On This Day.....

You've seen us. 

We're the car just ahead of you that simultaneously brakes, flips on the blinker, and turns precipitously as soon as we spy a historical marker.  We are the people for whom the tongue and cheek plaque, "*ON THIS SITE IN (name a date), NOTHING HAPPENED*" was created

.

And, to be perfectly honest, most days are like that.  Put a big X through the bulk of your Mondays through Sundays and call it good. Most of our ancestors lived their lives recorded in the briefest of statistics, despite what Ancestry.com and their ilk advertise.  For centuries, only the most well heeled sat for portraits and but few of them look out at us from museum walls. The advent of photography brought the weddings, graduations, and family portraits of stiff unsmiling persons not meeting the cameraman's eye and arranged as carefully as fruit and flowers in a still life. "ON THIS DATE.....THEY HELD THEIR BREATH...."

Enter TimeHop.  Suddenly, every date has its day.  Every birthday...naturally.  Every walk on the beach...of course.  Also...a rosy cheeked 'cheese' snapped on an iPhone on February 23, 2009 in the number 8 greenhouse...

...and some cuties in college gear and snow boots splashing in a man-made mud puddle in the big house.

On February 24, 2010,.TimeHop  brings a mosaic of plug trays of posies ...clearly an overwhelming kaleidoscope of work to come for the photographer and friends.....

No mud puddles in 2013, where Lizzie and Abbie are excavating in the bare dirt around a new hydrant in the #7 greenhouse in their school clothes.

I'm not so sure Abbie isn't making dust angels.

Hurst Greenery spring training 2012.  No, Josh is not pushing a cart; we don't let the kids do that before they turn three....Joke! Joke!  

February 2012...the beginning of a dreadful drought year, though we couldn't know it at the time.  The geese were low over the #9 greenhouse that February 23.  And I had a newer phone...an iPhone 4.

And the very next day...on February 24....a thick frosting of snow left by the retreating clouds....

 And some wishful thinking about palm trees and beach chairs as recorded later that night.

Yeah.  She definitely needs her toes in the sand.  Still February 2012.

Beaches are for daydreaming.  In real time, the greenhouses were building  big icicles in February of 2013.

And Aaron is old enough for some elementary basketball!  That means some serious bleacher time.

And it's February 23 again. Every week in February is like Groundhog Day and Christmas wrapped together.  FedEx, or UPS, or a Tagawa Greenhouse grower truck arrives dropping off 2, 4, 6, 8 or several pallets of stacked boxes.   Before we ever plant, we have to unpack.  Lucky to have these guys helping back in 2014.

Ok, ok. No child was harmed in the taking of these pictures. Trust me, that's a rubber knife Josh is holding wrong side up.

The iPhone 5 shows me pinching fuchsias so they will branch into a rounded fountain of blooms.

Told you we do Groundhog Day.  Here's another colorful delivery of cuttings: coleus and calibrachoa and New Guinea impatiens destined for big planters and hanging baskets.  That's what we were planting  on February 23rd in 2015.

Not everyone was planting: some of us were hanging around like monkeys.

Hello, moon over the sycamores at 502 Spruce and a goodnight to February 23, a day without much history...but plenty to remember.  See you again soon.

Not a Trivial Pursuit

Some things you don't have to work to remember...some things you know you will never forget. The welling up of tears will subside, the raw woundedness will scab over, but the memory in my mind's eye will remain fresh even as the event itself disappears over the horizon of time.  I cannot write about this week yet; it is too immediate and the vignettes too raw; time will judge and mingle the sweet with the harsh; today we can only reach and strive and hope the light at the end of the tunnel is gentle.

In the midst of this week, there is Valentine's Day, something I've regarded as a Trivial Pursuit in other years, a time for the kids to construct inventive boxes, for the folks in flower shops to stress, and a boon to restaurants at midweek. Our Tarkio HyVee meat case was nearly bereft of steak this Valentine's Eve and the stuffed chicken breasts were entirely gone.  Not everyone is eating out this Tuesday night; some folks...like Blake and me...will have steak and salad....especially those...like Blake and me...foregoing potatoes and chocolate...because they've been Valentines so long....

This year I'll be especially grateful for our humble table even as we skip the 'loaf  of bread' and go directly to the 'jug o'wine and thou'. God willing, I won't distinguish this Valentine's meal from any of the other February 14 repasts I don't remember because next year there will be another, and another, and another to come.  This year, I will thank my husband specifically for being both pillar and pillow: strong and solid and reliant, yet able to absorb all the pummeling and heartache and tears. Valentine's Day will just give me more reason to tell him, in case the steaks and chocolates over the years didn't get the message across.

Maybe next year I'll be frivolous and buy him a giant bag of Cherry Mash....or Peppermint Bonbons.  Maybe next year he won't feel guilty about eating them!   We can hope....