Earthy woman?

When I was in grade school, my favorite books were Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books.  I read all of them several times.  I also loved Baby Island by Carol Ryrie Brink, in which two girls are shipwrecked and land on an island with four babies in their care.  I have always imagined myself as a pioneer, someone who would thrive while living off the land, living a simple, elemental life, growing and preserving my own food, making what I needed, needing only the basic supplies.  This has been a big part of my self-image.

When Sweet Hubby and I bought this house, my first to own, I was delighted that it came with a large backyard, full of potential.  SH got right to work and planted a patch of raspberry canes, and later a row of blueberry bushes.  He build four garden boxes and planted lettuces, onions, cucumbers, strawberries, scallions, tomatoes.  When he built our deck, he planted all kinds of herbs and flowers in boxes.  It turns out he can be quite a gardener.

Imagine my surprise to find out that I am not.  I was happy to go out and pick what he grew, but I never got my hands dirty.  Not once.  I am, I fear, not a woman of the earth at all.  If I had to survive in the wild, as in my fantasies, I would last maybe 2 days; 4 if there were fresh water available.

Eventually SH's attention turned to other interests.  The raspberries still come back every year, and the blueberry bushes are doing well.  But the garden boxes have, for a long time now, been nothing but dirt covered with black tarp, and the wood forming the boxes has begun to rot.

Recently I crossed paths with a neighbor of ours who runs a landscaping business, and I impulsively asked her to come to our house to advise me how to get a garden going in those sad, neglected boxes.  I figured I ought to give gardening at least a one year try on to see if my image of myself is a complete sham or simply unexplored.

What I got from Sally Ann turned out to be a lot more than I had bargained for.  She immediately saw the possibilities in this big piece of land, and helped me imagine, bit by bit, what a glorious place it could be.  She addressed not just the garden beds, which will need to be completely rebuild and reconfigured, but imagined a hedgerow along the back of the yard, a rain garden, meadow plants to replace the sad, rough grass, paths curving throughout the yard, cleaning up the mess around the shed.

I am absolutely thrilled with this new vision of what our yard can be.  Not only will it be so much more beautiful and fruitful for us, but it will no doubt add greatly to the resale value of the house, should we decide to move at some point.  It has been in the back of my mind for a long time to make this one of our home projects, but neither SH nor I have ever taken the initiative to get it going.  That moment of casually bumping into Sally Ann has turned out to be what might possibly be the start of a new (and probably expensive) chapter in the years-long project of turning this house and its grounds into a home that it truly ours and truly beautiful.

Yes, it's green

This morning I made avocado bread.  Not the toast spread with avocado which is so popular these days.  This is an actual loaf of bread with mashed avocados as one of the main ingredients.  It's quite good, very rich and moist and lightly sweet.  I got the recipe from a friend of mine, and immediately bought two avocados, then waited until they ripened to soft.  I couldn't quite imagine how this would taste, and it does, indeed, have an avocado flavor, which I happen to like.  Here's the recipe:

2 C flour mixed with

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

2 very ripe avocados, mashed

3/4 C sugar

3 eggs

Oven to 350.  Beat together the avocados, sugar, and eggs until well mixed.  Fold in the dry ingredients.  Bake for 1 hour in a greased or sprayed  loaf pan.

Easy and good!  It might also be good with chopped nuts added in.

Another follow up - Bye-bye bridge

I have bowed out of bridge lessons.  Each lesson was 2 1/2 hours long, twice a week.  There was a LOT of information during each lesson, what the instructor called "a firehose of information", very dense and using an argot specific to the game.  Because I had to miss a few sessions, I felt I was falling further and further behind, not understanding the principles, not really learning.  I began to feel tense and uneasy about it, not looking forward to the sessions, and foreseeing that I would have to miss even more of them in the coming weeks.  So I gave my notice to the instructor, who was, predictably, very understanding.

I learned that new rookie lessons will begin in January, so I figure between now and then I can study the information I already have, as well as playing practice games on a couple of the apps and websites I've found.  Then, when I start again, I won't be starting from scratch and might be able to keep up and learn, even if I still have to miss some sessions.  

It was such a relief to let it go.  Why on earth keep doing something I'm feeling anxious about when there is a path to better understanding in the future?

However, when I reflected this experience, I realized that I have never really learned to knuckle down, to study in a deep, committed way.  I breezed through high school with little effort, relying on native intelligence and casually gathered knowledge to get by.  I suppose if I had applied myself I could have had a sterling GPA, but that wasn't really important to me.  And when I was in college, all I wanted to do was theater and dance, so I would get As in those classes and a C in whatever required class I was taking to round out my education.  I left college after 2 years to move to Hollywood to pursue an acting career and never earned a degree.

I enjoy my relaxed, loosey-goosey, impulsive, free spirited approach to life.  There has never been a time I have regretted not having a college degree.  But I do see that, in this one arena of trying to learn something new that is challenging and requires a fair bit of effort, I don't have much strength.  I would read the pages handed out at each bridge class and my eyes would start to close and my attention wander because I just wasn't getting it.

It's way too late in life for me to be hard on myself about this.  Mostly I'm just noticing something about how I move through life and reflecting on how I feel about it.  Actually, I feel all right.  But I do want to learn bridge, so I'm going to keep at the practicing, get myself some foundation so as to be ready for the next round of classes.  And then I'll either catch on or I won't.  And, loose goose that I am, I'm sure I'll manage to be all right about that, too.