Cultivate Your Own Garden!

For the first time since we returned to Charles Town, we have been able to turn off the air conditioning.  We are in our third day of ‘natural ventilation’ and we love it.  The house has been staying at a comfortable 78° with very low humidity.  At night with all the windows open and the overhead fans on low, it gets downright cool.  We have had a bit of rain but certainly not enough to penetrate the dry soil.

We have reached the end of our gardening exploits.  The big garden - 28’x18’ - is now one third planted with perennials, Echinacea and Sedum, and the space between the fence and the railway ties has been planted with twelve lavender bushes which should be magnificent by next year.  Everything has been mulched and my back recalls each of the twenty-five bags that have gone onto the two gardens to date. The second garden is where we first made a raised-bed vegetable garden four years ago but the trees have grown so much that it is now mostly in shade.  We therefore redid it and have planted Hydrangea, Hosta, two kinds of Heuchera (Cindy like to call it One H of a Garden) and some mums.  I moved the big Chinese Dragon Lantern that we had in my Zen Garden in San Diego to watch over the shade garden and it looks very good as a guardian of shade.

We have been able to have cocktails on the deck for the past three nights and it makes all the difference in the world, just getting out of the house.  I really have a love/hate relationship with AC:  I missed it horribly in Moscow, loved it here at night, but felt trapped by it during the day since it was just too, too hot and humid to do anything but stay indoors.  Now we have rediscovered that quiet time from 6:30 to 7:30 when we just sit outside and watch the humming birds come to the feeder, the oven birds making a disproportionally loud cry for such a little bird, and the other birds flitting around making last minute preparations for roosting for the night.  Last night a flock of about twenty-five Canada Geese flew directly over our heads heading home for the night; it was marvelous.

We were talking the other night about how nice it is to be someplace that we know will be home for awhile and I asked Cindy if she remembered how many places we have lived since getting married.  Here is her reply: Is it any wonder we feel ready to settle down?  I counted up the moves and domiciles over the 28 years of our marriage: We’ve moved 19 times and have lived in 12 different residences.  The latter does not count our houses in St. Paul and Winona that we each owned when we got married and also doesn’t count the times that one of us moved ahead of the other and lived alone for a few months; I only counted where we’ve lived together.  An additional reason for the discrepancy is that we have some repeats - in Europe we moved back to a previous apartment twice (Boston University rented apartments throughout Germany and Italy and rotated the professors), and we’ve moved to and from Charles Town a few times.

There will no doubt be at least one more move to a smaller house or even a condo someplace, but the location remains to be determined.  We have a lot of time to ponder this while we wait - and wait and wait - for the housing market to rebound.

I’m off tomorrow to San Francisco.  It was meant to be a one-day trip to meet Hannah at the airport when she deplanes from New Zealand and accompany her home to West Virginia. Somehow signals got mixed and I had to change my flight to tomorrow and hope that we can get some friendly folks at United to allow us to return on the 16^th instead of our ticketed date of the 17^th.  They charge you an arm and a leg to change tickets, as I already found out when I had to change my ticket from Tuesday to Monday.  If they charge us too much, we’ll just spend the day in San Francisco and I’ll show her as many ‘tourist attractions’ as possible before she collapses.  

Speaking of changing tickets, Cindy and I were scheduled to fly back from the termination of a cruise on November 3^rd, Venice to Dulles.  We had to hurry home because of a meeting I had in Greensboro on the 5^th. The meeting has been postponed so we thought we would spend a few days in the Venice area, meet with some dear friends and come home on the 8^th.  I called Air France to see what the change fee might be and was just shell shocked.  It would have cost us each about $450 to change the day of departure.  My, my but they should love to sock it to you when you fly in economy.

I’m off to pack, best wishes to all, Cindy and Wm.