NEGLECTFUL GARDENER
And too many things on my To-Do list.
Whew, no more loneliness and fear! I think I’ve made it!
For two years, I have been calming my fears and combating my loneliness by sharing my memories, stories, and cautionary tales as a way of dealing with this empty nest phase of my life. Some of my friends will say I’ve been oversharing … and apparently not everyone is as excited about embracing change as I am.
“Stop with your life hacks!”
This is what my husband said last week in response to my suggestion that he turn off the TV and we take a walk. It’s possible, ok, highly likely that I had made several suggestions that day … I know I’ve shared a lot of them with you. But here’s the thing—I can’t fathom why he’s not interested in his gut microbiome. And how can he not care about his sleep chronotype? I, for one, feel so much better knowing he is a wolf (night owl), and I am a lion (early bird). Of course, that makes so much sense!
Maybe his resistance to some of my ideas is understandable. I have to admit that the jar of raw honey and freshly peeled garlic cloves that is bubbling and burping in the cabinet is a little weird, not to mention smelly. He’s refused to try my homemade kombucha, which has been brewing on the countertop for several weeks. I confess that I’m a little leery of the store-bought SCOBY, and still trying to get my head around purposefully adding bacteria to tea. It mostly tastes like vinegar, so I’m starting my second batch with a peach-flavored tea
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One idea he did like was the sound machine with chirping birds and wave sounds. I bought it to encourage him to relax and fall asleep. He’s adopted it as a background soundtrack and claims the dog loves it! However, neither he nor the dog is fond of my sunrise lamp. I have it programed for the sun to rise fifteen minutes before my alarm goes off, so I don’t have to get up in the dark. See the sleep chronotypes above and you’ll understand why he doesn’t like it! As for the dog, I think he does like it because as soon as the sun rises, he’s ready for a walk. Aha! That’s why my husband doesn’t like it.
Keeping up with all these new ideas is starting to catch up with me. It’s hard to eat the right way, sleep the right way, exercise the right way, and still do regular life stuff— like making it in to work every day!
I wrote on my master planning calendar that this spring I was going to build above-ground garden planter boxes and grow my own vegetables in the backyard. Now that it’s spring, and my routine all winter has been to buy produce from the local farmers market, I’m thinking of ways to get out of this item on my to-do list.
I was encouraged by a discovery I made last week. You see, right around Christmas, I bought several orchids as impulse buys at the checkout. I vowed to decorate after years of not decorating, and when I pulled out my decorations, I ended up throwing most of them away. The orchids were so fresh and looked beautiful next to my nativity display. Around mid-January, when the blooms had fallen off, I pulled them out of their pots, plopped them onto a large potted tree in the backyard, and forgot about them.
Today, as I was doing an inventory of building supplies for said garden boxes, I noticed that the orchids I had haphazardly tossed out were now blooming! With absolutely no attention, no watering, no pruning, or fertilizing of any kind, they had thrived. Which makes me wonder what else I could grow in this style of the neglectful gardener
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