Day 8 (or: Planting the seeds of tomorrow's good today)

Yesterday sucked. And I mean it. I can just hear Holly shaking her head and saying “Cara…Cara. Didn’t I tell you that you couldn’t be lame?” Well I was. And I didn’t even wait until Day 63 to do it. Nope. Straight out of the gate. Not even into the double digits yet. But you know what? If yesterday sucked, then today was Armageddon. But the good news is that while everything fell apart around me, I wasn’t as lame in my attempts at good today as I was yesterday.

So here’s my thought. I’m on the hook now for allowing Day Lame of One Thousand Days to happen. If I had a wasted day of “good” yesterday, I’d better make up for it today. Right? Glad you agree. And, if I do say so myself, I think I came up with a fairly decent one.

There are all sorts of good reasons for gardening. Exercise, satisfaction in caring for and growing a living thing, calming the nerves, communing with nature, absorbing the vitamin D. Myself? I just love digging into the dirt and making things emerge from the earth. Incredibly satisfying to us obsessive compulsives. So satisfying that I’ve become a bit obsessed (duh), and I watch for new plants in the same way that a contemporary might watch for new fashion. But today I’m not thinking about my own gardens, I’m thinking of plants on the community scale.

I’d like to share two of my favorite public gardens. The first is the garden at my son’s new school. Funded at the start through the work of a former co-worker, whose mind for all things good is fairly un-equaled (remind me to tell you some day of the scholarship program he started in Jefferson County. For peace.). The garden is a part of a new program for Jefferson County schools and has grown (groan…pardon the pun, I couldn’t resist) into an innovative recycling program and wonderful, educational, and nutritious endeavor.

But my all time favorite public garden is purely one of the most beautiful and incredible and simple triumphs of human accomplishments. An abandoned, blighted, and dejected highline rail in New York City, which has been re-claimed by nature with the help of us clever (but vile, somehow, for creating the waste and devastation in the first place) humans.

Now, it's no Highline, but I live next door to a City owned property, which has collected rusted bits and bobs and plastic toys and overgrown tweedy stubs left in the haste of partially clearing the area. The City put a public trail through the area, but the trail is forlorn and the buzzing of the nearby power sub-station overwhelms what could be a lovely public space. So today, day 8 of One Thousand Days, I did two things. First, I went to the Jefferson County Conservation District and ordered a dozen cedar trees, a dozen western hemlocks, a dozen madronas, a dozen mock oranges and several other native shrubs and trees to be planted in march when the plant sale is completed. And because I had a deep need to do something physically lasting, something that I could count as an accomplishment for good, TODAY, I bought sweet pea seeds and planted them in the sunny areas of the lot. Joy.

Terrible day 8 down, managed to make up for day 7, and 992 to go.