Greenstorm's Journal

I grew up in a huge (albeit cold and unfinished) house, 4000 square feet and 5 acres for 6 people. There were always places both indoors and outdoors I could go to be alone, private, and safe. In the house if I didn't want to be in my room I could climb through the undrywalled bathroom, over the pile of contruction lumber and down the not-yet-or-ever-wired hallway, into the sauna-without-electricity which was basically an unheated unwindowed cedar room full of spiders, dust, and peace. It felt like the tombs of Atuan, known only by touch. Or I could go upstairs, through the library, into mom's office where she was never to be found during non-school hours since she was doing chores, making dinner, and taking care of my brothers and I could take a book off the shelf and hide under her desk (which faced away from the door). No one could find me and it was warmer in there.

When I graduated from highschool me, mom, and one brother moved into a 42" boat. The boat had three rooms plus a toilet room: mom's room with the shower in it, the front V berth, and then the galley-slash-salon with a couch in it on which I slept as long as I lived there. There was no privacy at all, visual or sound or anything, except when my brother was at school and mom was at work (and she didn't work in the office every day). The boat was (illegally, since we lived on it) moored in the city's downtown and I learned to live in public spaces at that time: the new library, the new plaza next to the transit station, the acres-big park with a bike path encircling it and swings, the big cheap clattering chinese restaurant with a million things on the menu which I could even occasionally afford.

I had no money at this time, I was working a very part time job for minimum wage and I was supposed to be going to school. I'd go to the university and use the computers there but I failed out of my classes pretty quickly; I was too afraid to talk to adults to ask them for help, and too poor to afford the textbooks. I tried to get a job following mom's advice ("just go in with a resume") but through some combination of the early 2000s recession, being too afraid of adults to talk to them, never having been raised around non-abusive adults and not knowing what to say, having no idea what working actually entailed since mom was a college professor and had hoed beans as a kid and dad hadn't worked, being deeply depressed, and being autistic I had a two year job search that failed to get me more than the occasional month or two at part-time minimum wage. At that point it was clear I wasn't doing well in university, and to motivate me mom kicked me out: she said I either needed to pass classes (which I needed to pay for myself) or pay rent on the boat. I wasn't able to do either.

Luckily my boyfriend had started working at a nice job at his mom's workplace at that point, and we could move in together to an actual apartment.

(This is so painful to write about)

For awhile we lived together in a couple of what were probably fine apartments, but that felt amazing to me: carpet! that was less than twenty years old! Smooth, drywalled, mudded, sanded, and painted walls! Molding at the base of the walls! Doors that fit their frames and frames that were finished! Showers with curtains! I felt rich. I was not rich. I was living with someone who we thought we would be together forever, but I was still only working the occasional stint in call-center jobs. He worked at a regional airport, so we lived deep on what were then the fringes of suburbs whose population mostly commuted to the city. He could drive, I could not. The busses to the city took a couple hours, and they did cost money. I grew tomatoes on a south-facing deck, walked to a yoga class and to the local nursery where I hung out, and spent a tremendous amount of time online.

It didn't feel unusual for me to be dependent on my partner, to not be able to leave. I'd never had the option of leaving while growing up, of living on my own. I'd never had enough money at one time to make up a full rent cheque even if I were to take every cent in my account and the change in my purse and spend it on just that one thing.

That was at least two apartments in the suburbs. Long story short we moved to a third apartment in the city to be closer to another couple we were dating. A year or two more went by, maybe more, I'm really uncertain of the timeline at this point. I was completely unable to get work in the city; I volunteered at the botanical garden for years, sold knives door to door for a bit but didn't have the network that business model relied on to sell to all my friends.

Finally one of my friends from the polyamory group had to go on maternity leave; she owned a cleaning business that she'd built and wanted to pass it on to someone. I started cleaning with her and I was completely terrible in the beginning, but she was patient and trained me up for months, introduced me to all the clients, and then eventually left it in my hands.

As soon as I had enough money to pay my own rent, my first partner said he needed some time living apart. I believed him. I suspect he believed him. The last time we ever had sex or an intimate date was in our shared bed, though, because once I moved out he made excuses about not getting together in private, got married to part of that other couple we were seeing, that person vetoed me with him and my other partner (the other part of that couple), and every time we got together for the next several years he'd express what seemed like real interest in meeting up but never actually follow through.

Anyhow, when I moved out I didn't know any of that. I found a room on craigslist in a house full of gay dudes. It was a beautiful old house, immaculately kept, with a big fishtank in the livingroom. At this point I'd developed some social skills but I still didn't spend much time in the shared areas, just up in the little attic room I had my own rights to. I kept my rats in there, my own fishtank for a little while, and my bed: that's all that fit. I wasn't home much: I spent a bunch of time at the home of the couple we were dating (I didn't really know I wasn't dating the one partner yet, and the other was still seeing me), and then my commute to work and back took a couple hours each way on the bus if I wanted to be on time. I learned the city's bus system intimately.

This is when I was first buying my own food. I remember buying a frozen brick of masago, the cheap orange kind full of msg ad sweetener, and eating about half of it on rice, then not eating any again for months. I couldn't leave anything in the kitchen, not even a dirty glass overnight, and friends didn't come to my place.

My home at this point was really the home of the couple I was dating, and my time was spent more there than at the room I rented. I'd swing home, hang out for a day, feed and play with the rats, and swing away again for a day or two or even three, depending on how much the rats were eating/drinking. In the other house I had no bedroom or anything like that, not even a drawer, so I lived with my bag full of housecleaning supplies including little vaccuum on one shoulder, and my big hockey bag full of clothes and books on the other. The other house meant stability though, it was people who loved me at the time, who cared for me and who I spent time with, and I (and partner) had been spending time there for the last several housing moves so it felt stable. It felt like home.

Then came the veto, and that house was no longer mine. I'd planted things there: a pawpaw tree, elephant garlic, raspberries, saskatoons. I'd built a greenhouse. I built a greenhouse in the backyard of the house I was renting a room from too, with the help of my other partner, and one of my roommate's friends offered me a job working with plants. I took it, and for the first time was, not full time employed or anything, but was actually employed by another person in a job where I could pay my rent.

A kaleidoscope of homes and partners follows: I moved on average once every six months for awhile, in with partners mostly but sometimes with roommates. This home had a hole in the floor that let in daylight and then the ceiling collapsed. That home we moved in as a group, lived there for six months while the landlord was always going to install floors, then got evicted when he finally did. This home was a studio space that one partner's brother let us live in for awhile, then kicked us out. That one I couldn't afford when the relationship ended. This one was really too much of my income. That one was a friend's place she rented me while she lived elsewhere, but I got the boot when she moved back in (that one was really lovely, and it's where I was the longest aside from here). There were sublets and sublets and sublets. I kept a PO Box in town, paid for, because it's the only way I could do all the legal documentation things you needed to receive mail for. When I needed to recover a password on the phone to do my taxes I ran through three or four possible postal codes when they asked what mine was.

I played ATM fishing every week, putting in two dollars so I could get at the extra 1.50 in my account and thus debit 3.50 at the store for groceries.

I remember moving my things in a wheely suitcase once in the summer, a gift that my aunt had got for me to pointedly suggest I should move out from living with mom before mom kicked me out herself. It was summer, and they're not made for that kind of use: the wheels melted right off.

If it was the right time of year I always planted things, if there was any outdoors at all. I tried to alway s be somewhere with outdoors. I could afford rent and mostly food, I always paid my rent, and sometimes I'd buy plants. I'd plant them where I was living. Years later I'd see them sometimes, flourishing if they hadn't been removed. I watched the saskatoons in front of that one house grow huge and full of berries.

I never stayed anywhere long enough to pick fruit. Tomatoes, a couple times. Mint, in very different types of locations, yes. I hauled pots of plants from home to home to home on the graces of friends who could drive and were willing to help me move.

I got so good at moving. I only ever had one dresser of clothes. I kept things in steamer trunks and books lived in boxes. The plants were awkward, of course, but there it is. I had a moving company I liked and that I eventually paid for; luckily I had a strong visual style so people would give me clothing they thought I'd like and I didn't have to pay for clothing; I could afford to move. Moving was my poverty hobby and my most expensive hobby.

Eventually my stuff went into storage. I don't remember when, or what spurred it; I think it was the breakup of a relationship where we were living together just the two of us, or maybe it was my decision to go back to school. Everything I loved was in a 10x10 box in an inaccessible part of the city (that is to say, busses didn't really go there) and I was in another box with a moldy futon on the floor, a rabbit, and a dresser in a house that was probably a negative 500k value on the multi-million-dollar lot.

Years later it came out of storage. I'd been at threshold a couple months by then, my own house, this house that I own. I'd been rattling around in it with a set of dishes I got on a facebook sales group, a week's worth of work clothes, a bed they'd left behind, and two of those tall barstools that are impossible to sit on. When all my stuff arrived on the truck it was like Christmas is supposed to be (did you grow up with nice Christmas presents?), all the things I wanted curated by someone who loved me and knew me well: my pottery wheel. My sewing machine. The mirror I liked. My lounging couch. My marshmallow mattress and the bed I can hang clothes on the frame of. Dishes I'd made. Festival clothes, fluttery silk and good for nothing but pleasure. Steamer trunks full of costumes and sweaters and kink gear and unfinished skirts. Boxes of books, and shelves for the books to go on. Old spiral bound notebooks. Booze I'd made and bottled in the hope of someday being able to sit somewhere and drink it.

People who place little value on stuff inevitably have enough money to get what they need, or a corner of their parents' basement where they still have stuff. People who say "it's just stuff?", I have no time for those folks.

Five and a half years ago I moved here, to Threshold, and my stuff came, and it was a completion. Three pieces clicked together: the land, me, and my nest of things. The next year we were evacuated for fires and I had one of the bigger trauma responses I'd ever had in my life: I was displaced, temporarily in someone else's home and unable to spend much time at my own home where I had put in a garden. My other partner was ghosting me and gaslighting me about the ghosting. I spent the weeks of evacuation in a dark dissociated haze where I could barely hear sounds; even with someone who loved me there, even with my animals close to me.

After that it slowly got better. When I came home the greenhouse had grown so much I couldn't get into it; Josh had set up automatic watering while I was gone and things had flourished. Winter, summer, winter, summer again: the seasons continued to come. The apple trees, here before me, bloomed every spring. Every spring! Ice locked the house and slid down off the roof and sheltered it in a cradle of white peace, while inside the woodstove breathed its heartbeat of full to empty, blazing to smouldering, over and over and over and over.

Last summer I was given a couch and put it in the basement, in the woodstove room. The room has a rack of squashes I grew for seed (I mean, also to eat) and is stacked with dairy crates of corn drying for seed. The dog door opens into this room and three cats and two dogs wander in and out freely. I spend so much time here now, sitting on the couch with my feet up on a suitcase (hard-sided, so I can set a drink on it if I need and my back to the firewood rack holding the next few days' heartbeat of heat. The wood stove creaks occasionally beside me, topped with the hum of a little heat-driven fan, and when it's windy I can hear the chimney singing. Outside is the winter's worth of firewood, right outside, the future sitting there in solid form and every week I split it and carry it indoors. Sometimes I go upstairs and get a jar of applesauce from the pantry, from the apple trees that where here before me, and I eat it.

This home makes demands of me and every demand is: stay, interact with me, I'm here, stay, you can't ignore me, stay. These demands feel like love.

I haven't opened every box from the moving years but I'm getting closer. Last night I took a rubbermaid of various things, noticed it was mostly winter gear, and I hung two dairy crates near the door. Shelves are beyond my budget, but dairy crates? I have a source. I labelled one "hats" and one "scarves" (considered, and discarded, "scarfs") and put the combination of work toques and unicorn toques in the one and the scarves from the box in the other. I took some other scarves off my coathooks and put them in too, which let the coats stretch out a little more.

The rubbermaid isn't empty but I'm one step closer to being unpacked. I have years of "important papers" to go through, mostly no doubt taxes and government correspondence about permanent residency and citizenship and paystubs that were so desperately valuable and so desperately hard to manage with all the moving, but can go on the fire now. There's another box labelled "ancestry" sent by my cousin on my unknown dad's side, and I think some sort of catholic baptism thing? My US birth certificate may even be in there somewhere.

Scarves and hats, two steps closer. In the summer I can reverse the crates and put pocket-vests and sunhats in them so I have somewhere to put eggs when I find them. Closer and closer.

The pottery wheel is out.

I've unboxed my sewing machine and ordered the part that got broken at Josh's place in 2016. I've made a spreadsheet of fabrics and put my patterns in one place, together, in one rubbermaid. I've assigned fabrics to patterns, pending toile making (I can't actually sew until the part arrives and I can fix the machine). I've cut out the base patterns, and much to my cat's delight have rolled out the big roll of paper to copy the patterns onto for useable templates.

