therapy 30 May 2010
I haven’t tackled the back garden for a long while and that has been a mistake on many levels. I love a bit of gardening – even if it is really just me in perpetual battle with the weeds, really – and I chat to myself while I’m about it and always feel better during and after it. Isn’t there the idea that if you can’t be happy in a garden you can’t be happy anywhere? Anyhow, because of the builders using it as a rubbish tip (for 14 rather than 6 months over the last 2 years), me working away from home a lot and the back wall falling down I decided to have it all re-hauled and therefore neglected it on the grounds that it was all going to be changed anyhow and made low maintenance. I decided to get rid of the grass because, as the G cat is gone, some harder surfaces will be easier to care for, particularly if Richard is in charge ‘cos he doesn’t have the gardening bug like I do. I am saving up my money for all this and in the meantime it has gone to rack and ruin and is quite wild. Today I broke and went out and cut the grass with the shears ‘by hand’ and it didn’t take much to put a bit of order on the place and it felt GREAT. It lifted my jaded spirits and I realise I have needed to get back to this all along – it was one of the necessary pleasures I had forgotten but, oh, how it lifts a gal…I was stupid not to think of it before this.
