First Saturday in May in the Garden

Emerging Virginia bluebells starting to show some color

It was a cool morning, but promised some sun.  The wind I could have done without.  It was windy enough to make raking the stray corners a futile gesture.  I am finishing up a couple classes I have been taking at the local technical college, so I thought I would hit the books a couple hours before gardening.

Studying, all the various sounds of the neighborhood drive in.  Hammering, chain saws, mourning doves cooing, the noisy robins, Andrea's children...and the sound of..could it be?  A lawnmower...

Someone was cutting their grass!

As my grass surely has to be the scruffiest, having not been cut past late September, the sound of a gasoline powered lawn mower was a challenge.
First, that I get outdoors.  Second that I cut my own grass.

Now I have an electric corded machine, buried under anything Handsome Son could throw into the storage shed on top of it.  (Did he think I would never return home last fall when he shut up the house?)

With the cord the motion of grass cutting takes on some semblance to vacuuming, which I can do with my cane..

First, though I walked my yard to work up the gumption to clear the shed and free Princess Electric Mower.  And of course, I had my camera in tow.

My spiritual advisor this spring-- pansies!

Euonymus fortunei--still dead, I think...

A new clematis planted late last summer, I think it has large white flowers if I remember right.  I didn't dig for the tag.

A native hepatica in white

Forsythia, no bloom, no leaves...

A native blue hepatica

A robin's egg, hard to see, but the shell was very thin, looked malformed, and there was yolk in one side.  It was either the victim of predation by a grackle or cowbird or just malformed from the stresses of this winter and spring.  It was a long distance from where the robins all try to nest in my yard.  I'm going to have to see if the other robins have been successful. 

Korean boxwood, supposedly one of the hardier species, dying from the outside in.  I clipped off a lot of dead to the green a couple weeks ago only to have the rest die back, too.

A Moorpark apricot, which had typically bloomed third week in April.  Still nothing this year.

Daffys!!! Yay!!!

Smokebush 'Nordine', I can tell it is alive already.  Last spring after the drought and heat of 2012, I thought it had died.  I am surprised I can tell it is alive already this year.  Sometimes it keeps me guessing until nearly June.

Those are not random white bumps, but bloodroot!  I always consider spring as finally here when blood root bloom,  I am thinking Thursday.  It is supposed to be in the upper 70s (F).  They shoot up fast a warm day over 50 degrees (F) and sun and BOOM there you are!

So I did mow my lawn.  It worked muscles I had not stretched out in a while, which is all to the good.  It took twice as long as it used to, but the fact is I did it.

The other milestone, I hit on Saturday, which I have been dreading, was I fell.

We all trip, or stumble, but with my healing fracture and a cane, the consensus was another fall might be really bad for me.  Statistically, falling with an assistive device for walking has a high probability of causing another fracture of some sort.  And, then there is the aspect of getting up, with no assistance, after you have fallen.

I was taking too large a stride trying to clear the rock border of my long border, and couldn't place my cane to support my balance point, and just sort of crumpled actually into a sitting position.  The grass was soft, my camera fine, and even though I landed on my left hip with knee bent, I landed softly, and don't even have a bruise this morning.  Going down, though was psychologically terrifying.  I sat there a moment, not even having the physical air knocked out of me, but taking stock, and then realized I better get right up, if I could (without a walker or chair for leverage), for fear the neighbors who have all been mother-henning me since my return home, run over to check on me.  I was indeed fine.  Getting up was easy, too.  When you literally have to support your body's weight with your arms, you develop some upper body strength.  Even when I was a D1 athlete rowing on the UW-Madison crew, I could not do a push up.

Not only can I do a push up these days, I can do several in a row, by the way.  Getting up this time was a breeze.