Dull February

It’s still February, and I could use a change of pace.

When I was younger, I would wish for something weird to happen when I felt like this. It didn’t happen as often as I wanted it to; I don’t know what made me so much of a drama queen back then.

I understand the sentiment, however. My life has become predictable, tedious, and dull. To work and then home. Eat at A&G on Friday (it’s Greek Night, of course). Work, writing. Sometimes I go to Starbucks to write.

Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com

I would like something unpredictable (in a good way) to happen.

Are there good unpredictable things that happen? Or are unpredictable things only tied to dire diagnoses and loved ones dying (neither of which I want)?

Am I just asking the universe for a cosmic cookie? And what’s the problem with that?

Spring Break comes in just two weeks (and a day). Maybe I’ll be able to find a change of pace then.

While My Garden Sleeps

While my garden sleeps, I make big plans for it. Each year I learn more about how to make it bigger and more interesting. I have always had what one calls a “green thumb”, although I’ve also had my share of mistakes.

When I was seven years old, my mom’s cousin Dale Hollenbeck brought me all the spindly, sickly plants on his shelves to try to bring back to life. By some mystery, it turned out that I could actually keep them alive. I may not have brought them back to vigor, but I could at least give them a fighting chance at a couple more years.

I didn’t know a lot about gardening, as was evidenced by the time I planted a kidney bean in a peanut butter jar in the pure clay soil of our backyard. By some miracle, the bean came up — well, the stem came up, but the bean itself with its seed leaves remained in the clay. I was left with a botanical mystery — the headless chicken of the plant world, which persisted in its barely animate form.

Perhaps the most important childhood moment for me as a gardener was the discussion I had at age 14 with my neighbor and almost-grandfather, Johnny Belletini. Johnny taught me a small but extremely important lesson — all plants had names, even weeds, and even the weeds could be useful. Most importantly, he taught me about dandelion wine. This led to a very enthusiastic me running back to my house with a dandelion wine recipe in hand and forbidding my parents from mowing the lawn until I picked all the dandelion flowers for wine. (Note: there is nothing forbidding a fourteen-year-old from making dandelion wine in US statute. They just can’t drink it.) My parents and I spent four good years making wine as a result, until I left for college. But I digress.

I didn’t get back into growing plants (or winemaking, for that matter) until after I got my Ph.D., mostly because I had neither the time nor the place to garden. I dabbled in landscaping my wee rental house in Oneonta NY with shade plants because that’s all I had to work with. When I moved to Maryville and bought a house, however, my dreams of gardening blossomed (ahem) again. My taste in gardening developed.

At my first house, I had no basement, no sunny windowsills — and a taste for cottage flowers that would frame my cute little acquisition. I couldn’t find the plants I wanted at the local greenhouse. My father and I built me the world’s smallest greenhouse out of four wooden-framed storm windows, and I started seeds there every year for a while., running a cord out the back door to the chicken house heater that kept it warm. If the electricity went out, an entire crop could be ruined, and that happened at least once.

I live in a bigger house now with my husband, and this house has a full basement. In the room that used to be the coal room, the previous owner fitted it with shelves. We fitted it with shop fluorescents and grow bulbs, and I now have a grow room big enough to handle 12 seed flats.

The gardening theme at this house: Everything I plant needs to have something edible about it except for the moon garden, whose plants tend to be white-flowered, strongly scented, and toxic. Right now, I have the seed flats waiting for seeds at the right planting time. I have some seeds cold-stratifying in the basement refrigerator with some roots that I will plant in the spring. I have a piece of ginger which I hope will sprout so I can plant it for a bigger yield later this year.

As always, I have big plans for the garden as it slumbers in its February torpor.

Proposal: A Real February Holiday

We need a holiday in February.

In the US, we have Thanksgiving in November, Christmas a month later, and New Year’s Day a week after that. So we greet the darkness of midwinter with a vision of a glowing fireplace and wassail and Santa in the Coca-cola red garb and the reality of stolen moments of togetherness in-between the Christmas crowds and the ugly sweater office parties. But fantasized versions of Christmas are good; our movies reflect the family Christmas we need, and instruct us to make our own families and love the people we have.

Then there’s the time from after New Year’s until spring, the hardest part of the winter. Ice and slush smeared with cinder and mud, with no red ribbon or colorful lights breaking the monotony.

What about Valentine’s Day? you ask. Valentine’s Day, as long as I have lived, has been a show of lording privilege over others. In grade school, the children all decorate boxes for others who stuff valentines in. If the teacher doesn’t require kids have valentines for everyone, then the popular children get valentines and the unpopular ones do not. If the teacher requires that children give everyone valentines, then the unpopular children get ugly, uncomplimentary, and sometimes literally snotty valentines. As adults, the haves display their Valentine’s booty on social media, and the have-nots — don’t.

Maybe we should make Valentine’s Day a real holiday, where we show love by giving? Gather our friends and have a good lunch before we put red bows on the dogs at the humane society and walk them; give manicures and pedicures to the women at the senior home; clean out our cupboards for the soup kitchen and give our old dishes to the women’s shelter.

And those flowers? Give them to someone who would not get a flower otherwise. A friend of mine gave me a white rose in my office one year, in a time when I hadn’t dated for years. The best February ever.