Home Travel, AKA Gardening
M is in Italy as I write this: she arrived last night, flying from Montreal to Milan non-stop, without, unfortunately, being able to secure an upgrade. On the couch with the kitties last night I received this text:
There sure are a lot of children on this plane.
And a bit later:
Premium economy is not business class.
For sure it isn’t.
But she made it, and somewhere in the wee hours I got another, happier text: In my rental car and driving to Bologna. I expect there will be pictures coming shortly, after a long nap in…Bologna.
I didn’t go with M to our beloved Italy this time (she has a two-week ceramics residency in Certaldo), which is unusual and would normally be regrettable if it weren’t for home travel, also known as gardening.
Let me put this out there first: I don’t know jack crap about gardening. That’s M’s domain, as she spent many professional years as a landscape designer. But what I do know is this: I love plants. And trees. And mushrooms, which, you are correct, are not plants. But they live with them like roommates, so indulge me. It was already late July last year when we bought this house, and the yard garden was in full bloom, courtesy of the former owners. I say “yard garden” to distinguish is from the vegetable garden, which, given that they were selling the house, they had not planted in the spring as they had done for the past 22 years. Still, the vegetable garden (let’s call it the Varden) gave things: lovely things like arugula and rhubarb and, later in the fall, a huge flush of shiitake mushrooms. This year, however, we started planting in April, and the bounty is beginning to arrive.
I have help. Lots of it. I wouldn’t know how to do it on my own and am grateful for the support of our gardeners at Flower Power. M is also a great deal of help, obviously. This will be the first of the summer gardening posts, so let me stop here after saying that gardening actually does remind me of traveling, as every single day there is something new and amazing to see simply by walking outside. Italy can wait, for the moment. I’m traveling around my yard.
