist.

Work began on the new bathroom today, thank God. There were a few times when I was afraid that the whole thing was going to have to be put off for weeks. The two fellows working on it are very pleasant and willing to work around the cats. The possibility of my cats getting out in a panic or getting sick from stress or getting underfoot is my main concern right now. Miss Lucy simply wants to hide, but Theo, Pablo, and Diego are all obsessed with the closed doors that used to be open.

My own work is picking up, so the time is going by more quickly.

Last night I cooked butterbeans with a few field peas tossed in and a squash casserole, with most ingredients from my garden. Before that I cooked what might have been the last green (purple) beans. The butterbeans should produce until frost, especially with the unseasonably cool temperatures we have now. The squash are definitely gone because the plants were diseased and I pulled them up. The seeds that I thought were cucumbers turned out to be butternut squash and those plants are producing and doing well because I planted them away from the yellow squash. Lots of green tomatoes are on the plants I grew from seed, and I covered them with chicken wire cages. The blueberries are nearly gone, but I did get to eat a few. Didn’t get to harvest any of the pears, as usual. Lots of figs are on the reviving fig tree that we butchered this spring. Can you even kill a fig tree? I don’t know.

I miss talking about gardening with my mother. I’m having a hard time with the loss in general, but I think that working in my garden really brings it home for me. We didn’t agree about much, especially the religion that was so important to her, and the art I do was sometimes incomprehensible to her. Much of my conversation bored her, but we could talk enthusiastically about gardening and cooking. I spent so much of my time in summer picking, shelling, and freezing butterbeans and field peas with my mother and other relatives and friends. I was lucky because my work was limited to vegetables and blueberries and the occasional load of shrimp instead of the tobacco fields and barns that my friends had to work in. I was also lucky because I learned to garden and preserve food from my mother. Not cooking, though. I learned to cook on my own.

Casting my thoughts increasingly toward tapestry and the retreat coming up in Oregon. Less than a month away!