Today's Keyboard Smash
Jul. 26th, 2020 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrubjayspeaksI will start with the bad news:
Everything still vaguely smells of fish.
That's it. That's the absolute worst part of the day--fish emulsion smell. (If anything worse happened in the world today, I do not wish to know about it. Fish smell is about the limit of my coping capacity anyway.)
We fertilized the pumpkin patch for the first time after we did an initial dose when planting the seeds. Which, hoo boy, this is what they're like WITHOUT ANY HELP??? Some of the plants are up to my chest, and I am very much not short. I know they are that tall because I waded out into them. Partly to pull weeds. Partly to put padding under the growing pumpkins to keep them from rotting where they touch the ground. Partly just to admire the world-devouring glory that is this pumpkin patch.
There are warty pumpkins. There are white pumpkins. There are two-color pumpkins. There is one already perfectly orange, perfectly round pumpkin, shaded by one perfectly huge leaf like a treasure.
There was also a swarm of some half dozen dragonflies overhead. Each of the dozens and dozens of squash blossoms had multiple bees ducking into them and buzzing about.
I have red, raised welts and lines all over my hands and arms from the spines all over the stems and leaf undersides. I'm not even sorry about that. As already established by my sharp and pointing collection of succulents, a plant's capacity to harm me is directly proportional to my love for it. I have accepted this fact about myself.
You know how in Harry Potter, there's the idea of the Patronus and how you summon it by thinking of your very best memory? (Or, to dip further back into fictional realms, the Happy Thoughts that let Peter Pan et al fly?) For a long time, I've known exactly what that memory would be for me. It's from my first year of college, though it has blessedly nothing to do with that directly, and it's a memory complicated by everything that surrounded it. It's terribly bittersweet in hindsight, but at the time, it was the purest happiness I could ever remember feeling.
I think, maybe, I have grown beyond the point of holding that as my best memory. That's a good thing, really. That would say a lot about the things I have moved past. I'll still treasure it, of course.
But today? Standing hip-deep in vines, sweating and stinging, surrounded by the hum of happy insects, brushed on all sides by the outstretched palms of leaves, exclaiming to my mother each time I spotted another pumpkin hidden in the tangled depths--I found myself consciously aware of being overwhelmed by joy. No, by contentment. A sense of utter peace with where I was and what I was doing. Suffused by the absolute well-being of doing precisely the right thing.
It was a good day, friends.
Everything still vaguely smells of fish.
That's it. That's the absolute worst part of the day--fish emulsion smell. (If anything worse happened in the world today, I do not wish to know about it. Fish smell is about the limit of my coping capacity anyway.)
We fertilized the pumpkin patch for the first time after we did an initial dose when planting the seeds. Which, hoo boy, this is what they're like WITHOUT ANY HELP??? Some of the plants are up to my chest, and I am very much not short. I know they are that tall because I waded out into them. Partly to pull weeds. Partly to put padding under the growing pumpkins to keep them from rotting where they touch the ground. Partly just to admire the world-devouring glory that is this pumpkin patch.
There are warty pumpkins. There are white pumpkins. There are two-color pumpkins. There is one already perfectly orange, perfectly round pumpkin, shaded by one perfectly huge leaf like a treasure.
There was also a swarm of some half dozen dragonflies overhead. Each of the dozens and dozens of squash blossoms had multiple bees ducking into them and buzzing about.
I have red, raised welts and lines all over my hands and arms from the spines all over the stems and leaf undersides. I'm not even sorry about that. As already established by my sharp and pointing collection of succulents, a plant's capacity to harm me is directly proportional to my love for it. I have accepted this fact about myself.
You know how in Harry Potter, there's the idea of the Patronus and how you summon it by thinking of your very best memory? (Or, to dip further back into fictional realms, the Happy Thoughts that let Peter Pan et al fly?) For a long time, I've known exactly what that memory would be for me. It's from my first year of college, though it has blessedly nothing to do with that directly, and it's a memory complicated by everything that surrounded it. It's terribly bittersweet in hindsight, but at the time, it was the purest happiness I could ever remember feeling.
I think, maybe, I have grown beyond the point of holding that as my best memory. That's a good thing, really. That would say a lot about the things I have moved past. I'll still treasure it, of course.
But today? Standing hip-deep in vines, sweating and stinging, surrounded by the hum of happy insects, brushed on all sides by the outstretched palms of leaves, exclaiming to my mother each time I spotted another pumpkin hidden in the tangled depths--I found myself consciously aware of being overwhelmed by joy. No, by contentment. A sense of utter peace with where I was and what I was doing. Suffused by the absolute well-being of doing precisely the right thing.
It was a good day, friends.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-27 02:18 am (UTC)