The Power Of Natural Magic

Posted on February 7, 2023 by Ann Lovejoy
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When losing a tooth was cause for celebration…

Remembering Wonder

Since the continuing rain and bitter winds are still limiting my outdoor time, my fleeting glimpses of the garden feel more precious than ever. Because I’m not out there every day, the progress of buds poking through the soil and early blooms, battered yet bravely opening, seems more dramatic and noteworthy than in gentler years. It feels both exciting and triumphant to find a crop of little tiny Lewisia babies coming up eagerly next to their mamas, something I was hoping for when I poked the seedheads in the soil instead of the compost last summer. I’m still filled with wonder when I see seeds sprouting and new plants forming; it feels like natural magic every time. Talking yesterday with a young friend who’s pregnant, we mused about the similarities of tiny beings forming in our bodies, just as buds become blossoms and possibly fruit. That too feels like natural magic, as does observing the emergence of a new baby from its mother’s womb, an experience that takes my breath away every time.

Since I’m only seeing my grandkids once or twice a week now that they’ve moved, it’s easier to notice their small shifts in development too. We were brushing our teeth at bedtime recently when we heard a little click and my grandson realized that his long-loose tooth had finally fallen out. Today he was very excited to show me the blank spot where another tooth fell out last night at dinner. Having lost a tooth myself last year, it struck me as amusing that for him, losing a tooth is wonderful and something to celebrate, while for me, it feels a little dire, like the looming edge of a slippery slope. I was fairly amazed to learn last week from my granddaughter (whose teeth are also going fast) that the going rate for teeth is now $5 (getting mine extracted cost a good deal more than that!). The poor Tooth Fairy must be going broke! When I told them that back in my day, the going rate was a dime, my daughter chimed in that in HER day, it was a quarter. My grandson also weighed in, saying that he only got a dollar last time, which sparked parental negotiations later….

Now We Are Seven

I was also a bit taken aback to see my granddaughter arrive with purple hair last week. Apparently her city cousins had celebrated her seventh birthday by going to a nearby salon where the three girls had their hair bleached in streaks and dyed. She reported having had a wonderful time with them; I truly can’t even imagine experiencing such an event when I was her age, though I suspect hair products are far gentler, safer and less smelly than they were back in the day. Several of my friends dye or streak their hair in vivid colors quite often, happily noting that going grey or white means they’ve now got a perfect palette to paint on; no need to bleach first and the colors really shine. Now there’s a win-win!

Another win-win is having the kids for an unexpected extra day after school, as happened this afternoon. Ever since the family started the big move, we’ve been working on big banners to fasten to the ceilings in their new rooms. Today, they’re busily painting their drawings using all sorts of media, including several colors of glow-in-the-dark paint. They’ve also made some smaller experimental versions for my ceiling, featuring flowers and shells, owls, cedar trees, stars and planets, and more. After we had a conversation about making space and feeling spacious a few weeks ago, they came up with a mysterious galaxy of space creatures to gaze at as we all fall asleep. Looking at the softly glowing stars and moons helps me coax my busy brain into peaceful paths where nature’s magic leads my imagination to wild and wonderful places. Onward, right?

Space; The Final Frontier

 

 

 

Posted in Crafting With Children, Health & Wellbeing, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

First Flowers

Posted on February 1, 2023 by Ann Lovejoy
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Hardy cyclamen and snowdrops cheer up bleak winter days

Snowdrops Never Fail

Brrr! This feels like the coldest winter in a long time, and it’s been hanging on for longer than usual as well. I know, people back east would be telling me to SHUT UP but here in the maritime Northwest, winters are generally quite mild. January usually brings the warming Chinook winds and the average daytime winter temperature is (or was) 44 degrees. That feels quite comfortable as long as you’re moving around, and I’ve been able to garden all winter in a light vest or sweater for decades. This year, every time there’s a sun break, I rush hopefully out to do a little light tidying in the garden troughs but it continues to be so cold, with such bitter winds, that I can’t stay out very long before my fingers go numb.

Yesterday, despite grey skies and icy wind, I couldn’t stand to stay indoors a minute longer and went out to see what if anything was showing signs of life. Sadly, there isn’t much; even the hellebores are holding back far longer than usual, though a few buds are barely emerging here and there. As always, there are a few calendula blossoms trying to open, though dwarfed by the cold. The only flowers that look fresh and crisp are the stalwart snowdrops, which never fail to appear in January, bravely emerging through snow and ice in the coldest places.

