Two steps forward and five steps back...

Remember the comic strip "Family Circus"?

Every now and then the artist would draw a sequence in which the harried mother would ask one of the youngsters to do a simple chore. "Go next door and borrow a cup of sugar from Grandma."

Junior would happily trot out the door, cup in hand, and immediately become irretrievably side-tracked. A little dashed line would track his progress (or lack thereof) as he trekked about the neighborhood doing everything BUT borrowing that cup of sugar.

My yard work is a lot like that.

Yesterday I decided the most pressing job at hand was to spray the wooden privacy fence (which has seen better days, but I can't afford to replace it, so I have to take care of it) with water sealant. So I headed to my local home improvement giant to buy sealant and one of those pump pressure sprayers with which to apply it.

I first stopped at customer service to return an item it turned out I didn't need after all. Immediately thereafter I was side-tracked by the flowers (a foregone conclusion) and yard ornaments, and found the perfect gorgeous big, cobalt blue pot to use for a bamboo water fountain I'm planning in the future. It took me some time to select it; there was a great brown one, too, with a turquoise-blue interior, and I had a hard time deciding between the two. I also remembered several other items I needed, including duct tape (for an issue with insulation around AC ducts in my attic), light bulbs, paint thinner for clean-up, and two bags of water softener salt.

Congratulating myself on remembering the other sundries, I ambled to the pump sprayers. After standing in front of a selection of half a dozen for several minutes, trying to decide which one to get, it suddenly dawned on me that I already had one in my storage shed.

Time to head to the checkout counter.

While pushing my shopping buggy out to the car, looking at my big blue bowl, I decided I should have gotten the brown one; it was more natural-looking and would better fit the wabi-sabi Japanese style I'm working toward in my yard.

Back inside the store to the return counter; then to select which one of the two available brown pots I wanted (no-brainer cuz one of them had more blue inside); and back to the checkout girl who looked at me like I was a nut case, and possibly up to something. Obviously, she doesn't garden.

By the time I got back home it had started to rain, which brought my fence-spraying plans to a halt.

This morning I got up bright and early (well, bright anyway) with the grandest of intentions and headed outside. In looking at the fence in question, I decided it had a fair amount of green moldy gunk on it and that I was going to have to bleach it before treating it with water sealant.

But before I could bleach it I was going to have to mend the hose I had accidentally lopped in half (in two places, don't ask me how, I don't want to talk about it, but it could happen to anyone) with my big branch clippers a couple of weeks ago.

Now, in order to mend the hose, which was lying over by two pots of bamboo on a side of the house I rarely visit because it's a jungle, I had to go get my pruners to cut out the two sections where I'd gouged the hose with the clippers. By the time I'd gathered everything I needed to fix the hose and gotten the job done (it took longer than it should have because one of the four hose clamps was boogered and wouldn't close properly), 30 minutes had gone by.

Then, as I was gathering up tools and cleaning up my work area, I noticed the bamboo was looking overgrown, and had a lot of dead-looking stalks. Since I had my pruners handy...another half-hour gone by.

Pruners still at the ready, I began to make my way about the back yard looking for strays that needed clipping (it's a never-ending job), and before it was over with, I'd watered all the hydrangeas, filled the water softener with salt, duct-taped the air vent in the attic, got stung by a bee in the armpit (I'm not making this stuff up), the big clippers had come out of the shed for more serious pruning, a huge pile of stuff had been hauled to the curb, and another hour and a half had slipped away.

Finally, back to the job at hand. I filled up my little pump sprayer with bleach

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and water, deciding that was going to be the easiest way to bleach the fence. But the pressure was so weak, I opted to haul out the gas-powered pressure washer. I hooked up my newly repaired hose, burned a large hole in the grass pouring the bleach from the pump sprayer into the power washer tank, turned on the water (hose bib in front of house, had to trek out front), and BLEWSH! - I guess I didn't get that boogered hose clamp quite tight enough - the whole thing blew apart.

So. Ask me if I got the fence sprayed. Go ahead, ask me. Nope. Not a drop. And now I'm hot and sweaty, sitting in the AC eating cereal, and thinking maybe mossy green isn't such a bad color for a fence after all.

It's a wonder I get anything done.

But isn't my brown bowl pretty!

virtually nothing to do with gardening...

...unless you count that I'm sitting in one.

It's 11:37 p.m. on the 24th of June. In 23 minutes I will be 45 years old.

Gosh, that sounds like a lot.

But as gray hair, dulling skin, gravity-challenged body parts, and crows feet creep slowly, but surely, upon me...life is good.

If I looked back over my shoulder at the year gone by it would be easy to reflect with maudlin mood on the substantial hardships it held. But I can't help but put behind me the sorrows of days I cannot retrieve, and look forward instead with anticipation at the year before me. If I allow myself a backward glance it is only so I might see the mistakes I made (and there were a few) and remember not to make them again.

Because, despite tears and loss in the vapor that was the last 365 days, I have been given many blessings. And though they may not seem like much to folks who measure success with yardsticks different than my own, the small joys make me happy; in them I find peace.

The crickets are chirping their nocturnal symphony; a soft breeze stirs the bamboo; an owl is hooting in the distance; and an old dog lies contentedly at my feet.

I am 45 now, and I look forward to whatever the coming year holds.

