Whoa! My garden is blowing me away this year.
Early spring hyacinths and daffodils,
Followed by an absolute explosion of everything else.
Flowers are such a joyful expression
exuding passion
and joy
and creativity
with every unfurling petal. There's this incredible knockout rose,
the same one that was in those hopeful Fozzie profile pictures when both he and the rose were small,
when I thought just the sight of him with all those flowers would make some lucky adopter snatch him right up, leaving me with only the flowers.
Ha! Their loss. Now both are mine. Fozzie helps me in the garden, like when he chases away the deer that eat my tomatoes.
I'm still keeping some tomatoes in pots on the porch this year, but maybe the other ones will be safe too.
That's in the back garden, where Princess likes to roam around and knock down the zucchini and potato plants. She is worth it.
Works out well, this joint custody thing with my sister.
We love having Princess here.
When you feel this much joy and love, how could two dogs be enough?
Two dogs, or one rose bush
Or one echinacea,
or one butterfly bush,
or one of anything beautiful and powerful and sensual?
You can't.
More is better, and the more things to love, the more love builds on itself and grows and blossoms in ways that are healing and medicinal.
Like St. John's wort.
What metaphor would you use to describe YOUR internal landscape this summer?
Well shit. That post was really sad. So I promise, the next few posts will be nothing but pretty flowers, scenic vistas, and happy, playing puppies.
This post will be a bit philosophical. I miss Marshal and I'm sad about what happened, but I'm not haunted by it the way I thought I would be.
Every time I go over the events of the past few months, I see that I did do everything possible.
If I could have had a few months with Marshal, doing TTouch and taking him to reactive dog and confidence building classes, I think he could have been a good, reliable dog. But for whatever reason something happened in his relations with Fozzie and it was no longer safe to have him.
As far back as I can remember I have always been what you might call a deep ecologist. I believe that the earth and its creatures have intrinsic rights to exist and pursue well-being.
I still am that way, and I think the death penalty is no more appropriate for animals than it is for humans.
I'd no more choose to get rid of a problem dog that way than I would to relieve myself of the burden of a troublesome relative by killing them.
But I know now that there are limits.
It is actually kind of a relief to have my thinking, at least in one department, closer to the culturally accepted norm.
It's a lot of pressure to be so far outside the mainstream!
Now I can just do completely normal things like daydream about Fozzie and Dahlia every moment I am away from them,
spend hours massaging their paws, plan every vacation around their favorite activities, take slow-motion videos of them tongue kissing with Florian, and shop online for better-tasting dog toothpaste so they can improve their breath.
Feels great to be normal!
It's Saturday, Florian and I have been sick for days, and we've been snowed in since last night! Might as well write a blog post.
Last weekend, we were going to take a nice romantic trip to West Virginia for some hiking and relaxing.
But why relax when you can obey an anxious, dangerous, and emotionally fraught compulsion? We decided at the last minute to drive 7-8 hours instead to upstate New York, where my parents' house in the Adirondacks may sell anytime and we both wanted to go there one more time first.
It is still so bizarre to be in places where every inch feels like my Mom--but she's not there!
The dogs got some good running around but I was worried about Dahlia and her bald pinkness in the cold.
The dogs only got warm when we all got under the blankets for a cold, sleepless night.
One night of that was enough! After a thorough, cathartic emotional breakdown, I was able to leave there feeling satisfied. Satisfied that we'd honored Mom and her love for that place. And satisfied that for me to consider keeping that place, and imagining that I could be content living in Bleecker, NY or keeping it and visiting it maybe a week out of the year and letting it rot the rest of the time, is completely bonkers (as Mom would say).
We took a slow drive back through back roads and stayed in a Motel 6 on the way back. Heaven for dogs and humans, though this human didn't sleep there either.
All that emotional stress and a few nights of no sleep meant immune system meltdown! All week its been a challenge to get out of bed and get the dogs out, but I've done it.
Even today, when I could barely get the doors open due to 15 inches of snow and counting.
Since it wasn't like we could do much of anything else, Florian and I decided to take a walk/ski with the pups through the neighborhood. And Fozzie, who can't handle humans locomoting in an unusual way, decided to attack Florian's skis.
Little chilly Dahlia would probably have had a better time if she'd let me put on her booties, but she is a dog so a reasonable move was out of the question.
We got those shivering things home and rested ourselves for a few hours before cabin fever compelled us to take another walk, this time without the pups.
A couple miles through partially plowed streets,
and Florian almost became one of those frozen explorers they unearth in a PBS documentary a few centuries from now.
Good thing it's so beautiful!
And good thing Dahlia can be persuaded to go out and pee.
Because looks like we won't be going anywhere for a while.
Well most every year I've done a flower post just to keep track of the evolution of my yard from dog sacrifice zone to stop on the Better Home & Garden Tour, which transformation will be complete any day now.
In the meantime, here are some scenes from the work in progress.
In the front yard are some things that I put in years ago and have somehow survived and thrived.
The Knockout Rose I put in when Fozzie was just a kid and still on Petfinder,
and formed the backdrop to his profile pictures that failed to get him adopted
This rose I also put in years ago,
and a few years after that I put a St. John's Wort--which is now huge!--in the large bare area next to it.
Notwithstanding these showy and obviously cultivated specimens, I'm going for a wild meadow kind of a look in the front garden.
Echinacea,
daylilies,
and things for the pollinators to enjoy
like a nice butterfly bush,
some salvia and my favorites, agastache with their little tubular flowers and licorice-scented leaves.
There are a few kinds of mint, which took over but I don't care because it's a nice weed to have.
My aunt gave me some Gooseneck loosestrife which has also taken off,
and the spirea and the hydrangea are thriving despite relative neglect.
The front meadow garden makes me very happy, and it is for the most part even standing up to the dogs!
The back yard is what's really been keeping me busy.
Landscaping and gardening are truly an art form. My mom and my sister, both very gifted with the visual arts, have a knack for it.
I do not! But I know things look prettier when there are less weeds, more flowers so that is a place to start.
Wood chips are another great ally that you can put down in places where there was once dense weedy vegetation,
and they'll help keep down the weeds.
I also think they look really nice and help the mind relax and space out.
Which is what gardening is all about, isn't it?
That, and squash. I intended to have a vegetable garden with a few things, but it turned into pretty much just a squash garden.
I planted way too many and because they are squash, they all succeeded.
Yellow squash and zucchini so far but there may be some large gourds and winter squash to come as well.
Good thing Dahlia and I love squash, especially since Fozzie and Florian are picky eaters.
Morons.
Works out well, this joint custody thing with my sister. 
When you feel this much joy and love, how could two dogs be enough?