I carry water every day for the animals.

I split and carry wood once a week for the house.

I move through my kitchen, through my livingroom and its current sewing space but sometimes its butchery space, its soapmaking space, its seed-saving space, for myself.

The wood shifts in the fireplace. The dog exhales and shifts in her sleep, head and limbs akimbo. Outside the geese honk quietly.

Last night there was something that could help me living in my house and I just did it, powerdrill was there to hand, screws were there to hand, I knew what the next months would be like and where I would need something, I put that thing there without it being a wasted effort or a ding on my damage deposit. That's the story. As you see I can tell you stories all day. The stories are just the setup, though, the context and feeling of chaos and kaleidoscope and helplessness and slow inching towards healing.

The noun to all these verbs is me, the person to this home, sitting next to the fire and beside the dog and typing thoughtfully on my laptop. Me, in the same home where last night I hung two dairy crates from an unpacked box, where four years ago I came back to find my garden overgrown and remnants of wildfire smoke still in the air, where five and a half years ago I rattled around on the floor in this basement with a puppy.

Somehow I'm still here.

Somehow life is still allowing me to unpack my boxes.

And you better believe I'm still planting things.

Counseling yesterday, with some epiphanies:

( I think I figured out what's happening when Tucker is gone and I have a rough time. )

This makes sense, and it's a relief to begin to understand the mechanisms at work here.

Anyhow, today I went to the bush alone and hung out measuring small trees and listening to a podcast on sour beer on my phone. It was sunny and warm-but-not-too-warm and I got a bunch of work done (though it turns out maybe the work didn't need to be done?). I got a picture of the little hills in the Inzana I had lunch on the other day, from a different little hill. I will do similar work tomorrow. It was really nice, and I snagged the little Chevy Colorado from work through pure good fortune so I didn't have to drive the enormous and annoying 2021 F250 with a front grille taller than I am. I do not enjoy the big trucks.

Last night I hung out with Tucker sorta spontaneously and that was really nice too. It was a connecty thing, not a relationship figuring-out thing, and if we're going to figure anything out we need that connection. I was reminded that the good part is when we're together in person. I was in town and just stopped by to pick stuff up and ended up staying the night, which meant when I stopped by home in the morning to get work stuff I'd left the porch door open overnight and the heat on and it was very cold and likely also very expensive.

Oh well. I had put the pork primals in the fridge at least.

Today will be a little butchering, a little picking tomatoes, and potentially receiving some vanilla. I joined a group called the vanilla bean co-op on facebook, which is what it says on the cover. I can get vanilla for roughly $11/oz US, and they have a bunch of different kinds. I've been getting a little of different ones and have found the Ugandan are DEFINITELY the best -- like brownie batter. Very fun. Now I need to figure out how to extract the flavour into mead.

I'm also giving some thought to taking a truckload of meat down to the city and selling it to my friends. The logistics of travelling 12-15 hours with a bunch of frozen meat seem a little steep, but less steep than meeting folks piecemeal from surrounding towns to sell them ducks. Plus I know my city friends would appreciate them. I'd feel a little better connected and I'd get some money back and empty some freezers. I'd primarily thought to sell ducks but people are very intrigued by my dark red pork. I'm considering taking a pig to the... well, you can get it slaughtered on farm and bring it in to the abattoir and they'll butcher it and that's a little more legal than me home butchering and distributing. I don't think the butchers will know how to handle the fatty pork though.

While I'm talking about borderline-to-very-illegal meat processing, I smoked my first lardo (cured pork backfat) the other day. It's traditionally eaten thinly sliced on toast, basically in place of butter or cream cheese. This one is rosemary and bay leaf scented too. Home curing is completely beyond the pale for sales, but it seems like a pretty good way to handle the backfat on these older sows.

I suspect I didn't mention that Black Chunk had her babies two weeks ago, Penny did about five days ago, and Hooligan (daughter of Rapunzel, I just put Rapunzel into the freezer) did about three days ago. Chunk had three that I found, she made her nest in a slightly odd spot. Penny had at least 5, but at least 2 got crushed because she had insufficient bedding and it was a cold night. Once I loaded her up with bedding she shacked up with black Chunk to co-parent; both have 2 males and 3 females. Hooligan nested where I wanted her to, far from everyone, and she's got three males and two females. I don't know if I'm up for castrating that many myself, my willpower is not where it should be, so I may try and take them into the vet. I should call the vet. All the piglets are great and frolicking and happy looking.

