Greenstorm's Journal

I'm supposed to be looking for love, but love is hard right now, it's all pain. Instead I'll look for points of connection. I am grateful for all of them.

A point of connection: talking to my coworker today. We were standing by the door to the office, looking out into the afternoon rain, talking about a spot we'd both been to. The blackflies are bad this year. It's hard to get through that alder and slash (alder up here is a long-stemmed shrub that sprawls and lies in waves along the ground and as high as maybe ten feet and twines through and captures everything). There aren't many people who know what I do, who know what it's like to even really go off a hiking trail and just walk, let alone for a purpose. It has meaning.

A point of connection: I say "oh no, did I just ruin my reputation for asking surface-level, easy questions?" and someone laughed.

A point of connection: the house itself is truly silent except for the laptop fan. The sun is fading. I am here, in this place, safe and partnered. I even wear the ring.

A point of connection: the lake and I don't have an established relationship. Nonetheless in the midst of the heavy stormcloud and mist and ongoing rain I looked across it and there was a huge bright ring of light out in the middle of the water, glowing and silver, a momentary gift of beauty given me for no reason at all.

A point of connection: another coworker learned I liked old maps yesterday, so he spent a couple hours with the plotter making me an 1850s or 1870s map of the area to put up, full size, in colour-- and then another of his favourite hand-drawn map of the area, and then a card of old forestry videos. I need to think up a suitable offering in return. This is how we make friends.

A point of connection: my tomatoes are thriving, growing a third in size every day. My mixes are so much bigger than any of the others.

A point of connection: my rose rhubarb mead is the most beautiful baby pink, and the expired ale yeast I used in it is going gangbusters. I should step feed it.

A point of connection: it rained the last two days, lots of water, slow enough to soak in, fast enough to be real water. My garden is happy. The ducks are happy. My lawn is happy. The world provides. Tomorrow I will go out and plant seed mixes.

I love how the corn differentiates: stocky, tall, slender, tillering.

I got my first open tomato flower: the stigma isn't super exserted but the anther cone really is open and the stigma is accessible. It's also from a big robust plant in the northern mix set, so it may be a bee-created hybrid from last year. That's what I'm hoping anyhow, and it was the point of last year. It's so neat to have projects like this that reveal themselves over time.

When I visited my coworker the other day his wife made roasted rhubarb which was caramelly and sticky, I think with no added sugar, and I have lots of rhubarb. I'm grateful for seasonally abundant food and for people who eat that way and share their knowledge.

My body feels properly tired. Between gravity and my blanket I feel... at rest, and I am grateful for that.

It rained! My corn will be so happy.

Mom and I did some companionable silence tonight, it was really nice.

Line-dried bedding, all the sheets and blankets on every bed.

My upstairs bed, firm and expansive, and how different it is from the soft marshmallow nest of my downstairs bed.

My weighted blanket. I hadn't realized I missed using it.

My mom, actually.

Feeling like an adult around my mom, feeling comfy opining on relationships and interpersonal with confidence. I love her, and I am not seeking her approval, though like any of my intimates I'd pay attention if she disapproved. That's important to me.

Corn that's almost knee-high by the fourth of July. I'm looking at you, Cascade Ruby Gold.

Evening chats with Tucker, and a moment of reconnection.

Rain in the forecast.

Earplugs.

I'm grateful that I can run into someone in the grocery store and get stuck in a conversation about gardening so that I have to let folks past me in line because otherwise I'll hold up the line.

I'm grateful for girls who seem flirty.

I'm grateful for the inexorable roll of the seasons, for the way the sun is already setting and it's only barely 10pm, for that huge swing in environment.

I'm grateful to have two different soils to play in, or really three, or even four depending, in my gardens.

I'm grateful for the way photographs can evoke memory that would otherwise be lost.

I'm grateful for how soft my cat is.

I'm grateful for activity partners.

I'm grateful to live in a situation where I can just make cookie dough if I want to, and probably then give those cookies away if I want to do that.

I'm grateful for how fast my corn is growing.

I'm grateful I could get my potatoes in the "ground"

I'm grateful to have 4 cord of birch laid in, with the option for 2 more this fall if I can afford it. The beetle pine is going away after fifteen years of making things easy and it's getting to be the time we need to think about seasoning wood and figuring out wood types again.

I'm grateful that I find the little sloshing swishing sound of my dishwasher so relaxing.

I'm grateful someone strung up a clothes drying line on this house before I got here, and for how quickly my heavy blankets dry in this weather, and that I can give all my bedding a good couple days of sunshine twice a year.

