Spring Came While I was Busy Working

In the past ten days things have changed in the garden. I hardly know the place.

Planted these anemones - Anemene ciribarua 'Lord Lieutenant' last year and only two or fifteen came up, but they are both back this year and much bigger. There is hope.

A native honeysuckle. I love the color! it grows over a piece of lattice and used to hide the trash cans. It's big enough and thick enough that some years we have a bird's nest in it. Nothing so far this year, but there's still time.



An early azalea that is nearly open (left) and a lungwort (right) - Pulmonaria cevennensis . The latter came from Andre Viette two years ago. It struggled last year and has never bloomed before, but this year popped up early and has been in bloom for two weeks. Don't know if it's because of all the rain, or if it just finally got old enough but either way, it's lovely.




Not actually mine. This lovely lilac is my neighbor's and lives on the lot line. It smells heavenly and is just gorgeous! I look forward to it's blooming every spring.




Fothergilla gardenii 'Mt. Airy'. A lovely foundation shrub. It was scraggly last year, but came back full and pretty this year, like just about everything else in the yard. I hate to think that it was all the extra rain that resulted in the beautiful flowers we are having this year.






And Carolina jasmine. This is one of Mitchell's favorites. We have it growing on a big trellis supported by the house, so it looks like a shrub, when it is actually a vine. Unfortunately, he decided that it needed to be cut back - he was right - so he did it in February when we trimmed some of the shrubs - that was wrong. He cut off more than half of the buds, but it is still blooming and pretty - and much smaller than last year.

A gorgeous spring day in central Virginia. Wish you were here, too.

New Mown Grass

One of my memories from college that reappears at odd times is of the first time I spent the weekend with my (then) boyfriend's parents. We drove from Virginia to Trenton, New Jersey on a Friday and stayed a few days.

On Saturday morning after giving his mother a raft of grief, he cut their very large yard. This was in the days before riding mowers for the home and they must have had an acre or more, so it was quite a job. He stripped to shorts and, shirtless, attacked the job. Since this is my memory, we will give him swimmer's abs and a slight tan. By the time he finished he was soaked with sweat and smelled like a working men do, but the lawn was gorgeous.

Driving home I asked why he had given his mother such a hard time about doing it. " It's all a game," he told me. "I don't mind a bit, never have, but Dad hates to do it, so I pretend to hate it, too. That way they think that they've won something. I actually enjoy doing it, and it looks so good when I am done."

I think that's why I have this memory. Walking mindlessly behind the mower, following the line between cleanly, newly mowed and wildly overgrown, I love the way it falls into place - nice and neat. But most of all, when it's all done to look across it all and watch the wind ripple it.

When our hero finished mowing he had an ice cold beer. I chose a glass of wine on the deck. Well, if you've paid any attention you know that the east coast is three inches deep in pollen right now, so I really didn't sit on the deck to drink it. I hid inside away from the breeze, thankful for the protection from the pollen.

But that in no way diminished my appreciation of the newly cut yard. An hour outside on a warm afternoon, with a necessary job completed - what more could a girl ask? Ah, spring!

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth. As usual your card will be late! I still love you.

Dr. Nancy Sez...

"Don't make me crazy!" Yes, she actually did say that this morning. The topic? The need for women over 50 to get 60 minutes of exercise daily just to hang on.

Dr. Nancy's take was that women have too much on their plates to add one more guilt issue. As in, "I'm working my butt off trying to get everything else done in my life, and now I need to work twice as hard to work my butt off?" She felt that 30 minutes a day was probably plenty for most folks and that that could be gotten by parking farther away, using the stairs and taking the long route when you can - and most important, by pushing away from the table! Well, there's that!

I did make the effort this morning with disappointing results. Knowing I had a meeting mid-morning that would make jazzercise impossible, I dragged my lazy self out early and walked over to the nearby middle school to walk around their track. I've used that route for nearly 10 years to get in a two-mile walk when no other activity was promising for the day.

This morning, tho, an odd thing happened. Well into my fourth (and next to the last) lap, I was approached by the Michelin Man who was dressed in a "Security" sweatshirt. "Sorry, ma'm," says he, "but I'll have to ask you to leave the track." "Why?," says I. "For the security of the children," says he.

I thought about that a minute. "You mean," says, I, "that having paid my county taxes on time, I cannot walk on this track?" "That's right. Not between 7:30 and 4 when the children are here."

I did not tell him that he needed the walk more than I did. Nor, that he was freakin' crazy. Nor, ask him what danger a woman of a certain age actually posed to the children in a building 100 yards away. I left... and fumed all the way home. I see a letter to my school board member and board of supervisors in my future, with a copy to the principal.

Don't want to endanger the children - or, I wouldn't pay my taxes - but it does seem to me that they have gone way too far in that direction and forgotten their role as part of the community.

Do you see hoards of middle-aged women storming their local schools and demanding the right to use their tracks to get in three extra hours of walking a week? I certainly plan to!!

It's Official. It's not our Fault.

Did you see the news today out of the Women's Health Study? That's the study that's been continuing for the past 13 years looking at 34,000 women across the country. They're looking at everything. And, I do mean everything!

Today they released information about women and weight control. Seems that in middle years women need at least 60 minutes of exercise a day just to keep off additional weight gain, and that's only if they were of "normal weight" to begin with. Let's parse that a bit. If a woman is of normal weight prior to menopause, then if she exercises 60 minutes a day she can stay the same. If she is already overweight, then 60 minutes a day won't cause any loss. Ya gotta cut the calories to do that.

In some ways it's what we all know: cut calories and exercise more. The big kick in the (over sized) ass is that "more" starts after one finishes the first hour every day.

To get personal, now I understand why the three trips a week to Jazzercise have not done me as much good as I had hoped. Well, I do have abs now, but they are still buried in an inch of adipose tissue. I have been feeling so good about myself since I increased my exercise to 180 minutes a week - 30 minutes more than the previous recommendation of 150 minutes a week. And it's the first time in my life that I have voluntarily stuck with an exercise plan for 18 months!

I knew that I needed to add some more exercise because, altho I have tightened up some, I am not losing any weight. I had already decided to add a walk a couple more mornings to try to kick it up a bit. [And, yes, I know I need to cut calories, but that's a whole different blog.]

Now I don't know if it's worth it or not? Actually, I know that it is, I'm just bummed by the prospect of at least tripling my current efforts. And, I am a tiny bit happy to learn that I'm not a totally worthless lazy fool. It's at least partly nature.