What Month Is This?

This week the kiddies in our locale are finishing up their very last week of school for the year. My husband is coming to the end of his second year of retirement from school teaching. Because he taught school nine months of the year for forty years, we fell into structuring our time and thinking about each month of the year in relationship to the school year. Now we find this framework that dictated our activities for so long slipping away from us. The old thought pattern of "Christmas Vacation is a whole two weeks long this year!" or "Time to wrap up all those summer projects, because Teachers' Workshop starts in ten days," is no longer applicable. Now we don't have these mandated periods to tell us what time of year it is.

I'm finding the same thing happening to me thus far this spring/summer season in relationship to gardening. Here we sit, well into June, and I still feel like it's at least a month earlier. Our temperature this morning was barely 40 degrees. I can't set out tender plants yet nor can I put tender seeds such as beans into the yet-to-warm-up earth. I, along with all other gardeners in the area, am really tired of dragging out the big blue tarps to protect plantings each night. It's gone beyond just a bother to carry pots of flowers in each p.m. and back out again the next a.m. My garden is nowhere near the stage it should be at this time of June.

So I'm a little thrown off as to the fact that we're as far into summer as we are. A strange, discomboobulated feeling . . . sort of like floating with no tether. No touchstone on which to anchor oneself. In the same way the school year used to tell us just what part of the year it was from late August through early June, the summer months are defined by the state of my garden.

But we're told to expect a high of 60 degrees today . . . woo-hoo! And the soil has had two days to dry out from the recent gray, drippy days so perhaps I can spend most of the day getting dirt under my fingernails and seeds in the soil. Maybe even do some transplanting of those root-bound seedlings that now resemble gangly adolescents more than cute, chubby babies. As for the sunflowers, squash and pumpkins . . . I don't think there's a chance in h-e-double-hockey-stick they will make it this year. I'm thinking it would be an exercise in futility to even plant them at this late date. What a shame. My taste buds love (and crave) deep orange, homegrown squash slathered with butter, salt and pepper. And growing my own pumpkins for fall decorations is pretty special to me, too.

I'm not gonna end this post on a negative note. I'm just saying that when Roy came in from morning chores he said there wasn't a cloud to be seen in a gorgeous blue sky, and it looked like we were gonna have a beautiful, sunny day. I stopped writing this long enough to get our breakfast on the table.

In the space of time it took me to get the above prepared, the whole sky turned a slate gray, it's getting darker by the minute, and (sigh) now it looks like rain.

I think our nearest tattoo parlor is 130 miles away. I may take a road trip today. "Hello, I'd like this tattoo put on my forearm . . . IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE SUNNY TO BE A GOOD DAY."