I'm grateful for throughbreezes.

I'm grateful that when Avallu is anxious he's learning to come to me, to go inside, and to ask for hugs.

I'm grateful for the adaptability of skin, how it can put together a protective tan like magic.

I'm grateful for the newly-sown gaspe peeking up already.

I'm grateful to be present with myself, right now, inside my own mind.

I am again grateful for the shower I'm about to have, and how lovely it will feel to be unstickied and clean and in bed.

I missed this last night, so I'll do two today maybe. Anyhow, I will do one now. I have a keyboard and I'm not doing it from bed on my phone, that's a good start.

I am grateful to myself for taking the plastic off my north window so I can open every side of my house and feel the moving air on my skin. I am grateful to the wind for gently stirring every aspen leaf even remotely in earshot into a quiet ocean susurrus.

I am grateful for the seasons for progressing with the comfort of structure and the intrigue of variation. Today the leaf miners are out on the aspens. Last week was hot two years in a row. This year there are more roses. The apples are swelling just as they always do.

I am grateful for my garden. Already it's bigger than I am, it's more information than I could ever take in. Tomatoes greening and foliage exploding, corn expanding in such different ways in each bed: up and slim or wide and green and thick-stemmed or slender, each a different green, each leaf a different shape, squash putting on leaf after leaf and the soaked seeds sending up cotyledons that make me wish I'd recorded all thirty-odd types seperately because I've never seen a squash cotyledon so huge, beans, melons, brassicas-- it's happy, and I'm happy, and I'm already thinking for next year. I walk it every morning.

I'm grateful that my past self sowed just a few glutinous barley seeds on my deck, for seed multiplying and to see what would happen. One type either didn't sprout at all or was eaten by crows; the other did sprout in two different buckets of soil. One bucket had two seeds, one bucket had three. Now I can observe the differences between buckets (maybe the drainage in one is stopped up, the plants in it are paler and smaller, or maybe it's a fertilizer issue?) and the glorious tillering on the biggest plant -- nine stalks! -- and just generally have a sense of bounty and focus different than the larger-scale garden gives me. Hopefully it will be a successful seed multiplication.

I'm grateful for my geese, who accept me as one of the flock.

I'm always grateful for cooking and eating with people. It may be the most human of experiences I'll ever be accorded.

I'm grateful to always be learning more about myself, to be able to see patterns pop up and think about them and hold them through my daily life.

I'm grateful for a pantry full of empty shining jars and a summer to fill them; for empty carboys and rhybarb and roses to fill them; for a house full of the things I love to do.

My gratitude today goes to:

Liminal spaces where every being feels comfortable being loudly and completely themselves, instead of feeling the need to live small and compromise

That despite my large-scale optimism about people, which I still believe is correct, my small-scale pessimism is wrong

Am I forming a social group in Fort?

Gardens

My dogs, who have been no doubt keeping that huge bear I saw near my house away from All The Things

Thunderstorms on the beach

Things cooked with fire

Water: heavy raindrops, waves on gravel, drops of moisture on nasturtiums, ducklings in mud

I've noticed that every time I have a good day now I tense up, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I am grateful to see that, to hold myself gently, to seek out experiences that will allow it to relax over time.

Friendly contractors.

Today my gifts are:

The corn that lives: open oak party (oops, it gets to ten feet?), tenacious painted mountain resprouting, saskatoon white that the crows left alone, gaspe because always gaspe, the first bits of norden, the passed-on atomic orange, sasaskatchewan rainbow and assiniboine flint that are lonely and want to fold into gaspe, two resprouting plants of Floriani, the handful of early riser and oaxacan green dent that survived...

My very robust-looking tomatoes and melon starts, and the squash that's putting out new leaves so quickly.

That cool window in the evening between 7 and 10.

Unscented lotion.

A well good enough that forgetting to turn off the water results in happy ducklings and not stress. And just ducklings, honestly.

Cooking my feelings.

Cutting the strings of unreciprocated commitments.

Remembering that my time is my own.

The ability to make rye-chocolate-chip cookies at 11 at night.

Today my gratitude goes towards:

My stubborn hopeful past self who planted tomatoes even though I thought I was moving.

The magic time between 7 and 10pm when it's cool out but still bright and I can get lost in the garden.

Those bits of painted mountain corn that are resprouting.

The way one's mind can't sustain max intensity for more than 2 hours, so the worst will always fade if I find a way through that period.

Chance neighbour meetings.

My very good, very smart dog.

Corn.