Anyhow, a day in the field has definitely been good for me. I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

I don't like Mary Oliver. Her work feels trite, lacking in nuance, more like a motivational poster than the echo of a person's insides.

Nonetheless I'm spending a lot of time walking carefully, censoring myself, making myself small and invisible and unassuming to keep people comfortable lately. I'm keeping company with people who find no joy in me; quite the opposite.

I want a better poem but I can't find one and so Mary Oliver it is.

I don't want to live a small life

I don’t want to live a small life. Open your eyes,
open your hands. I have just come
from the berry fields, the sun

kissing me with its golden mouth all the way
(open your hands) and the wind-winged clouds
following along thinking perhaps I might

feed them, but no I carry these heart-shapes
only to you. Look how many small
but so sweet and maybe the last gift

I will bring to anyone in this
world of hope and risk, so do
Look at me. Open your life, open your hands.

Mary Oliver

I have the feeling that ee cummings has written something closer but all I get are approximations of the target:

Now i lay(with everywhere around)
me(the great dim deep sound
of rain;and of always and of nowhere)and
what a gently welcoming darkestness—

now i lay me down(in a most steep
more than music)feeling that sunlight is
(life and day are)only loaned:whereas
night is given(night and death and the rain

are given;and given is how beautifully snow)

now i lay me down to dream of(nothing
i or any somebody or you
can begin to begin to imagine)

something which nobody may keep.
now i lay me down to dream of Spring

and maybe...

i am a beggar always
who begs in your mind

(slightly smiling, patient, unspeaking
with a sign on his
chest
BLIND)yes i

am this person of whom somehow
you are never wholly rid(and who

does not ask for more than
just enough dreams to
live on)
after all, kid

you might as well
toss him a few thoughts

a little love preferably,
anything which you can’t
pass off on other people: for
instance a
plugged promise-

the he will maybe (hearing something
fall into his hat)go wandering
after it with fingers;till having

found
what was thrown away
himself
taptaptaps out of your brain, hopes, life
to(carefully turning a
corner)never bother you any more.

So I've been chewing on this PDA thing for awhile. It very clearly fits me. It explains so much, and at first it helped me with a bunch of workarounds and made me feel so much lighter: I wasn't failing at all this easy stuff, instead my experience was just so different enough that it wasn't easy. And I was a little bit relieved or smug that I'm in the 20% or so of folks with this thing that can still work and function in normal society (though honestly, awareness climbs it's likely those numbers will shift since if folks are in any way able to function they don't come to awareness of their neurotype etc).

Now I'm kind of crashing, though. I've realized that because it isn't just me there will never be a trick I learn that makes everything easier. There's no one simple thing that everyone else knows but can't verbalize that, when I figure it out, will just make the world fit me better.

I'm stuck here forever.

Don't get me wrong; I honestly really like who I am. PDA is a component of my personality along with many others and together they've all led me to be able to see things from many angles, to love deeply, to take joy in curiosity and unveiled understanding, to feel I fit into the actual earth if not human society, and to my truly wonderful relationship with ecosystems and the land. The things I can't do don't feel important to me most of the time; they feel like distractions from the heart of any matter. But.

But I don't live in a world with just myself, and I don't get to interact with just myself. I don't even get to interact with folks who really understand. That can be really lonely. The more clearly I understand myself the lonelier it gets. And there's no trick, no key, to take that away.

I don't consider my personality to be a liability. It's hard, but it's worth it. And honestly, all my life I've pretty much been able to normalize myself enough that other folks don't think I'm a liability either. Deep feelings are relatable. Striving is relatable. Feeling alienated is deeply relatable for a lot of folks. And when things aren't relatable they're manic pixie dream girl-style admirable, I guess inspiring is the word. Folks wish they could shed as many societal constraints as I do without fully understanding that I pay a price to do so.

But all during these interactions I'm an interpreter: I'm evoking other folks' feelings, analyzing for commonalities, reviewing what I know to be already-normalized or common experiences, and building bridges between my experiences and theirs. It's work. And I don't see too many folks doing the same for me, although I guess other folks don't see me doing it for them because I'm good at it.

