It’s lucky the weather has been beautiful, because the news has been so disheartening. I have great need of the garden, to recharge my ability to deal with my fellow humans. Pure summer has arrived, blue skied, clear, and breezy, so I stepped away from websites and media feeds, took my kneeling pad, my weeder, and my tubtrug and went out to the garden. Hello tomatoes. Let me help you out by getting these iniquitous weeds out from under your feet.

It was satisfying. I liberated the tomatoes and went on to the cosmos and zinnias. You can never have too many flowers, so when the available raised beds were full I found  a place for more: a circle of zinnia seeds around my garden globe. In my garden I can grow what I want, where I want, in as many raised beds as I like, or in low dirt where I think that’s a better idea, No one argues with me about it. Other people grow other things, but gardeners don’t go around forcing their beans and watermelon seeds on those with other plans.

I added a row of pots down the deck steps – more flowers, and then some chocolate mint. Mint grows fast and will take over the world if not confined to pots. Someone once argued with me that mint couldn’t possibly taste like chocolate, because they didn’t believe chocolate came from a plant. They became very invested in this position, causing a force field to rise around their ears, blocking facts. I like to think this happens more outside of gardens than in them, but our first recorded instance of it was in a garden, long ago.

Once I had the pots on the deck I continued around the house to the front yard, where I checked the water in the birdbath. There was water. There was also a bird. Robins are my totem bird, of course, so when they hang out around my house it feels like a kind word from the cosmos, and makes me happy.

I fill the birdbath from a hose at the end of the house. I’ve been wanting a nice clear path to it, so I cut up some cardboard boxes, laid them out across the grass, layered mulch over them, and lined up stepping stones on top. When I turn on the water, my thumb on the end of the hose sends a strong enough spray to the birdbath to clean out any fallen leaves, dirt, stray feathers, whatever muck the has been left behind. A slight change of pressure makes the spray gentler, filling the birdbath up again, clean, sparkling, ready for the future. It takes the right effort in the right place, repeated often, to keep the situation from getting out of hand.