Control issues, reality checks, comeuppance, and resolution

Last weekend's gardening was limited to picking a big bowl of strawberries, mowing the postage-stamp lawn, and pulling a few weeds. Yet there were a few surprises: a brilliant magenta disk of bloom on each stem of a transplant that I thought was lamb's ear but has shot upward into tall, multi-stemmed flowers that startle the eyes when you walk in or out the back gate. And the mushroom gravy and biscuits that Jessi and Alex made for breakfast on Sunday.

The old redbud "tree" transplanted from the old house refuses to grow vertically despite all my attempts to stake it and train its multiple stems upward, as a tree is supposed to grow. It persists in spreading its new growth outward every year in its new spot beside the back door, drooping almost to the ground above the irises that surround it. I think I'm fighting a losing battle to make it go up if it wants to go out, because every year it gets stronger and my stakes and I don't.

Should we read parenting metaphors into that? Yes, let's.

This week has been warmer and drier. The grass still needed cutting, the mower didn't get any sharper, and the usual weed suspects are encroaching on salvia, ajuga, and lamium in the shady beds. I picked half a many strawberries as last week, and they're half as big. The spinach and mesclun are about played out, but cabbages and cauliflower and getting big heads. Tomatoes are starting to show some growth with the warm days and nights, and the beans are beginning to climb their poles. A lot of perennials need to be transplanted from crowded beds to empty spaces, but I don't have the energy right now.

I was out of sorts coming home from a long, boring meeting Saturday morning, and it didn't help that the fake health food store on Shock Road was out of whole wheat flour. How do you forget to order flour? Oh, but they had plenty of sweetened yoghurt covered nut balls and over-packaged manufactured food-like products with pictures of smiling suburbanites, just no wheat flour. So I drove to Olde Clintonville and stocked up on flour, rice, beans, cheese, and wine for the party that night at our friends' place in the country.

So I started a batch of bread as son as I got home, and it proofed fast on the patio bricks in the 90-degree heat. But when it came time to put loaves in the oven, the gas oven wouldn't light, and for a while I thought we had a pilot problem, and we still might. Eventually the oven heated up, but not to the right temperature, so the bread took about three hours to bake. I was cutting it close time-wise in the first place, so in my foul temper I blamed my reclusiveness on the oven, the store, the forces of the universe, and called it a day.

Two out of four loaves actually over-baked, and I'm eating them for breakfast and lunch this week as penance. Sunday morning I wore my dynfunctionality to church and even left half my coffee sitting on the kitchen counter undrunk. How counterproductive can you get?

Turns out there was an interesting person sitting next to me in the pew, and we had a nice conversation after church about, of all things, fitting in (or not) in a new community. We both have had varying experiences in moving from one part of the country to another - Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Kansas - and found that in some places you have to go back three generations to really belong. Not so much in central Swingstate, which seems more accepting. And in most places, people can spot an outsider a mile away, and once you open your mouth, forget it. Never try to mimic the dialect; folks know a fraud when they hear someone try too hard to talk like the locals.

Most of the afternoon I spent in blissful solitude pulling weeds, transplanting lemonbalm, yarrow, hosta, and salvia, making lentil soup in the crock pot, and burning the brown rice. John and Yoko's song "Isolation" (from the Plastic Ono Band) was running through my self-indulgent head, but I'll get over it. Jessi called from Connecticut, where he's been meeting Alex's family. Just before dark I uncorked the white wine that was meant for the party, poured a glass for Gven, Helga, and myself, and unwound on the patio reading the Sunday paper. Helga made a nice quiche, basmati rice, and some outstanding oatmeal chocolate chip cookies in the uncooperative oven. Gven gave me a Paul Klee print, a couple of cool binding tools - an awl, some linen thread, and a burnishing stone - and a book about book-binding. Awl's well that ends well?