It is traditional in this season in this space to tickle your eyes with pictures of our early spring crocuses, while gently dunking a bit on our fellow Canadians who, away from the bottom left corner of the country, are still snowbound. So, here you go. Only not really.
Yes, those are this spring’s crocuses. But they’re not our crocuses, they’re someone else’s. We don’t have any. Because we moved.
It’s a blog isn’t it? I’ve written up childbirths and pet news and vacations and all that stuff. So why not this?
What happened was, we bought a house in 1996 and then, after 27 years and raising two kids and more cats, it was, well, not actually dingy, but definitely tired. The floors. The paint. The carpet. The cupboards. So we started down two paths at once, planning for a major renovation on one side, and shopping for a new place on the other. Eighteen months later we hadn’t found anything to buy, and the reno was all planned and permitted and we were looking for rentals to camp out in.
Then, 72 hours from when we were scheduled to sign the reno contract, this place came on the market across our back alley and three houses over. The price was OK and it didn’t need much work and, well, now we live there.
I’m sweeping a lot of drama under the rug. Banking drama and real-estate drama and insurance drama and floor-finishing drama and Internet-setup drama and A/V drama and storage drama. And of course moving drama. Month after month now, Lauren and I have ended more days than not exhausted.
But here we are. And we’re not entirely without our plants.
This is Jason of Cycle Driven Gardening,who lent his exercise to moving our favorite rosebushes, whose history goes back decades. Of course, there could be no guarantee that those old friends would survive the process.
Today was unseasonably warm and our new back patio is south-facing, so we soaked up the sun and cleared it of leftover moving rubble. Then ventured into the back yard, much-ignored over winter.
Each and every rosebush has buds peeking out. So it looks, Dear Reader, like I’ll be able to inflict still more blossom pictures on you, come spring.
And we’ll be putting in crocuses, but those photos will have to wait twelve months or so.
See, even in 2025, there are stories with happy endings.