From the outset I think it's important to be forthright. If you've come here looking for sage and learned gardening advice, you've probably come to the wrong place.

Now, I'm not saying I haven't learned a thing or two from trial and error along the way. And, though what I know won't take long to pass along, I'm happy to share it with you. But I'm no garden guru. The joke about keeping the marigolds alive is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.

What I am, though, is a lover of the outdoors, of growing things; and a great experimenter. I'm also somewhat easily distracted by enticing rabbit trails and just as apt to change paths with my gardening plan as I am to stick to it, a fact which has made my local home improvement giant more money than I ever intended to give them.

In fact, just this morning, while looking around the yard and cursing the weeds, snails, and moles which seem to have proliferated with the last several weeks' rain, I realized how like my life-plan is my gardening plan. I kinda-sorta know what I want to do with the space and time allotted, but not exactly. In both cases nothing turns out like I planned and I never have enough cash-flow to live up to the grandeur of my schemes and dreams; but they're as like as not to morph into something entirely unexpected, so I never let that bother me. The dreaming of a thing is half the fun anyway.

My garden plan at the moment is loosely Asian in theme, which is a bit difficult to pull off given my threadbare budget, allotted space, and climate. I'm in zone 8b here, which means that it's humid and hotter than H-E-double-hockeysticks in the summer, and slightly sub-freezing for short stretches in the winter. Not hot enough year-round to be tropical like Miami, but not cold enough to really kill off the bugs. Add to the mix that I have a strange penchant for flowers ranging from coral to orange and blue to purple-black, and the plan becomes even more dodgy. (Purple and orange Asian flowers in zone 8b? Yeah, I'll get back to you on that.)

But I have plans. Big ones. I can see it all now.

I bought this place by accident. Seriously. I didn't plan to buy a house, but somehow it worked out that way. Without waxing maudlin, a little over a year ago life as I knew it imploded around me and I relocated on impulse and instinct. ("Must...get...out...of here...!") My quickly constructed, loosely drafted, and possibly somewhat ill-conceived plan was to find a place to rent, get the lay of the land for a year or so, get my real estate business off the ground again (ha!), and then maybe buy. I scouted the city, quickly finding the neighborhood I wanted (more on that later) and spent the next week looking for rentals.

It didn't take a week to figure out I couldn't afford to rent in this neighborhood. But on my fourth day of hunting I spotted a brand new For Sale sign. Long story short, I fell in love with a funky little 1957 2/1 house with terrazzo floors, open-beam ceiling in the dining room (read: no insulation) and original cabinetry and ghastly blue bath fixtures. Ten days later the bank and I owned the place. I moved in the day the seller moved out.

I'm pretty sure the previous owner, a sweet Irishman named Maurice, didn't have a gardening plan, either. Unless maybe the plan was to do as little yard work as possible. The postage stamp of grass loosely defined as the back yard was 18'x24' and surrounded by a thick periphery of shrubs and ferns which thought they owned the place. I hauled 15 lawn bags of leaves off that little 432 square foot patch of grass the first week, and Lord-knows how many since then.

But the cool thing about the yard was this: During the aforementioned life-implosion, I'd been thinking that if I could build any house I wanted it would be one with an Oriental spirit to it. I could see it all in my mind: rice paper partitions, sleek lines, open and airy spaces, bamboo cabinetry, sandalwood...beauty and calm in simplicity.

Now, this "historically contributing" little concrete block house with its blue bathtub didn't quite fit that bill, but Maurice had planted patches of bamboo in several places about the yard; built a an Oriental-looking trellis for Japanese wisteria in the patio area; and had placed a little ornamental pagoda in its own rock garden in the back corner. Lovely, old azaleas line three sections of the yard, and you have to walk under a bamboo archway to get to the front door.


The beginnings for my imaginings were already in place. I couldn't afford to build my dream house, but I could rebuild my dreams with the blessings at hand.

In the beginning....

I first thought about writing this blog several weeks ago. I was gardening at the time - filthy, sweaty, and bug-bitten – thinking happy thoughts about what was doubtless a profound and brilliant topic, the subject matter of which I can no longer recall (I knew I’d forget it if I didn’t write it down).

I don't think it's any coincidence that cognitive life began in a Garden...nor that, for those of us who seek joy and peace in the simple things in life, we've been trying to get back to it ever since. No matter how haywire (to put it nicely) my day, if I can just get outside and look up through the trees, piddle among the flowers, listen to the wind rustle the bamboo, or just sit outside and hear the birds carry on about the things important to birds...the cares just seem to melt away. They get replaced with a "garden state of mind" which, for me, is respite and peace and which seems to put everything into perspective.

I do some of my best thinking while getting dirt under my fingernails and mosquito bites behind my knees. And while many of the things I hope to share are directly related to working in the garden, the posts won't always be about gardening in particular; nor certainly will they always be introspective. As much as anything they will be about maintaining that state of mind - the Pollyanna outlook, if you will - in a world which is increasingly haywire ("Where are we going and what am I doing in this handbasket!?"). Maybe sharing some happy thoughts, and some practical stuff, too, will brighten someone else's day. And maybe I'll be lucky enough to make a few friends along the way.

So what’s a blog about a Garden State of Mind got to do with New Jersey? Nothing at all.