What a Time to be Alive. No really it is. A wild and crazy time. Full of fear, anxiety and things that make everyone a bit jumpy. There are other truly wonderful things too, like the smell of dirt, spring flowers, bird feeders, rubber boots and that feeling that winter is finally over.

I have to admit that I am here because my therapist thinks this is a good idea. Oh gosh, don’t worry I am not going to start blathering on about a sad childhood or the grey weather, I am here to talk about control.

More importantly things that I can control.

One of those things (for the most part) is my garden and my compost heap. Now, I can’t control all the aspects of this, Mother Nature seems a bit pissed at us, so she is a bit of a wild-card, but I can create a space that I will grow some food to feed my family in these uncertain times.

That is all you really hear about these days, how uncertain everything is, and I feel that, I FEEL it deeply and heavily. It is hard to look to the future with hope, for me anyway. I cant imagine going on every groundhog day that comes after this thinking that this is the best we can expect. And we won’t. We can’t. We will all look at our regrown celery stalks in a few months and sigh happily that things are returning to normal.

As we all look out the window and wonder what 2020 is going to bring us, i invite you to watch me stumble gracefully in my garden and in life. Because we are all gonna be okay. There isn’t any other option.

** Did this age well?

Did I age well?

Oh the questions that were answered in the months and the years since the pandemic started. So many things happened. So many things didn't happen. We were lucky though, we made it through, this part. I won't get into the Jurassic politics of what makes the world the way it is. But I don't know that we've seen the end of it, even if I'd like to say that we have. And still all of these things are uncertain and still I can't imagine going on every groundhog day that comes after this thinking this is the best I can expect.

I need more.

I need to grow I need things to change I need the sun to come up tomorrow. It's funny how few years of indoor captivity will lead you to a place where you think it's a good idea to start writing about how things have changed. Or how things haven't changed. Maybe this did age well. Maybe we're still looking at the window and wondering what the year is going to bring us and then maybe you are here to see things that we can to do together.

Things are dramatically different now than they were when I wrote this in 2020.

Life is dramatically different for all of us than it was in 2020.

I am dramatically different than I was in 2020.

So, grab you sweater, here we go.

Onwards. There's no other way.