Big, hairy fears and a baby goat that named himself!

Jun 24, 2023

Happy Saturday Friends!

This week I got to go through my mom's cell phone photos. Needless to say it was bittersweet. Unfortunately the phone only goes to 2018 but it was good to see all the things she took pics of: family, a few selfies, her yard—I think she loved azaleas the best and planted swaths of them over the half acre:

Her dog Allie:

When she got home from work, she would sometimes take her jewelry off and put it on Allie and then—picture time! 😂

The yard ones got me though. I see my picture taking ways in those photos. How I go out in the morning and see something blooming, and think, “Oh! Look!” Her eye for beauty and for interesting tidbits got passed down to me. I love that.

I took a bunch of clippings of plant’s in Mom’s garden with this plan in mind for the 1 year anniversary of her death coming up in November. But also, I wanted to propagate as much of her stuff as I could. Some of it I could dig up, like hostas, iris, and cannas but her azaleas are 40 years old and almost as tall as I am. I read about propagating Japanese Maple, dogwood, azalea, roses, hydrangeas, and so many more and now have this clear tub as a little greenhouse in my living room:

I have 13 plastic wine cups with holes cut into the bottoms and each have 3 cuttings in them. Fingers crossed! They look good so far! I’m excited!

I was also surprised to find out how many things could be propagated by sticking them in water. Of course many houseplants will grow roots in water, I have them all over the house :-) What I didn’t know was that lots of trees and bushes can be started this way too. This was one of Mom’s juice glasses from her kitchen window sill. It already had a cactus growing in it so I added a Japanese Maple sprig, a Dogwood sprig, and a Rose of Sharon:

When I moved to my first house in 1991 in Knightdale, just a couple of miles from Mom, we were often together digging up extra plants from her yard and transplanting them into mine. That’s where I learned that for most things, you can just use a shovel to dig out a chunk, stick it into a plastic grocery bag, take it home, separate it out into smaller chunks, plant, and water.

So, Tuesday, I dug chunks and cried. The last time I did this was probably 2003 when I lived here in NC and Mom was a healthy 57. Just a few years older than I am now. This is Ajuga, a great little groundcover that spreads and has purple flowers:

When it came to gardening, Mom was the queen of, “Oh it’s easy! Just plop it into the ground and water it. It will be fine!” And 99.9% of the time it was! When I look back this was my first foray into letting go of perfectionism :-)

Actually she was like that for a lot of things: gardening, getting lost ("Oh for heaven's sake! Where are we? Oh well, we'll just keep driving until something looks familiar! We can always stop and ask for directions if we need to!), swimming ("You can tread water until you're tired and then just flip over and float for awhile, so easy!" It wasn't until about 20 years ago that we found out that she had extraordinary lung capacity lol) And that all led to me saying things like:

No reason to be scared of painting the walls, it's just paint, if you don't like it, paint over it!

If you don't like the watercolor you just did, it's not ruined, just turn it into a mixed media painting!

Plant it, if it doesn't thrive there, dig it up and plant it somewhere with different light!

I still struggle with perfectionism in all kinds of things—apparently this is going to be a life long lesson and I'm thankful Mom set me on that path :-)

There are things to be afraid of in life, but so much of what we turn into big, hairy, scary fears are just not important in the grand scheme of things.

•••

Tiny goat has named himself! Bonnie and I were driving home from picking him up last week and she suddenly said, “Oliver! I don’t know where that came from!” I kept offering him some of the other super cute options this week but he likes Oliver. Ok then!

We had a birthday party/father's day party last weekend! Daughter and granddaughter holding baby Oliver:

She 👆🏽 was one of the birthdays too! And of course ManChild (with Aunt Katy and Uncle Chris):

How is he 16??

We did spaghetti and meatballs for 12! So yummy! I made the mistake of doing a slight widening of the shot and made everyone's head look like bowling balls 😂

THE RANCH

I found this patch of daisies in the upper pasture:

B-Rad found a half of a squirrel chewed fig in the hole in the top of a fence post that made us both laugh (he thought I put it there!):

My finger is healed!

Itchy horse butts caused this:

Daughter Nichole took this one ❤️

When I let Rayn out during chore time, she often goes into the lower garage where we store the hay and has a little visit to the "Hay Buffet." The whole point is that she go do a little wandering and eat some grass. I started to close the garage door to keep that from happening so then she did this: