A chilly, gray day after lots of rain yesterday. I had to turn the heat on this morning! Temps will be back to normal tomorrow and in the meantime, I’m going to try to get more work done today and tomorrow, as it looks like we have a rainy week ahead.
Don isn’t coming home for his day off for a few reasons. His longtime friend is visiting NYC and he’s having dinner with him tonight and then on Tuesday, he has an afternoon rehearsal for an event later in the week where the cast will be performing. It’s a pretty busy week for him and trying to get home for one day isn’t all that restful. I may go in, but I doubt it, as Monday is one, if not the only, dry day on the docket for the week. Grass needs to be mowed! Plants need to be planted.
Next week, he’ll be home for an extra day, so that makes up for this weekend. It’s all good.
I had a great time with Rick and Doug. They’ve had a garden designer and crew in for the last week and the changes the designer made are really thoughtful and smart. The property had been neglected for the past few years, so there was a lot of clearing out to be done. It looks lovely and will look even lovelier as some time passes. It’s such a pretty property. And they’ve discovered that they have dogwoods (gorgeous!) and crabapples and they are all blooming at the moment. Heaven!
Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms. And that includes moms of animals, students, nieces and nephews, grandchildren – even plants. I miss my mom and I miss being a mom. But I’m very grateful for the mom I had and will have forever and for all the dogs I have mothered, for my nieces and nephews and godchildren, and for all my former students. Mothering comes in many forms. A special Happy Mother’s Day to my sister, who is such a terrific and fiercely devoted mom to her boys (including two furry boys.)
Happy Sunday.
We are also having gray days, lots of rain but, oh, what a difference it makes in the garden. My sons took me out yesterday for brunch (my suggestion) so I could have today to do what I want. Husband is in Germany on biz, and this is my first Mother’s Day without mom (she died the end of March). So I wanted to just putter around the yard, get some seeds planted, read, etc. But – I had the best present: heard the House Wren for the first time this year! Hoping she takes up housekeeping in the little birdhouse hanging on the pergola just like last year. I just love their cascading call. Already sent a video of her calling early today to Dean in Munich. So excited!
It wasn’t supposed to rain today, but it did! Sob. I was planning on working outside. Lovely to hear about the House Wren!
Mother’s Day was created as the one special day for moms, but every day is Mother’s Day! A happy day being outside in your garden, Claudia. I received wonderful gifts from my daughters…a hand-written two-page letter from the one away at college, and a homemade coconut cream pie from the other.
Lovely gifts, Wendy! Happy Mother’s Day.
Happy Mother’s day to you Claudia!
Monica
Thank you! The same to you, Monica.
Happy Mother’s Day to you as well! Enjoy puttering in your garden today! It’s supposed to rain all week here, too, after tomorrow. Need to get my zinnia, Mexican petunia and cosmo seed in the ground early tomorrow — and then hope they don’t get washed away!
Well, it ended up raining, so no puttering!
We are all Mothers in many ways as you said! Wishing you a lovely day. I’m spending mine with my Mom. I’ve already given her a new bird feeder and this morning a beautiful rose. Later we might go out to eat or just stay in and avoid the crowds. Whatever it will be wonderful. My girls have called so I’m truly happy!
So glad! Have a wonderful day!
Happy Mother’s Day to you!
Laura came home from work yesterday with a dozen roses for me! The smell like a heavenly Spring day! And my cats even left them alone after their initial smell. Getting poked in the nose by thorns my have helped!
Glad you had fun yesterday at Rick and Doug’s. I am so glad they are making a wonderful garden, and finding out they had those trees is a plus. Please take some pictures if you can.
Have fun working outside!
Roses are always lovely!
I didn’t get to work outside. It rained. Even though it wasn’t supposed to.
happy mothers day dear bean! xo
Thank you, Tammy!
Gloomy day here, too. Still more rain forecasted…but, everything is starting to look really lush.
Bet you are looking forward to that extra day with Don next week. Mothering is nurturing….Happy Mother’s Day to all my fellow nurturers! ;)
Gloomy here and to my surprise – more rain.
Happy Mother’s Day, Claudia. We are having a great time in the city with the boys, so no relaxing for us. Being reminded how much fun it is to walk three dogs several times a day, from The twelfth floor.
Saw the play yesterday and had a ball! Great performance enjoyed by all—but I agree that Don stole the show! Loved it!
Oh, you saw it! Great! So glad you had a good time. It’s awfully fun and joyous, isn’t it?
It has been raining off and on all day. The grass is growing and will have to be mowed sooner than later. We had the heat on this morning.
Marilyn
Yes to the need for mowing and it’s going to rain most of the week here!
Beautifully said Claudia and so very true; Mother’s do come in all forms… Happy Mother’s Day!!
Debbi
Thank you, Debbi!
Well, I did read your comment on ‘mothering’ twice because I had a real meltdown this morning.
Dreary and gray and cool here (it won’t last, so on the one hand I’m loving it) but just woke up to too much melancholy about the day, and going to the cemetery to put flowers on Mom’s grave didn’t help. (We took all from our yard; glads, lilies, daisies; was so pretty.)
So my husband kept driving and I sorta had to get it all out because I was in a real pity party about my failure over being unable to be a mom myself (a birth mom). We went out to the country and saw a foal with a mom, and a newborn calf with a mom. That didn’t help either although I loved seeing them in free range with the yellow and blue wildflowers; so pastoral. But I’ve been dreading this day for weeks. And if one more person, like a store clerk or medical assistant or the letter carrier said to me, “Happy Mother’s Day!”, I felt I could scream . They don’t know; they mean well; there’s just an assumption that most adult women are moms. Majority rules. I’ve tried to shout out a congrats to a lot of moms I know; even sent out greeting cards to some this year, trying to get myself out of my own head. Still doesn’t help; nothing ever will.
I briefly glanced at an online poll of something like close to 300,000 ‘voters’ and only 20 percent of people in the U.S. don’t celebrate Mother’s Day. I’m making a note on the calendar for next year that I have to plan something well in advance of this holiday, like maybe take a l.o.n.g roadtrip or dive in and host a Mother’s Day party. I don’t like being so self-focused.
As Scarlett O’Hara would say, “Tomorrow IS another day!” Monday, bring it on…
Very interesting. I said to my husband, “Who starts these holidays anyway?” He said, “Florists and Hallmark.” So, I looked it up. “The American incarnation of Mother’s Day was created by Anna Jarvis in 1908 and became an official U.S. holiday in 1914. Jarvis would later denounce the holiday’s commercialization and spent the latter part of her life trying to remove it from the calendar.”
But I wouldn’t want to take away from anyone’s right to celebrate their mom. I always, always made a point of remembering my own mother with a card/gift on ‘her’ day; usually a family meal except when I lived out of the area. Never, ever missed a one of them, the Mother’s Day Sundays, of which I had 58 with her (I counted it up; that’s a lot of Mother’s Days). What must be heartbreaking is the moms whose adult children don’t even call because certainly the holiday sets up the expectation. I’ve had two elderly neighbors where that was the case.
Onward, I hope you enjoy your week ahead with the rain; a break from all the hard yard work. The moisture will help your garden grow. Maybe you can get in a good book. Are you amassing any great summer reads yet?
Don and were talking about Hallmark holidays yesterday. There’s too much pressure with all of them: Valentines Day, Mothers Day, Fathers Day, blah, blah, blah. I really dislike them. If you love someone and honor them, you don’t wait for one day to do that, you do it all the time.
Unfortunately, they often push buttons of loss and loneliness. What about parents who’ve lost a child? What about those who wanted a child and didn’t get that chance? What about people like me who chose not to have children and are thought to be ‘less than’ because they didn’t take that path? The list is endless. Frankly I have to force myself to include a Happy Mother’s Day message on the blog because I feel it’s a day that has become so commercial – buy cards! buy flowers! – that it’s meaningless.
I’m still having trouble reading and getting into anything. I’m reading off and on but it’s mostly nonfiction.
Well, I appreciate your sentiments about all of this, Claudia. Thank you for being generous and compassionate. You really hit the nail on the head, as always. Good perspective, I’m glad you and Don can talk about it, as I did so much with my own husband yesterday, God Bless these good men.
I agree with you so much about how it can make some of us feel ‘less than’ – – who likes being made to feel diminished? Not me, not you; we don’t deserve it. I tried everything to have a baby (I’d waited too long; got married late) and put my body through torture of surgeries and procedures which resulted in physical health issues (ongoing, as will be for the rest of my life), and I lost two babies because I couldn’t carry them full term, so the pain of loss (my heart & soul) is resurrected on these Mother’s Day holidays. Believe me, I’ve sought help for this, which is the only way I got/get through it; I had grief counseling with a family therapist some years ago; maybe I need a refresher.
It’s just like at Christmas, if you’re a single person eating cranberry sauce by yourself in a small apartment, you can be getting along okay and enjoying yourself, then turn on the TV to some ad/commercial or even a holiday movie (you know how they’ll have a string of them on, at that time of year [Hallmark again; endless stream of Christmas-themed TV movies]) and be made to feel worthless because you’re not in a big house with all the family coming over to sit by the warm fire and open presents, sleigh bells ring. It can take a strong person to rise above that and say, “I’m alone and my Christmas tree is fake & small. But I’m content. I’m where I’m supposed to be, for whatever reason. I count. Don’t try to steal my happiness!”
As humans, some of us are more sensitive to this type of thing than others. Everybody has their own degree of fragility. Anyway, thanks again; I’ve overshared. Again.
But it’s Monday now…wake up to a new morning. And it’s beautiful; we have some sun again and it’s not too hot here in SoCalif. Hubs planted more veggies and daisies yesterday afternoon and I also had bought a shrub called a ‘ozothamnus diosmifolius’ or pink rice flower which I didn’t realize will grow as high as five feet, yikes, but tiniest pink buds that will be year’round (hardy to 20 degrees and we’re never 20 degrees!) and I guess the buds open to white flowers; it’s like a spray that can be filler to a bouquet/vase, say, of roses. Just thought it was unusual on my, sigh, WEEKLY visits to the garden center (I have to stop; we are out of room, but I’ve gotten some incredible bargains lately).
(Darling photo of you and your ma on I/gram.)
I can’t fasten on to any kind of substantive reading either. This seems to be happening to a lot of us lately. I’ll pick up a magazine and I’m good for a couple of articles. I read a few things online. That’s it, for now. Stack of books waiting to be read.
Claudia, Don’s never really going to get a vacation, is he? A Broadway musical just doesn’t shut down for a week so that its peeps can snag some R&R, right? They just have continuous shows and an audience generally wants to see the faves, not the understudies. (But how do they avoid burnout; rest their vocal chords?) So, it may be awhile before you two can ever hit the road again, like even getting to Florida to visit your sister?
I’m so sorry for your losses. I haven’t had to deal with that – I didn’t marry until I was 45, didn’t meet Don til I was 41. It just wasn’t a possibility even if I had seriously considered it, which I didn’t. But to try and not have it happen is heartbreaking. It will most likely always cause pain for you, especially on Mothers Day, and remember that you’ve had a very scary and painful year. The car accident, the injuries, the fires, along with the political upheaval in this country – all of it is most likely making you more vulnerable. It’s okay. Just be and let yourself feel whatever emotions come.
You are the best; thank you for being so kind to me always. You have a lot of readers, and to even remember some of my story is really heartwarming.
xoxo
Totally conquer with your thoughts on ‘mother’s’, Claudia! { smile } I hope everyone had a wonderful day! Mine was spent in the yard prepping gardens, listening to my WREN singing for a mate. { LOVE him, makes me happy! } I just didn’t seem to get enough crossed off my list!
Pleased it didn’t rain on Saturday as predicted. Though we do need it after 6 days of sun, which I’m so GRATEFUL after this past winter. Taking advantage of an unexpected day off of work!
Claudia hopefully you get to dig in the dirt today! Your gardens are beautiful! I wish I had the grass you have …
PS … I was too tired from gardening to learn Instagram! Hopefully, we’ll get all I’ve been taking uploaded, along with finishing the rest of my profile. It’s on that same LIST I mentioned above.
Happy Monday All …
I didn’t get to dig – it rained! I was taken by surprise and was ticked off! Ah well. It’s a rainy week ahead for my neck of the woods so I have to get cracking today.