When a Blogger Doesn’t Blog

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When a blogger doesn’t blog, there usually is a reason.  Because I am a person who loves to wallow around in guilt, I feel I need to explain this disappearance before I can return to writing again.  It’s just the way I am wired.  So what are my excuses?

Several reasons jump to mind.  Feb-April is our busy spring teaching season at the nature center so free time gets scarce.  Add that to the fact that it was the wettest spring I have seen in TX so far; floods of biblical proportion, which led to the weediest season I have yet to experience and the limited free time became even more limited. 

Each day would see me coming back from 4 hours showing students the clever adaptations some plants possess whose sticky seeds can hitch a ride on you or any animal that passes by and thereby get away from the sun-hogging parents.  Well, its one thing to teach about it but then to come home and see endless amounts of said plant that needed to be pulled out before they turn my dogs life into misery, is quite another.  I felt like all I did was teach in the mornings and weed and sweat in the afternoons. 

I have had a benevolent policy with the plants in my yard these 5 years. I do not bow down to the god of green grass so I am happy to let the wild flowers occupy a full half of the yard where they do so well in the scrabbly caliche soil that it is amazing.  That half blooms with Black foot daisy and Zexmenia and all manner of fleabanes and yellow composites without any help or attention from me. 

However, the other half is the work intensive half, where fruit trees planted by the previous owner, require drip irrigation that clogs up within minutes of being unclogged, the result of an overabundance of limestone dissolved in the water.  The “lawn” is almost 90% burr clover, the burr that takes all the joy out of it being clover.   

The other 10% sports Malta thistle, which has a vengeful burr, that hurts long after it is removed.  Then there is the “Velcro” plant which again may be entertaining to show kids how it clings to you like Velcro as you pass by, but it also clings to your garden gloves, your shirt, your pants, to every part of you as you tangle with the yards and yards of it which on the one hand is easy to remove and on the other makes you half mad by growing back seemingly overnight and you get to do the whole exercise all over again.

March, April and May I weeded so much that my poor little fingers were always in a state of cramping or “trigger” fingering.   No one wants to hear a grumbly blog and by then it was already getting hot and humid so kind thoughts towards Texas weren’t exactly filling my soul. 

April is the grand finale for Sunday school and I like to end with each class dong a signing praise song, which we did.  It went well, as it so often does, but my little weeded-to-death-fingers couldn’t quite make the appropriate signs.  As it is actually always a hearing audience that sees it, no one was the wiser.

Then in May it was time for me to flee the heat and answer the call of any daughter in the North to help out in any way they needed. 

“Yes, I would come and watch Willow” while my daughter who teaches at West Point had some overnight maneuvers.  “ Of course I would love to come to splash about in lakes and hike mountains with my much missed grandchildren in Maine, and yikes! the wedding of my youngest is fast approaching, so better see how things are going there. 

On top of that, which already had me absent from Texas for a little over a month, now a trip to Iceland is in the offing, spurred on by my globe- trotting middle daughter who has two weeks leave coming up at the end of July.  We will fly from NY so, why drive back to Texas to just fly back here for the flight to Iceland on July 24^th?  Better to just stay!

Oh Yippee! Oh answered prayer! Oh the “Glory of God all around me” that I recognize so clearly in marsh, ocean, forest, pond and lakes.  NOW I haven’t been blogging because I am just having too much fun!  That being said, I have every intention to fit it back into my schedule and start sharing the delirious joy I feel at being back among friends, not just of the human kind, but of the plant and animal kind too.  Dear old chipmunks, and look at that partridge berry along the trail, I know you, and mosses and ferns and lichens. I have missed you all!     

So now, I have every good intention to write anew.  However, this explanation had to happen first; it’s just the way I am, like cleaning the dishes before you start a new recipe.  I am cleaning out the old excuses for my paltry performance in the past before I attempt to write anew of the delights of the present.  Let’s watch and see how well I stick to that.