Bringing Bulbs Back

Though some snowdrops are native to Europe, others found their way into English gardens through the challenges of war. Old English gardening books are full of stories about soldiers returning from battles in the Middle East bringing unusual forms of snowdrop back to England. It’s hard to imagine modern soldiers gathering bulbs; over the last two centuries, soldiering has changed quite a lot. Apparently back then, people in various military services overseas found time to explore the hills and mountains and plains. When they noticed interesting variations on plants familiar from home gardens, they sketched them and often brought them back to England. Old English memoirs and novels often mention the practice in village schools of nature observation. Children were encouraged to gather wildflowers, nuts, berries and lovely leaves for the ‘nature tables’ set up in many a classroom, and elementary students often kept nature journals and sketchbooks as well. These days, children at Waldorf schools still do this and for some of them at least, the practice of nature observation opens their eyes to the beauties of the natural world for life. What a gift!

My own children, and now my grandkids always collect interesting seedpods, catkins, lichen-covered sticks, colorful or skeletonized leaves and other bits and pieces, not just from woods and meadows but even as we walk around the neighborhood. They like to bring them home to play with, draw, or simply admire, and as their own pockets are fairly small, such things usually end up in my more capacious pockets. Indeed, I’ve often discovered an overlooked chestnut or slightly squishy berry when doing laundry (checking pockets has become a strong habit as so many things that do NOT belong in the laundry end up in pockets).

Children naturally see art in nature

Snowdrops Persist

After so many house moves, my once-large snowdrop collection has dwindled, but I have the satisfaction of knowing that their legacy lives on wherever I’ve lived. Snowdrops, like crocus, are good naturalizers, spreading slowly but surely as long as their foliage is allowed to ripen before they go dormant. They can spread and persist for decades, even centuries, despite adversity; when a friend who lives on the site of a century-old former nursery cleared the neglected land of its heavy ivy blanket, he discovered thousands of snowdrops covering half an acre or more.

In this tiny garden, I’m only growing common snowdrops, Galanthus nivalis, but they’re very lovely, common or not. The outer petals have the substance and texture of slubbed silk, while the inner petals are marked on their fronts with green fish or hearts and neatly penciled with green lines or dots on the inside. For all their delicacy of modeling, their toughness is impressive. On a cold morning after a hard frost, the flowers collapse, seemingly melted to mush. A few hours later, the (relatively) warming sun revives them and they rise again, crisp and fragrant. That example of endurance and resilience is especially welcome in these chilling times; despite freezing weather or smothering blanket of choking, oppressive ivy, these lovely little bulbs, seemingly so fragile, persist. Onward, right?

Posted in Crafting With Children, Gardening With Children, Health & Wellbeing, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Finding Spaciousness In Small Spaces

Posted on January 24, 2023 by Ann Lovejoy
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There’s always room for one more

Making Space

As the new year rolls on, I’ve been thinking a lot about space and spaciousness, inside and out. For starters, after years of living larger, this sweet little house still seems so small to me and I was worried about cramming in four more people when my family makes a mid-week overnight pit stop to take a break from their long commute. However, right across the street, an even smaller place is happily housing a family of four, including energetic twin 8 year old boys, as well as their friend who has lived there for many years. Long ago he made a tiny house-ish addition where various home sharers lived off and on. Now he lives there himself while the young family uses the main house, where they fitted two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room and a kitchen in a space smaller than my former bedroom in our Big House. They’re happy to be here after living under a terrifying political regime in Venezuela and they find that little house to be a haven of peace and comfort.

Happily, a little burst of New Year reorganizing has created some new places to be in our small house, some of them very fun. After moving so many times in recent years, once my daughter and I got here, we set the house up to our satisfaction and pretty much called it good. Four years later, looking at the space with fresh eyes helped us try new configurations of furniture that allowed unsuspected spaces to open up. My creative grandkids have some appealing ideas for making cozy corners to sleep in, places so fun to inhabit that the kids decided to trade off each week so they get a chance to be tucked in to each sweet spot. By day, we now stack four mattresses on our little daybed, making a princess-and-the-pea-sized pile that doubles as an indoor slide when the kids are feeling frisky. The cats also love to scale the heights and survey their territory from on high, admiring the improved view of busy birds in the garden.

Interior Enlargement

Things are opening up inside me as well. I’m co-facilitating a large-ish Senior Center book group as part of the all-island social justice book club and steering that rich, deep conversation is being a good way to stretch my own ideas and put my imagination to work. We are reading STAMPED: Racism, Antiracism and You, a Young Adult version of Ibram X. Kendi’s STAMPED From The Beginning “remixed’ by Jason Reynolds. It’s an engaging book that offers many talking points which spark great conversations and interior dialogs as well. Realizing yet again how much my own world view has been shaped by twisted history is prompting yet another round of personal revisioning.

