On to...

EDNESDAY it's in the future as I write this
didn't feel all that spry yesterday  sorry I never got a post off.  It was an  okay day I just felt off all day and it continues today...a stomach virus? Something like that,  just enough to make me feel sluggish.  Anyway I had food to buy yesterday did that and came home to do my house chores, nothing really to share.

Im digging up another planting plot in the back yard which has been over run with undesirables.  It's only a small space, like 2 x 2 ft.  I rip the unwanted out and say "sorry" you don't belong here.   Back breaking to dig it out...I did a little, then rest, then a little more till I finally gave up and will finish tomorrow.  I tried to pick up all the debris under the 100+ft pine, it's been shedding limbs for ever, and twig by twig Im moving a 100 ft pine from my pasture to the dump.  Seems every day a ton of small  ones and a least one big one falls to the ground during each winter.  So I did cut the big limb up a while back and today I made an effort at moving it onto the trailer...but I was not able to finish...

I can't recall anytime I left a simple job half done.  Does it mean Im losing my zest or just losing the last bit of my youth and vigor?  I looked at all the pine cones  shed beneath it and I stood back and leaned my head back as far as it would go and I starred at all the limbs that are now missing.  Each one had been a proud part of that tree for so long and one by one they fell away.  They were shed...

The cones hold the seeds that will take that big pine into the future...in fact there was a 6 inch seedling there beside it, and I said Oh NO you're not growing there...So I gently pulled it out of the dirt, and took it far to the back of the fence, let it grow big there where it's cones won't reach the yard...Maybe in 40 yrs that pine will be the size this one is now.  I will be long gone, by then even the  memory of me will be gone from the hearts of anyone who cared..

If life is fair maybe my 80 yr old son will stand on the deck here  and look at the old pine across the field  that keeps making such a mess that he does not have the power to change.  The cycle keeps going, whether we have vigor or we don't.  It made me recall when I moved back to SC to help mom; her yard was a mess.  The grass was dead because it lay under the fall leaf bed for too long...I worked hard.  I planted soooo many flowers in her overgrown beds.  It took about 4 years of hard work to bring it back.  

She loved it, and I have to wonder would I love it?  Part of the love of a tree is the energy you put into keeping it alive, the sweat, the aches and pains, the effort.  It's watching it in every season as it lives.  Is it the flower that matters or the experience of planting and caring for the flower?