Planning and Planting

Planting seeds.

I planted seeds in February and fussed over them. I do it every year. I love watching things grow.

I plant seeds as an act of faith that winter will end. I plant hoping that these seeds will grow and live. I have never been able to plant one of these seedlings in a garden yet.

Two inch buds grew…. I watched with great hope. The poppies sprouted, shot up, and died first in less than two weeks. It was liking watching a graceful mass suicide.

Other seedlings grew more slowly. I repotted these seedlings carefully into larger containers sometime in April. I hovered and watered. … And watched all slowly die by May. They actually seemed to mold over so it may have been the soil.

In April, I found some heirloom Quaker tomato seeds that I had meant to plant. I tossed some into another container and left them upstairs in the warmest room in the house. One plant shot up to 4 inches in four weeks, outgrowing plants started 3 months prior. This leads me to conclude that nothing is predictable when planting.

The Quaker tomato plant has been moved to the garden. As I watch it, I hold my breath. He is the first I have ever been able to plant outside. I buried most of him to give him a good root base but a lot can happen in a Connecticut growing season.

While I struggle with seeds that should grow, I noticed one of my house plants has a weird climbing stalk that does not match the houseplant’s pointed leaves. The climbing stalk has familiar leaves; those of a tomato plant. A tomato plant is growing freely in one of my house plants. Someone is mocking me.

They say that there really is a fairy per house plant keeping it alive. I think that they might be trying to teach me a lesson. It is not logical but they are more successful than me. A tomato plant is thriving where there were no tomato seeds. Worse, parts of the tomato plant have started withering since I started watching it.

I have a sense that there is a lesson in all this. There are things that we can control and I need to learn that there are things that I can not control.

Yellow Jacket Update:

I began blasting a radio at the bedroom wall where the yellow jackets had been living last fall. I did this for 5 days in April before realizing that there are no yellow jackets leaving the hole. They were gone already. Why did my intuition tell me last fall to blast the boom box at the bedroom window wall this spring if they were already gone? I know that I did NOT scare off the yellow jackets in 5 days. I feel led astray by my intuition.

My next door neighbor still wants to shoot the hole by the bedroom window with bug killing spray. He likes killing things.

While out watering flowers, my neighbor who lives below noticed that some yellow jackets are carefully building a nest under the roofline of the shed. I ask him if I could get a boombox onto the roof to scare them off. What did he say? “Your choice of music will only scare the neighbors, not the bees. Is that fair to the neighbors?”

Bill III

I went to Bill’s memorial service. I was wondering what he would look like if I saw him. Supposedly ghosts like to attend their funerals. I don’t see ghosts so I had no expectation of seeing one, just a curiosity. No- that’s not true. I was a little anxious that I might start seeing them.

We only saw Bill in suits at work. I wondered what Bill would wear if we saw him. I had a sense that he loved to dress up and add his dash of flair and color to every outfit he wore. He has a hot sauce tie that matched impeccably with his suit and shirt so that it looked like a beautiful outfit, not a tacky tie with a suit. He wore a lot of jewel tones (purples, blues) so that I noticed a vibrancy of color in his perfect color coordination.

A co-worker thought that Bill would wear a Hawaiian shirt and khakis on his free time. I had a sense of a casual suit. During the memorial service, I held my breath anxiously. I did so because I never know what to expect anymore. Thankfully, I saw no ghosts.

During one song, I saw Bill in my mind’s eye in a casual tan suit, probably a linen suit, get into a Cadillac convertible and ride straight into the sun. This suit idea conflicted with my co-worker’s idea so I doubted my vision. We asked his sister after the service what Bill would wear and she confirmed that he loved to dress well. If not doing work around the farm and going out, he’d be wearing a suit.

That was Bill riding into the spirit realm in style.