Saturday morning, a few minutes before I need to leave for work.
Cooking breakfast eggs. Drinking tea with cream. Biscuit the blanket stealing dog on a blanket on the couch, because it is already warm out, so I have no need for a blanket on my lap that he can steal.
This was a week. A good week with good work. Had a chance to do a few days of substitute teaching for an elementary school.
Here’s something that it has taken me a surprisingly long time to figure out: we can’t control anybody, really, except for ourselves.
If, for example, two little boys want to hide under a cabinet and not come out, there is nothing anyone can do about it, especially a substitute like me, and they know it. We all know it.
A substitute teaching selfie.
(They came out, eventually, just as soon as I walked out the door toward the hallway where one of the other teachers was working.)
I have a full day of massages today. Groups are happily making their way back to the center, once their members are vaccinated for Covid, and people who have not had massages for more than a year are eager to get them. This weekend I’ll be working with quilters that I’ve known for years. They are kind, creative, and generous women. It is a gift to be with them again.
Work is a blessing.
Quiet moments before the work are also a blessing. I am sitting now at the kitchen table with the sun pouring in. The California poppies are blooming outside the window; also the snapdragons and my foothill penstemon. The ceanothus is done for now. I already made fresh hummingbird juice and filled the feeders. My son helped set up the solar fountain attachment for the bird bath the other day, and it is burbling happily. The native bleeding heart plants that I dug up from my Mom’s house are looking OK. I think a few of them might actually survive, which makes me happy, that a piece of my parents’ lovely yard will become part of mine, too. The hollyhocks look like they are about to bloom, which is a first. Usually, the deer find them and chomp them before they do much of anything. Haven’t seen the deer around lately, although just now there was one in the backyard who glanced at me in a bored sort of way, and then kept walking toward better pastures. Hopefully, those better pastures will not include my hollyhocks.
It’s Memorial Day weekend, and there was a lot of traffic on the highway yesterday. Seems like a lot of people won’t be working today. It’s the traditional first weekend of summer. Lots of unknowns for us Californians as we move into this season. The weather forecasters are calling for unseasonably hot temperatures this weekend: already up to the 90s tomorrow, even here in our little mountain town, and more than 100 in Sacramento. Although it is not even June, we are worried about our upcoming fire season. Wildfire anxiety was not part of my world growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. Really, it didn’t become something that I thought about until relatively recently, maybe the last six or seven years or so.
Hopefully, the firefighters will be able to rest this holiday weekend. Hopefully, you will be able to rest, too, and maybe remember someone on this Memorial Day that you loved and lost. I’ll be working, but I’ll have a quieter week next week and more time for reflection. I have planting to do, which for me feels like joy, and also hope to get back into the blackberries to do some trimming. My sweet son who just had his last day of school for the year said that he would love to help with the blackberries. I bought him a pair of thick leather work gloves. I’ll keep you posted on our progress.
Happy Memorial Day weekend, friends.
Now, off to work.
(Here’s a link to my latest Blackberry Project video. Take a look if you have a moment and let me know what you think.)
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