With my growing understanding of PDA comes a growing knowledge that I'm an interpreter forever. I don't fancy myself an alien: I am an alien. The places I find meaning are just different from where other folks find meaning. The things I find important are invisible or inconsequential to other folks and I can't draw meaning out of many of their core rituals except through the consequences as they reflect back on folks.

The world is never going to fit me. I am never going to suddenly fit the world. Instead my daily practice, every day, is to carve out a space for myself. Some days it's like digging in sand and the hole fills back in. Some days it's chiselling rock. Some days it's like moving aside good garden loam with your fingers to plant a seed. Every day, the previous holes fill in a lot or a little and it starts again.

This is why covid ending is hard for me. I've had days where I haven't had to dig.

And so a lot of days lately I feel angry and defeated and frustrated and cast out and tired. No doubt I'll get back into the swing of daily work, and knowing me I'll make myself a place that fits me better where I don't need to do as much work every single day. But.

There's no trick. It's the work of moving the whole world a lot or a little. And in the end I am only flesh and blood.

This was supposed to be the last day of the high-level heat. Most places in the province beat their previous all-time heat records, most on two consecutive days; in some cases the new record was over 10C higher than the previous all-time record. Lytton broke both the Canadian all-time high temperature record and was also hotter than Las Vegas has ever been in recorded history. Nowhere hit 50C so at least there's that. Fort has not been spared. With careful curtain and air management I've been able to keep my main floor 8C or so below ambient at the hottest time of day and the basement has stayed 16C below or so. Thank goodness for the basement! But doing the largest possible air exchange at night to cool the place and set up for the next day has brought in hordes of mosquitoes; over dinner I swat enough of them that there's a noticable scatter, not quite a pile, around me. I'll be glad when that's done.

The fire danger rating jumped from moderate to high or, in many-to-most places, extreme in the last few days. As our high temperatures roll out, the edge of the incoming normal summer weather brings thunder and lightning. I, and everyone, hope that it brings some rain with it. I'm here alone; I don't think I have it in me to evacuate all the animals on several fronts.

As I do chores later in the evening to avoid the heat it's clear that the days are getting shorter. The sun was below the horizon by 10:30 and I'm sad about it. This year it feels like summer has actually arrived; we missed it entirely last year.

Today the yarrow started flowering. The air is hot and wet and with that semi-medicinal herbal scent breathing is like drinking hot herbal tea. A haze has settled on the horizon and the sun set through browns and reds. My pigs are quite alright -- they've made two champion wallows and don't seem to have suffered from the weather, maybe related to their origins in Georgia -- and all the other animals seem to have pulled through too. Tomorrow is supposed to be 10 degrees cooler, and I should be able to go outside after work and get some things done. I could also break down all the pork loins and shoulders that have been chilling since Saturday but it's been too hot to butcher them further in the house.

My counselling appointment was very good today, I saw my regular chosen counselor for the first time since before my weird medication/concentration camp breakdown (during which I mixed up my counseling and Dr's appointment and so missed both of them). Talking with her I began the process of knitting up the chaos into narrative, the process of making meaning of the world that allows me to drive forward. As I'd realized before I'm not quite sure where forward is, though, and I suspect I need to sort of learn to be just where I'm at again. Last weekend was a good start, there were hours of sitting on the grass with the dogs and watching cottonwood fluff and crooning to the geese and just existing, which I had not done in quite some time.

From three sources in the last week I've heard I need to learn to inhabit that space at will and I'm not sure how to do it. It's an innately unpeopled and demand-free space. It can't exist in proximity to transitions into and out of the world of humans.

I don't know. It does need to happen though.

Now to shower, and to sleep, and to maybe wake up into a day where I can go into the greenhouse after work and harvest myself a salad without dying. This was a good year to plant cucumbers and melons, they're so happy in there. It was not a good year to do a trial test to find varieties that would grow and fruit in my normally-cool climate. The trial is compelling anyhow. Early evidence supports the Lofthouse and William Schlegel tomatoes, plus stupice and bloody butcher and definitely sweet cheriette. My green grocery-store cherry looks like it was open-pollinated; at least all 8 or so of the plants I grew from it are very uniform, and they seem to be doing well too. Very exciting!

I hope you're both warm enough and cool enough, wherever you are, and that your air also smells like flowers.