nonsequitur

Gven Golly was out of town this weekend, helping her sister celebrate her birthday in Georgia, so I had all this undisturbed time to get all these things done, which I won't enumerate, except to say that I didn't get most of them done, which I will blame in part on the rain that fell most of Saturday, beginning during my bike ride to the bank, post office, and watch repair shop, and preventing me from doing any meaningful gardening, of which there is a lot to do, even the minimal cleanup of last week's chores, let alone the extensive planting and soil prep I had in mind.

So instead I made a big pot of bean soup (white kidneys with onions, garlic, celery, cayenne and habanero peppers fried in butter), froze about 12 quarts of cranberries (harvested on Cape Cod by Jessi Golly in November and stored in our garage all winter), cleaned up the kitchen (a mountain of dishes stacked artfully and soaking in the sink), did a load of laundry, and listened to a Lou Reed CD (New York) over and over and over. "It takes a busload of faith to get by."

In the evening I drank a glass of Ohio wine with a bowl of bean soup and some guacamole, talked to Zelda Golly, read a couple of stories from The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, The Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953. That's the title. Then I went out to a movie called "Smart People" at the nearby mall multiplex by myself. It was pretty good for a predictable Hollywood treatment of family troubles among the irritable and mean-spirited intelligentsia, who it turns out are just hurting and lonely, which well-earned condition is instantly cured by the birth of a baby.

Sunday was a little more productive. Rev. Susan addressed the Passover holiday by talking about the importance of knowing who your tribe is, and what an unlikely or unpredictable or inexplicable tribe a congregation of Unitarian Universalists can be. It was New Member Sunday, and I talked to an interesting woman who brought a painting instead of reciting her autobiography. I stopped at the office on the way home to finish off a piece of work leftover from Friday. Although it's a shame to waste good weekend weather, it felt good to get that chapter off my desk.

I couldn't squander any more of a perfect spring day, so I ate breakfast on the patio while reading the Dispatch in the sunshine. My sister Jo Jo Golly had sent me a bunch of vegetable seeds for my birthday in January - six varieties of peppers - and I don't usually start plants from seed, but here's my chance to learn how, so this will be an experimental venture. I lined six plastic flats with newspaper and half-filled each with a loose mix of soil from the garden. Each flat has space for about 50 seeds, poked into the soil an inch or two apart in rows that are then labeled on one end with the seed packet.

This is way more organized than I have ever been this early in the season, but the sun feels good on my shoulders, and it's a golden opportunity to get into the garden on the ground floor. It also forces me to be much more systematic than usual so I can keep track of which varieties of vegetables and herbs are planted where - not that I have any confidence that these tiny seeds will actually grow, mind you. Handling them individually - smoothing out little rows in a series of one-by-two-foot microgardens - forces you to pay close attention to each one and give it a chance to live, just in case of good luck and good drainage, the right temperature, the right amount of moisture, and more variables than I can count.

So much is left to chance, especially for a beginner, but what else is there to do? According to the directions that came with the seeds, the flats should be watered from below by placing them in a pan of water. I don't have a pan that big, so I commandeered the bathtub of the back (utility) bathroom, laid all six flats sideways in it, and filled the tub with about four inches of water - just enough to soak through the bottom of the flats and saturate the soil - then drained the tub.

There they sit, six flats of pepper, sage, basil, chamomile, and something called malva, either germinating and sprouting little roots, or not. We shall see. If nothing else, I'm getting a whole new appreciation for this very erotic phase of the garden process. It's no wonder old people love to grow things.

I did get distracted once or twice by other tasks I had to get done, planting three bleeding heart roots in a bare spot in the front yard and ten tiny Montbretia bulbs, which I have never heard of so I'm not sure why I bought them, in a swath across the salvia bed in the back yard. Then I started a batch of bread and took off for an hour-long bike ride just in time before the sun set.