By the time we get to the end of this month, one third of the year will have gone.
One third!
Of 2023!
Where does the time go?
Now I am beginning to feel so much better, I realise how poorly I was, so much of my time in the last few years has been spent sitting around wondering why I don’t feel like getting up and doing something. Or in and out of hospital.
But now I have the feeling of energy again, though sadly it wears off more rapidly than it used to do, which may be recovery, or may be age. I cannot now imagine how I used to dance all night, or, indeed, why. But I did do it. I know. I was there. Only a few years ago after a rest at tea time and a bit of food I was ready to go again and do something in the evening. Now I am finding myself sitting around online window shopping in the evening, which is hardly up to my standards of being productive. I’m not even reliably productive at sitting around window shopping; I tend to drop off.
It could be worse, I could be watching television through my eyelids.
Part of the problem is the fresh air. Getting out in the garden is great, today I spent several half hours trying to clear the land drain under the outside tap, because it isn’t draining. The OH said he would help because I had got to the limit of my short arm for digging out the mud and solid clay at the bottom that was preventing the water draining away. The OH after a bit of ‘Now? You mean now?’ having found an archery competition on You Tube, and thereby that the best archers are female and about fifty years younger than he is, eventually showed up with a crowbar.
Crowbar – mud?
It took him about three minutes to decide that the ground was waterlogged because of – rain and that the drain could not be cleared, before he flounced back indoors, leaving me to get on with scraping the mud out of the hole.
I did get covered in mud, which was satisfactory and then went back to sorting the dandelions.
I’m amazed no one has yet bred a dandelion cultivar for sale with a huge flower and much smaller leaves and in colours other than yellow, though it is very cheerful. I feel breeders are missing a trick, dandelions grow so willingly and prolifically anywhere, they almost root in concrete. You could have rare varieties, growing competitions, cups for the biggest clock, the possibilities are endless, not to mention recipes for the roots and the leaves for the non-allergic.
If you don’t want them everywhere this is the time of year, early spring, to root them out, which is what I spent an hour or so in the morning doing.
Tomorrow I am going to tackle the Lords and Ladies, which are back in huge numbers round the flagstones under which I sieved the soil to get rid of the roots. They are also under the beech hedge, which is their natural habitat. Highly poisonous and irritant, they were used as a starch for ruffs in Elizabethan times, which accounts for the sniffy expressions of some of the aristocracy in Tudor portraits. The OH was bought a pair of unlined Harris Tweed shorts as a small boy and bitterly recalls trying to stand with his tender thighs exactly in the air space in the middle of each leg. I daresay his facial expression was thoroughly New Elizabethan and similarly far from relaxation and mirth.
The rain is due to start on Easter Monday, it being the traditional outdoor garden centre shopping day, which leaves tomorrow to bid farewell to the weeds and unwelcome plants and make some spaces for planting out lovely flowers in the middle of May, which is last frosts around here, and then it will be the end of May, then June, and then we’ll be half way through the year.
Where does the time go?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~