Mother's Day 2009. Long may she sail!!

HS offered me the usual Mother's Day gifts: card, flowers and the blessed gift of his time that I can use as I like. Some years we have gone on a hike, or hung out at a nature center, or just at home depending on the weather.

But our lives are different now, and I asked HS to spend the afternoon keeping HP company, taking care of him, so that I could go out for the afternoon in joyful frivolity, no worries.

Bright day, very windy, but lovely to be out and about, so I headed directly, do not pass Go, for Mazur's the best garden center in the world, where they never put out plants too early for them to succeed at home, are cheerful and knowledgeable and the whole family works there, including a very old grandmother who still works on the plants.

So I lugged a cartload of flowers, herbs, the usual suspects, away, and took a couple of pictures before I left. No those are not my palatial gardens, they're the garden center!

It's a great place for hummingbirds a bit later in the season, when they have hanging baskets all over the place, but lovely at all seasons. Their herbs are great, and now I have a new bunch of rosemary, thyme, oregano and something else whose name escapes me. And impatiens -- always buy a whole flat of these to put in all over the place as white sparks in the flowerbeds, and petunias for hanging baskets. And tomatoes, of course, Roma plum tomatoes, the best for sauce and eating and just why bother with anything else, really.. and peppers, the bell kind.

I should explain that I have limited ground area, but I hang a lot of containers overhead from the tree on the patio and the hooks out front. This year I'm trying upside down tomatoes and peppers. I got an upside down kit thing, and, having studied it, have decided I can improvise more of them using giant coffee cans. Anyway, that's the plan. We;ll see if it's like the pictures on the kit, or if it's a rain of earth and plants on the unsuspecting passerby.

Then, having blown my plant budget wide open, I went off to hike the Preserve, in the beech wood and beside the lake. Both the garden center and the Preserve were full of families dragging elderly moms with them, feebly complaining that it's WINDY, it's messing my HAIR, I want to wait in the CAR, oh MOOOOOMMMMM, etc. I guess the idea is that you came to enjoy the outdoors, now get cracking and enjoy the outdoors..I wonder if grown kids who were always being shoved out to play as little kids are now reversing the procedure, shoving their mothers out to play.

Notes from field, fen and preserve: hearing then sighting of redwing blackbirds, sure sign of spring to hear that rusty shout, like a referee's whistle with a loose part, and first sighting of a black and yellow tiger swallowtail butterfly, and a comma butterfly.

It's official. Spring is here. I realize I've said this before but it keeps on surprising me anyway.


And then a wonderful surprise in the afternoon just a couple of minutes after I got home: a beloved friend showed up, despite feeling physically rotten, to deliver a great present, a spinning kit! complete with drop spindle, lovely fluff, wrong term, but I have to study the right term, wonderful colors, dark brown and pure white, I've been petting it like an animal, how-to book, what a total and wonderful surprise.

My new art skill for this year is to learn to spin, and dear C. is putting me squarely in the path of this new artform. The spindle is a work of art itself, wonderful to handle and puzzle over what to do next..

That's my low tech ambition. My high tech one is to install a flash drive and move my blog onto it to preserve it (heh).

So, one of the better Mother's Days I've had, oddly enough, you'd think this year would be hard to enjoy, but noooooooo.

So I wish the same wonderful day to all you readers, mothers, daughters, anyone who is or has a mom! that should take care of everyone.