What Kind of Place Did You Bring Me to This Time?

We planted the vegetable garden yesterday. And by we I mean my wife and my daughter. I spent the day working some aches and pains from being a helping hand on a neighborhood project on Saturday while Sigrid and Michelle were getting all the grunt preparation work for the garden accomplished.

The spectacular weather we had in early April made a wonderful comeback this weekend with blue skies and light breezes and moderate middle seventies temperatures. Saturday about fifty of us managed to bang out a decent piece of work along Greeneville's Walking Trail as part of a cleanup that was long overdue.

The women of my house went shopping and rounded up all the gardening supplies from humus mixed with manure (I became an expert on the light breezes in a hurry, believe you me), through the steel fence railing and five foot high fencing and an overhead mesh net (Michelle's way of telling the squirrels and birds she is NOT in the growing food for them to eat business this summer) to a variety of seeds that she planted (carrots, and lettuce, and radishes and sunflowers, because she likes sunflowers and if planted out in the open, as they grow the squirrels will climb up and snap off the heads of the plant which makes her very angry).

Yesterday she and her mom went shopping for pepper and tomato plants, pre-grown as as the marketing guys like to call them and she planted those in the garden as the long afternoon rays bathed the backyard in sunshine. I was worrying about a story for my job I needed to write by end of the day tomorrow, and I will, but I didn't get very much of it done yesterday because I just wanted to enjoy the sense of not having to do anything for anyone.

Our son stopped by and helped bring my replacement cell phone on line (I am horrible on cell phones, if they're called Droid II. I am now on my third one and have no idea why they hate me, but they should because I hate them because they don't work). Of course, I have no idea how to do anything with the phone except to hand it to someone who does and hope there's a happy ending. It's amazing how addicted I am to a device to whose existence I was oblivious less than a decade ago.

I've discovered our lives, yours as much as mine, are spent more with strangers than with the ones we love and who love us. We assume we shall have all the time in the world to share as much of our lives as we so choose with whomever we choose and are terminally surprised to realize how much of those lives are lived in other people's rooms.
-bill kenny