Yay, Progress

I was just telling Patrick last night that we need another summer. A double summer. After a few moments (and a few more sips of wine), I revised that declaration. What we need, I decided, was double the summer weekends. Is anyone with me, here? We've been spending our weekends outside, by and large-- Patrick at festivals, and myself in the garden-- or out having fun, which has had one very predictable consequence: nothing is getting done inside. Boxes still need to be unpacked. Refinished furniture projects are piling up in the back bedroom. We haven't cleaned since the party. ::Shudder:: I can't go much farther down this list before I begin feeling the need to sit and breathe deeply into a paper bag, so I'll stop there. Life is a long time, Kristina, I tell myself, wheezing at the piled-up laundry, the weedy flowerbeds, the unpacked boxes.

As an alternative to wheezing, let's focus on the things that are getting done, shall we? Last week sometime, we met after work at a very lovely very hoity toity overpriced nursery in Binghamton. And Patrick gave me a late anniversary present. He let me make a pile on the counter, and then he nodded and handed the lady some money and I got to take the pile home and plant everything in my garden.

I kept wandering back and forth from the counter to the nether reaches of the nursery, returning with a couple of this or that to contribute to the pile, looking at Patrick, begging for him to impose some limit on me. Because that, I knew, was the only way to keep me from going nuts. 

In the end, I came home with a fernleaf bleeding heart, two Japanese painted ferns, two frosted brunnera (on sale!), and one fat, sassy pot of lady's mantle. The larger shrubby things are oakleaf hydrangeas I bought two weeks back (and forgot to blog), at the same hoity toity nursery. It's a big improvement, I think, from this:

(Funny. I took this picture just before I planted the hydrangeas. You can actually see one off to the right, sitting on the lawn. How's that for keeping it real?)

The sedums have been relocated, as have the ferns, and a whole lot of weedy nonsense headed for the compost pile. 

I still have tons of space, and lots more weedy nonsense to cart off. And this is where the life is a long time part comes in-- I can't afford to fill all that space up this year, so I will let it be. Life is a long time, and a journey, and so I will take lots of pictures of this happy, maintained, attractive corner, and do my best to ignore weedy nonsense. After all, there will be an anniversary next year, too...

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