During my girlhood years, New England’s colonial history was presented as progressive and positive, with happy stories about helpful, generous Indians eager to share their land (!). Even as a kid, that seemed unlikely, on a par with the cheerful, smiling turkeys we made for Thanksgiving table decorations in elementary school art class. Despite growing up in a time of great social turbulence and feeling ardently opposed to much of American foreign and national policy for most of my life, I still bump into pockets of resistance, finding little nuggets of racism hidden away in my thoughts and beliefs.

Cut Off Or Welcome In

That kind of sudden self knowledge can trigger deep defensiveness, a common response that can shut down a conversation right quick. My family of origin was big on emotional cut offs; cross one of us and you are history, with no recourse and no second chance. Such a moment of insight, however uncomfortable, can also offer an opportunity to open up our inner doors and windows and let in some fresh air and brighter light. When I feel that defensiveness kick in for myself and others,I’m finding it useful to step back and take a breath. Instead of calling out our mistakes in a shaming or blaming way, it feels more useful and healing to simply sit with that very human behavior a bit. That makes space for considering how rearranging our mental and emotional furniture might make room for more light and fresh air. Onward, right?

Posted in Health & Wellbeing, Social Justice, Sustainable Living | 5 Comments

Cherishing Our Gardening Elders

Posted on January 16, 2023 by Ann Lovejoy
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Carol, living her bucket list but leaving her bucket behind

A Marvelous Role Model

About five years ago, my dear friend Carol decided to emigrate to Panama. A vibrant 88 year old, Carol was one of my life heroes, a wise, kind, thoughtful, smart, engaged, active woman with connections to multiple community groups. Like so many others, I was beyond sad to lose her companionship but thrilled by her example. How courageous to uproot herself after decades in this community and transplant herself into a distant country that doesn’t even have mail service. Actually, that may be part of the attraction; one reason Carol made this move is that she too often felt overwhelmed, angry, horrified and sad about the state of our country. She found Panama to be a lot more peaceful, especially since following US news is more challenging there.

She already had family there and a circle of friends (of course), since she’d made long visits a number of times. In 1917, her winter visit lasted a lot longer than usual. When she returned, she announced cheerfully that she had bought a small house with an attached “casita” for guests or caregivers, should the need arise. Her new community consisted of a number of similar units, a development model that could be extremely successful here as well. Given the lack of affordable housing all over the country, modest, single story homes with built-in ADUs (Accessory Dwelling Units) would sell like trendy doughnuts.

A Legacy Of Tools & Dreams

Carol was an active part of the Friday Tidy gardening volunteers at our local library for years. When she told us of her plans to relocate, we were all a bit shocked but also moved by her courage and positive outlook. Quite a few conversations were sparked by her choices. Would we be as bold and daring as Carol? I wasn’t sure then and I’m still not; so many ties can keep us connected to our long time communities and the change would have to be pretty promising to dislodge me. When it came time for her to leave, she quietly distributed many of her favorite belongings, giving away a fancy pair of hand painted floral clogs here, a lovely jacket there, and wonderful gardening tools everywhere. All of us Tidies still use those tools and we often speak of Carol as we work with them

When the days dwindled and leaving time arrived, we had a party where we did a little gardening then enjoyed a potluck, laughing joyfully and tearing up a bit as we exchanged memories. Our time with Carol was so rich and it seemed like there was always a new side of her to discover. I attended a few other farewell parties thrown by some of her many friends and heard marvelous Carol stories. Many were new to me, and even as I was letting go of her, I was realizing how complex and fascinating a person Carol was, and how little any of us knew of her. Sadly, she died this week, from complications from a recent fall. Joyfully, she died in her own bed, snuggled with her dear companion, a cheerful, pleasant man who adored Carol and brought a lot of pleasure to her final years.

Practicing Appreciation

After Carol left, I thought a lot about how much more I had learned about her just in the last months of her time here. I’ve noticed before that when we meet people in their elder years, we (or at least I) often take them as they seem now and don’t always bother to learn much about how they got to be who they are. I think many, perhaps most lives are more complex than they might appear unless we steer or coax our conversations beyond the surface. After several memorial services in which again I discovered fascinating aspects to lives I thought I knew fairly well, I decided to start a class called Write Your Own Obit. We’ve been offering it at the local Senior Center for years now and it’s always a delightful experience for all participants. Who knows your story better than you?

Along the way, I realized that too many single people have nobody to remember or tell their stories when it’s too late to discover more. That’s why it’s so rewarding to spend a few hours with others, writing our own stories and listening to others as well. When people get stuck, we do a silly exercise where we make up an imaginary life, just for fun, then consider whether anything that came up in that story could be something we might do. I always tell the story about Carol, moving to Panama at the age of 88, and finding five years of new experiences, new friendships, and new love. What do you wish you’d done that you still could? Maybe it really is never too late to make a dream come true.

Posted in Health & Wellbeing, Planting & Transplanting, Sustainable Living | Tagged , , | 4 Comments