Sometimes the weekend gets rolling and I'm not sure I'll ever be ready to let it go.
This weekend was like that.
Long and busy and insanely messy, with mud and straw and dirty dishes from Friday right straight through Monday.
Those messy weekends. They're usually the good ones, aren't they?
Overwhelming, sure, but undeniably good.
It's been a cold spring here in Wisconsin. Really cold. Sneaking on the furnace two weeks before June kind of cold.
So cold that our garden wasn't planted yet, here on the brink of summer.
This weekend it was time.
It just couldn't wait another week.
We snuggled into wool hats and rain coats and got out there to plant in the drizzle for two days.
Breaks came in the form of hot tea and stories, morel hunts in the woods, and knitting (then unknitting) a sweater.
And to be honest I was actually dreading the planting part of our weekend. (cold! raining! windy! new garden! clay soil! thistles!) And yet to my surprise I found my bliss out there with my family, digging in the Earth.
Absolute bliss.
The mist. The rain. The valley. The soil. The countless treasures and bits of history unearthed in our digging (bits of pottery, a vintage toy car, an axe head, a rusty hinge...). The magic of working together. Tending together. Digging in. Together.
It was simultaneously literal and symbolic and both were equally good.
As best as I can remember we planted peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, summer squash, zucchini, beans, onions, broccoli, cauliflower, strawberries, and potatoes. There might have been more. But at this point it's a blur of leggy starts, seed packets, and mud.
Everywhere the mud.
There is more to be done but we're catching our breath for a few days before we dig in again.
In time.
All in time.
Between planting veggies or running inside to warm up, the kids and I also transformed a low, weed-filled border along our walk into a hen-and-chicks and thyme wonderland and filled some pots and old pails with starts from a nearby nursery.
And then last night, after three days of gardening, I sat down to sew some curtains for our bedroom (well, to finish some curtains that I started in February and needed just three more seams to be done). My fingernails were so unbelievably dirty that I laughed right out loud when I saw them, my filthy hands laying so properly on the clean pressed fabric, as I fed it under the presser foot.
I really shouldn't have been touching fabric. I should have been in the bath.
(But considering that those "new" curtains are sewn from sixteen year old bedsheets, that fabric has seen more than its share of post-gardening-marathon fingernails. And feet. And... well, my point is I really don't think it'll show.)
And what a difference it makes! All this digging and planting and tending and sewing and doing.
Yes, this long-empty, so-sleepy, tiny little farmhouse is starting to look like home.
And I couldn't be happier.
Or, come to think of it, dirtier.
