from May 11, 2011

I downloaded and erased all of last year's pictures from my phone.  2011 was a misguided year.  It never did behave as expected.  Fortunately, over the last four decades, I have learned to negotiate with the years.  Sometimes I can even persuade them to work with me instead of fighting me every day.  For instance, when 2011 took my job in May, I said, "Wow.  Okay.  Are you [la la] kidding me?"  

It was not.

I didn't think my response was unreasonable.  The news, especially the delivery, was quite a shock.  I had eight months left on that contract and my boss called me on a vacation day.  I gathered myself.  I knew profanity (you didn't think I actually said 'la la', did you?) wasn't going to sway a year.  Once calmed, I asked, "Can I get a few minutes to figure out what I'm supposed to do next?"

2011, being what it was, said, "You have until tomorrow morning.  We're building a sensory garden at your daughter's school.  You're going."

I knew that getting outside would be important and volunteer work is never bad, so I grabbed some work gloves, a shovel and a heavy-duty rake.  When I arrived, I found out I would be in charge of a section of the garden.  The teachers would shuffle their classrooms through to help.  Each class was made up of about twenty elementary school students raring to go.  If you know children, you know that they're not always helpful to have around, especially if you're trying to figure out something you've never done.  I was given the birdbath area, mostly because I could carry the birdbath.

We had a poorly-scaled drawing and a few minutes to make a plan, so I paced out a big lima bean shaped perimeter for our area and grabbed the plants shown in the drawing.  When the first mob came out -- five kindergarten classes, I believe -- I asked my group to form a fire brigade.  They passed landscaping bricks from the pallet (donated by Lowe's) to our area where we put them down, forming a border.  The next group helped prepare the soil by removing pieces of sod from the area.  There were clumps of dirt and giggles flying every where.  The next class had seen the clump throwing, so they didn't need guidance.  A few of them broke out and began to dig holes.  The ground was a couple inches of black dirt, then hard-packed clay, making it very hard to dig.  They dug, tired, and passed the little shovel to the next kid until the hole was eventually large enough to fit the plants.  The next class broke into groups of three to five and planted the flowers.  Each class had a minimum of half a dozen kids that didn't want to get dirty or pay attention, so I had them walk in a circle around the landscape bricks.  The idea was to have their weight, what there was of it, seat the bricks into the tilled dirt.  It worked.  The kids got gradually larger as the morning went on until there were some boys big enough to carry bags of mulch, one kid at each end, from the pallet.  We tore them open and spread the mulch around the birdbath area.  By the end it looked pretty darned professional.

The garden is still there.  It's winter now, so the ground doesn't look like it does in the picture.  It's much whiter.  Another thing that you can't see in the picture is that I was emotional.  I'd just taken a life-changing vacation and found out on the last day that the job I enjoyed -- the first time I'd been able to say that in years -- was to be snatched from me.  It was the second time I'd lost my job in less than six months, and the fourth in three years.  Always to the same company in the same building with the same excuse: The Budget  Throughout the morning there were occasional tears in the eyes behind my sunglasses.  Sometimes it was due to joy; the combination of sunshine, digging in the dirt and working with kids is very therapeutic.  Other times I welled up from the fear of not knowing how I was going to provide for and protect my family.  And other times it was anger.  I was so mad and completely devoid of solutions that I simply cried.  The thing that tied all my reactions together was disbelief.  I simply could not believe or imagine my life had turned in such a direction.  2011 had changed me, overnight, from a design engineer to a volunteer gardener, and it wasn't even close to done.

I've been going through the year's pictures and narrating them to myself.  Hopefully the project will gain some momentum and I'll share with other people.