On the Bright Side ...

The garden is growing

This has been a funny stretch in my life. Not funny ha ha, as we used to say. Funny strange.

My schtick as a writer is that I dig deep into my experiences to find some insights that are worth sharing. But the last six months of my life have been … well, they’ve been hard to write about. Not worth sharing.

I don’t want to write about life being hard, about pain, about the difficulty of dealing with an aging body. But that’s what I’ve been dealing with for six months, starting with a knee replacement in February and then a hip replacement in July. Not only can I find nothing interesting to say about this process, but it’s also stolen big parts of my brain. Perhaps I’ll write about it at some point, but not yet. Right now, I’m just trying not to limp while I push myself to walk more and bike more to get ready for a trip to Patagonia in January (fingers crossed).

On the bright side, our little experiment in vertical gardening has been a real success. There’s a corner in our yard that gets the best sun and stays much warmer than other areas, so we’ve wanted to take maximum advantage by growing things up. We’ve got squash and melons clambering all over their cattle-panel tunnel, promising an abundant harvest in the weeks to come. (There are tomatoes too, buried back in the jungle.)

Here are some pics. More writing coming soon. I can feel the clouds of recovery lifting.

April 14. The cattle panel is in place, ready for planting.

July 12

July 30. The summer heat is working its magic.

August 8. You can see the pole beans and tomatoes to the left.

Cantaloupe (or it could be Honeydew!)

Delicata Squash

This is year two for our fig tree and we’re starting to get fruit.

Lest you think I’m kidding about the new joints, consider the following. Now all I have to do is teach them to act like my old joints.

If you like this, give it ❤️. I could give a damn what it does to promote my work, but it sure makes me feel good.