Like Sands Through the Hourglass

Last Monday and Tuesday I had all this energy and so many ideas for what I was going to do with my "5-day weekend." Now it's Sunday and, other than a couple loads of laundry, paying some bills, getting Calvin groomed, and hanging out with the cats, I appear to have done essentially nothing. I have no idea where the time went --or the energy I had in anticipation of this vacation.

It's not exactly that I regret sitting around doing nothing for the last 4 days. I think I'm just having a really hard time having an "adult summer" this year. For one thing, I'm keenly feeling the loss of my childhood summers this time. Summers when I was a kid meant sleeping in and playing all day. It meant running through the sprinkler and the feel of wet grass and mud in between my toes; the occasional popsicle; climbing trees; riding bikes; running around in the "fog" behind the mosquito spray trucks; drying off in front of the box fan after a bath; hours spent working on jigsaw puzzles; trips to the public library and staying up into the wee hours of the morning reading --I read SO many books every summer! I often stayed with Grandma and Grandpa Cory for the 4th of July, playing with good sparklers at their neighbor's house (not these crappy sparklers they make now), and watching the Springfield city fireworks from lawn chairs in the parking lot of Gabatoni's with the neighbors. Heck, I think my heathen atheist soul even misses Vacation Bible School.

I've never completely gotten over the disappointment of losing week after week after week of freedom each summer, but it's usually not this hard.

I don't think it's just the desire for a full-summer vacation, though. My lack of interest in going to work has been there most of the spring, too, I think. I just want to do whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it. Especially since I never know when the energy and the desire are going to hit at the same time. Like this weekend: the weather is absolutely perfect for working outside, going on a picnic, hiking, painting the house. But I don't feel like doing any of those things. Which should be okay, because I also have a list of "quiet" things I need/want to do. Heck, some of them are piled next to me right now, waiting until I finish writing this.

So why do I feel like I'm doing it all wrong? Why am I feeling an increasing amount of sadness, regret, and longing? Is it because our summers are so short, so perfect, and so precious? Is it because I feel like I'm getting older every day? That my life gets shorter every day? Is it because I'm worried that I'm wasting my time on the wrong priorities? Is it because I want more out of life than I have a right to expect?

All I can say at this moment is that I do NOT want to go back to work tomorrow. I'm supposed to be covering a bunch of items at a meeting tomorrow, and I could care less. I haven't been keeping a list of them as they've come up; I've actually been brushing them aside until I have to deal with them. Which might actually be a good thing in that I haven't been obsessing over work things. But, it also means I'm going to have to go back through weeks' worth of emails tomorrow morning to prep for the meeting since I haven't been prepping all along. Which is fine, too. I just don't want to do it.

I suspect that I need my job in order to keep my life structured and my brain stable. One of the downsides of those long summer vacations was that the longer I did nothing, the lazier I got. And the more moody, dissatisfied, listless, and/or depressed I got. I realized this in my college years, and it's the main reason I'm not sure I would completely quit working even if I could afford to do so.

But I don't think that's what is happening today. This feels more like, dare I say it, some sort of mini mid-life crisis. I'm tired of every day being devoured by the "have to" so there's no time or energy left for the "want to." I'm tired of feeling like the hourglass of my life is emptying faster and faster while I'm being sucked down into the merciless sand. This summer feels different. I feel a little more alive, a little more motivated, a little more aware, a little more appreciative. And I want desperately to relish it. More than I can remember wanting it before, I want to have all the time in the world to do whatever I want until I've sated that need and am ready to go back to the old daily routine.

Instead I'm going to post this and then move on to working on my "quiet" projects, like typing up my "affirmations" I created for my counseling work. (I can't use my tools if I'm not carrying my toolbox. I might have to add more tools to my box now, but...) And adding information to my gardening spreadsheets so I can actually find the information I need when I need it instead of having to flip back through my garden journals trying to find what I planted where. I'm going to drink my coffee and watch the chipmunk and squirrels on the bird feeders, and maybe refill the bird bath. Hopefully by the end of the day I will feel like I did enough productive things and relaxing things that my vacation wasn't completely wasted.

Learning to Love Stella?

First of all, I can't believe it has been two years since I posted anything. Second, I can't believe it has been almost two years to the day. Weird. But that's beside the point, which is that this spring I realized I had a mystery daylily growing in the "foster home" bed where some of my plants live until I can find them a more permanent spot. I had some issues with people driving over my plant tags last year, so I wasn't sure if they all ended up back in the right places and I was short a tag. All I could do was wait to see what kind of flowers it produced. Today I noticed a little tiny fading gold flower and Aha!: last year a friend at work gave me a little potted daylily that she didn't want to keep. I had never recorded it in my Master Planting List or my Where Are My Daylilies spreadsheet, and I had forgotten all about it, poor thing.

Except I'm pretty sure it's a Stella d'Oro daylily, and I have strong mixed feelings about them.

On the one hand, they are plants. Any hardcore gardener has a certain kind of love for all plants just for being plants. Even plants I hate, like ragweed, tug at my conscience when I attempt to destroy them. Except maybe the weeds competing with my plants. But even as I'm trying to pull them out by the roots, I sometimes grudgingly admire plants like quackgrass for their resilience and ability to thrive. I am also aware that my hatred is completely subjective and based on the interference of these plants with my selfish desires.

