A good old fashioned tired
I have given up my nightly glass of wine and weekend gin + tonics for the time being and what has that gotten me – more energy. I spent Saturday, well eleven hours of Saturday, planting queen and palmetto palms and cacumba ginger and a keffir lime tree and vitex and some butterfly plants along with some madras plaid coleus (and a whole lot of liriope) and now the front looks amazing and I was walking like I was crippled when I came inside. Once inside, it was time to bathe Tin and shampoo his hair and on my knees over the tub, I thought it was really possible that I would never get up.
Joe had come to help me and from the get go he was complaining and telling me how he is not a gardener, he’s a lawn guy. We bickered back and forth for 9.5 hours of those 11 like an old married couple and at the end of the day, we got it done. Well most of it, at 8PM we could go no longer and there was still a pile of Katrina-laden mud – complete with marbles, a silver robot leg, stones, a lead pipe, terra-cotta, ceramic, bottle tops and one red glass heart – that we had dumped onto the street near the curb making it impossible for anyone to park there.
This morning, I woke and ran a 5K across the river for a friend’s birthday. It was a graffiti run where you and everyone else there sprinkle nontoxic colored powdered all over each other while you are running. We were in Avondale, which to me seemed in the middle of nowhere. It was sort of like stepping out of a routine into something ridiculously different. [I did notice a go cart track there and thought, now that would be fun too!]
When I returned I had a hunch that I better shovel the rest of the dug up mud and stones to the dumpster or risk getting caught in the rain and having it all turned to hardened concrete-like mass where no one would be able to park for days, maybe even weeks. So 30 buckets later, when I thought I might really collapse, I placed the final bucket in the dumpster and raindrops started falling on my head – my colorful, dyed head, as I was still in the same clothes I had worn on the run.
I came inside as it began to pour, down pour, New Orleans style rain, one minute “um it might rain” to “good god almighty” and all of my plants gave a hip hip hooray for they had waited patiently for eleven hours in the hot sun yesterday, their roots exposed, their throats dry, now they were happily rooted and soaking up the glory of H2O.
Tonight, I cozied up on the couch and tuned into Thunder Soul – and cried a little.
So Labor Day weekend, was actually quite the opposite of what it is intended and tomorrow I’d love to throw a barbecue in my backyard and enjoy the day, but honestly, I’m taking the day off, for real.