Fresh Finds

What to write about when you’ve lost your voice? What to photograph when your quilting projects have ground to a halt? I am cross covering for a provider who is out on maternity leave and while the patient care is shared by everyone else, the added patient contact hours every week have reduced my time to do administrative tasks and that ends up coming home. So, at night and on weekends I am juggling. And, I fear, doing a poor job at it. I have so much to do that I can no longer keep the list active in my head and I am so overextended I can’t even make a list of it all. Things pop into my head and by the time I go to write it down, it’s gone and I have a new items floating before my vision. What I want is to bake cookies and dig in the dirt. Instead, I flip through Pinterest like a daze addict in an opium den.

Apple Hand Pies I discovered tracking back from a photo on Pinterest. I think these pies shall wait until fall, when apples are in season. There is so much fresh, seasonal fruit for summer and the peaches haven’t even shown up. In fact, this weekend is slated to be for blueberry picking and canning tomatoes. May I never buy another can or chopped tomatoes again….that is my opjective.

Rain lilies popped up along fence lines and roadsides in the last few weeks. I have caught glimpses of these flowers but their show is fleeting and by the next week they were gone. Then last week they returned, coaxed from their hiding places by the tropical storm. The pool at Cutler Ridge Park was ringed by these flowers and in the summer seemed to bloom continuously. And like my childhood, they faded away, forgotten. But then the storm came through and the seasonal talk of hurricanes and weather preparedness started and my mind was drawn back to the erasure of much of my childhood that happened with Hurricane Andrew. Saturday morning, at the Alachua Farmers Market, the plant vendors was selling these rain lilies, also called Fairy lilies and Zephyr lilies. The Florida Native Plant Society also gave great information about the flowers. I bought two pots and will plant them in my future yards.

Arbequina Spanish olive trees, that I bought at Olive Growers Farms in Dunnellon, Florida. I drove down there and stuffed trees in my little car. I planted the smaller 1-gallon trees this Sunday. I planted the larger 3 gallon the weekend I bought them. They get watered each day at the job site.

And now, I need to stop the percolation of ideas and threads that race to get out of my head and through the keyboard. That’s just it. Once I sit down, I could sit here for hours and write. The new fiction story in my head is writing itself, all the characters mingling and greeting each other. I am a horrible hostess by ignoring them all and heading off to work. All those voices will need to wait for when I have more time to be gracious.