Besides being plants, Stellas are daylilies, which are Nature's gift to crappy gardeners. Okay, they are Nature's gift to all gardeners. Okay, to everyone. They come in a truly astonishing number of colors, patterns, forms, sizes, and bloom times, and most of them will grow just about anywhere. The ever-present orange fulvas apparently cannot be eradicated. For a while I dismissed fulvas as common "ditch lilies," looking at them with disdain and thinking of them as not worthy of being included in a "real" garden. But I've learned to appreciate their vigor and their contribution to making the world a better place. There's a clump I'm looking at through the window right now that is glowing in the sunlight and it's absolutely beautiful. Just because they are common doesn't mean they aren't valuable.

Which I'm thinking is an important thing for me to keep in mind with Stellas seeing as how they've become sickeningly common. They are Professional Plant Breeding's gift to lazy, uncreative landscaping. Because they are daylilies they are easy to grow anywhere and everywhere, and they bloom early and continuously all summer. And so thousands of landscapers have planted millions of these damn things as islands in seas of orange mulch outside nearly every business in America that uses landscaping services.

I hate this. Passionately, deeply hate this with almost every inch of my gardener's soul. This may have to do with the fact that I think most professional landscaping is completely devoid of any aesthetic or environmental value. It is almost always more of an affront to the eye and to Nature than it is an enhancement. It's all show and no soul, and it's not even a good show.

Folks, I'm going to tell you some hard truths.

• Orange ("red") mulch is an abomination. It is not a natural color for mulch, and I have no idea why anyone decided to dye mulch this color. It doesn't "go with" anything --not the houses and buildings it surrounds nor the plants stranded in it. It isn't even cheaper than other colors (at least not based on homeowner prices for the stuff you get at Lowe's or Home Depot). 
• Mulch's value is not as a substitute for groundcover plants. You are not supposed to cover vast swaths of ground with it and then plop a few flowers here and there in the middle of it. Especially since...
• Mulch does not eliminate weeds. It may help reduce them, but they still make it through. If you think weeds look bad in general, notice how much crappier it looks when you've got random weeds growing up through swaths of mulch. You might as well just have planted a nice grass in all that space. 
• Mulch should not be used because people are too lazy and/or cheap to plant and/or maintain a more appropriate groundcover. This is the only reason I can think of for all that damn mulch. It's easier to blow a bunch of mulch down every spring than it is to plant a nice, low-growing variety of grass that might require an occasional trimming. (Which is, of course, nonsense because there are all kinds of ornamental grasses that require little to no mowing or maintenance. And that's not even considering the various other groundcover options besides grass.)
• Mulch should not be orange. I've said it before and this won't be the last time either. This may not even be my first diatribe against it. There is no argument you can offer that will make me accept orange mulch as having any value, and I will judge you all the more harshly for defending it. If you use it, just never let me know or you might be dead to me. I hate it that much. 

I'm realizing that it might not be fair to blame the landscapers if they are just responding to the wants of their customers. Perhaps they are ready and willing to do something different, but none of their customers want to make the initial investment to plant a more permanent solution. Of course, a more permanent solution also removes the need for repeat business, so maybe the landscapers are perfectly happy to keep mulching away. I really have no idea. I know nothing about the costs of professional landscaping options. 

What I do know is that Stella d'Oro daylilies are EVERYWHERE. I sort of hate them because of their ubiquity. I sort of hate them because of how they are planted --one plant per square yard of mulch. I sort of hate them because to me they represent the laziness, the complete lack of creativity, and the pretension that masquerades as landscaping. 

But talk about pretension, oh black pot. Do you think people who dabble in easy gardening shouldn't even bother? No. Isn't it better that they at least try? Yes, I think it generally is. Dabbling can evolve into a passion or kindle a desire to learn more and to grow as a gardener.* Is there no beauty or value to be found in something because it is common? I should know better. True, Stella d'Oro flowers are one of my least favorite colors, but so were fulva daylilies at one point. I "hate" magenta flowers, too, and yet I've found exceptions that I like. Perhaps a bit of warm gold is just what I need. One resilient and thriving specimen plant saved from the trash can certainly find a home somewhere in the rainbow that is my yard, especially nestled between such a wide and interesting variety of other (naturally- and limitedly-mulched) plants.

*The individual dabbler, like the individual plant, may deserve encouragement, but the companies perpetrating bad landscaping judgment still ought to be taken to task. It's better to have no trees than one tiny, sad, suffering tree suffering in the middle of a giant parking lot. That's like having a bear in a tiny cage at a gas station because people like the idea of seeing "nature up close." People like the idea of flowers outside their McDonalds, but that's not an excuse to plant a row of Stellas spaced feet away from each other with orange mulch for miles on every side. The thing I have to remember is that I feel sorry for the tree and I feel sorry for the bear, so I ought to feel sorry for the flowers. The best thing I can do is to give a better life than that to this plant that ended up in my hands.