Grief is a funny thing. It can hit you in so many different ways. In a simple sentence to Don about my Dad where I said “When Mom died…” As in fact. As in it happened, it’s real. Sometimes it’s the simple things that pack the biggest punch. Most of the time, it just seems unreal. My grief shows itself in my scattered thoughts, in not being able to find a word for something or in saying one word when I mean another. My normal level of articulateness has broken down. I feel more than a bit spacey. I find it hard to concentrate. I’m finding it hard to express myself.

I’ve been trying to keep busy because doing things helps me. Thank goodness it’s Spring. I can step outside the door and find a million and one tasks ready and waiting for me. I can dig. I can rake. I can lop and prune. I can weed. Yesterday, we mowed the front lawn and the dog corral. The front lawn is huge. It’s a lot of work, the kind of work that leaves you very tired but with endorphins pumping. The day before that, I dug out a small garden bed. I weed wacked for the first time this season. Nothing makes me happier than being outdoors working in my garden.

Watching the garden grow, observing the perennials and their daily growth, seeing the garden beds that I have put in and built up over our almost nine years in this house, watching them come to life – all of this helps enormously. Rebirth in the face of death. Renewal in the shadow of grief. Somehow I think things would have seemed even bleaker had my mother died in the winter.

Spring has come to help me. That I know.

I have a somewhat sheepish announcement to make. This large bush, this early bloomer that I absolutely adore? When we first moved here, I discovered that it was a wiegela. The blooms looked exactly like one of the cultivars in that rather large-ish group of plants. Last year on this blog, someone suggested it might be a flowering quince. I researched it, though I was doubtful. I’ve never seen any fruit. Quinces have thorns. No thorns. No fruit.

There are articles on the differences between wiegelas and flowering quinces, so I assume others have been confused, as well.

It had to be a wiegela.

On Saturday, the blooms opened, so I went out to take some pictures. As I looked at it rather more closely than usual, I saw something.

Umm….I think that’s a thorn.

Upon closer observation, I noticed several more thorns. I even prodded one with my finger. Yep. A thorn.

Wiegelas don’t have thorns.

This is a friggin’ Flowering Quince! After eight springs, eight blooms, eight years where I was absolutely sure it was one thing, it turns out to be another.

Oh nature, you are constantly challenging me.

I have a new buddy. This little chipmunk hangs out on the edge of my garden, sometimes sunning himself on that flattish rock, sometimes eating little morsels of whatever on the driveway.

When I got too close, he hid behind that rock and peeked out at me. Then he took off in the direction of the porch. He’s shy.

I love chipmunks.

This morning, as I opened the door to let Scout outside, two very young deer were on the other side of the corral, very close by, staring at me. We observed each other for what seemed like quite some time. Scout was so sleepy that she didn’t even notice them. Then, one of them turned away and took off through our woods, the other following.

No time to get the camera. Just a lovely little moment where our eyes met, where we acknowledged each other. I like those moments.

I’ve tweaked the email settings and now I’m once again getting my own posts via AOL and Gmail. Nothing yet in Yahoo. This has nothing to do with Feedburner except indirectly as they are a delivery service. This muck up across the board in blog land is due to changes Yahoo, AOL and other services have made in their settings which have to do with something called DMARC. The end result is that they are trying to stop spam and spoof emails. If a bulk mailing (like that in post emails) is coming from a personal email address, they will block the email and reject it, because it looks suspicious. Most of us who use Feedburner or any email posting service use our personal email addresses in the FROM setting. So I had to change that to a FROM that references my domain name. So far (cross your fingers) it’s working in 2 out of 3. If you’re signed up to get this blog via email, let me know if you’ve begun receiving posts again. If you haven’t, I’m sorry, but that’s about all I can do.

Happy Monday.