Not really. I mean the rain is real, but I’ve cut back on my afternoon gin dramatically even though yes, it’s raining as usual.  Also the evening wine. I’m not doing as much of that either. To be fair, I don’t really like wine. I know. No one likes a woman who doesn’t like wine. I’m more of a fruity beer or good cider kind of person. But those have too many calories/carbs so I decided Prosecco wasn’t just for celebrations and bought myself a nice wine cork meant to keep the bubbles in your bottle in the fridge. It works. I do like a glass of bubbly. But you can keep your red wines, thank you very much. You know what else I don’t like? Mushrooms. That’s right. Their texture is like rubber to me and I just can’t.

This lack of the ability to tolerate the texture of the mushroom is, apparently, related to my brain. Lately I’ve come to understand that there’s a fairly new word for how my brain works (or doesn’t, as the case may be): Neurodivergent. Huh. Go figure. I find this very amusing.  I mean, everyone has their quirks. Maybe I’m more quirky than some but I never considered myself ‘divergent’; a word which somehow seems like it probably means something close to antisocial, also something I’ve been accused of. Sure, I “diverge” from being told what to do. I consider myself somewhat of a free thinker who chafes at the constrictions of polite society, although I do have a moral compass. Of sorts. Maybe the life I lead “diverges” from the average path.

But as used here, this word that apparently describe my brain and its workings means neurologically divergent from the norm.  It’s a word reserved for people whose brain processes information differently, or learns somehow differently, or causes behaviors that are atypical. The only problem is that there are so many people whose brains are ‘atypical’ that it leads me to wonder why the typical people are not the divergent ones. Who gets to decide what is typical, anyhow? Probably someone who lives a beige life in a beige house and eats beige things. Like mushrooms. Phooey on them and their probably boring beige lives.

Making headway in that salon, just figuring out how everything fits together.

And where are all these other neurodivergent people I think I notice? Evidently they all live in Olympia, where people wear their divergencies on their sleeves; like they almost literally show them off. Maybe being neurodivergent is like the new blue/pink/green hair or sleeve tattoos. Like maybe it’s just all the rage right now and I’m actually normal. Maybe that’s why, overall, I like Olympia. I like that no one bats an eyelash when I do odd things like wear my little red wool pointy gnome hat well into the spring when it’s clearly a Christmas accessory;  or drive a Mexico van that was obviously completely paid for decades ago; or wear the exact same outfit for weeks at a time (a little trick I picked up as a cruiser and adopted in my land life because who cares? Not me, and clearly not you, either, because you never even noticed). Try that in some snooty city and see how far you get!

In Olympia, people generally smile at me and slow down so I can cross the street safely no matter how weird I look. One time I even got sent home with an entire box of fresh French pastries from the bakery on the corner. I feel certain it’s because I showed up in my red wool pointy hat since the van, which smacks just slightly of anti-capitalism and looks like it’s driven by someone whose idea of a perfect croissant can be found inside a cardboard tube in the refrigerated section of the local Safeway, was parked at the house. Or maybe they thought I just looked hungry. I’ll never know. I just smiled and thanked them because those pastries are like $4.50 apiece and French.

There are a lot of people like me here; people whose brains work in such a way that it’s impossible for them to remember how to tie a bowline even though they have learned it and relearned it countless times. My secret shame. I always blamed my brain, because why not? But now I understand that I was actually right about that, so I can move on and just accept it. After all, I’m divergent. Not anti-social, just a little bit different from a beige and boring definition of normal. Whew! I’m so glad.

We’ve had a bit of a delay working on Galapagos while Michael flew to Tennessee to make sure his mom was ok. She is fine now, which is a big relief to us all. But we were dead worried for a hot minute there and he felt compelled to go be with her, which is exactly how it should be. We are in the middle of putting the salon back together and it’s going much better than we had feared but we kind of lost our groove for a bit.

We were honestly so burned out from the big project of tearing the boat apart and getting the chainplates/rigging done that the puzzle that is the woodwork in the main cabin felt like a bridge too far. But enter the reality of the checkbook balance, not to mention the uphill trek of finding anyone who might do a better job than we could, and it seemed wise to just move forward the best we could. We have the port side done and I am close to finishing the starboard side. It’s coming together. When we move the cushions and mattresses back on board I have promised to open one of those bottles of Prosecco I have stockpiled around the boat. We will truly feel like we have arrived. Oh wait, no that’s not right. That day will be the day we reinstall the bow pulpit. THAT’s the day we will have arrived somewhere.

The list of tasks, it is still long.

In the past, our chainplates were hidden behind really beautiful teak boxes. Those boxes did look grand, but to take them off to check for leaks meant removing bungs, which then was a woodworking job to replace them and touch up the finish. We are not fans of hiding the chainplates, and so we are not going to do that again. With the addition of extra fiberglass to repair the considerable damage that had to be done to replace the backing plates, those areas where the chainplates are attached are now too wide to accept the box covers. So. We are going to show them off instead. I have a cunning plan on how to make them look attractive and to intentionally bring attention to them, my divergent brain at work here. We’ll do a post when that’s complete.

The old salon, where you can see the box hiding the chainplate in the background.

We’re getting there. Foreshadowing represented by the bright green paint on the fiberglass underneath the chainplates. And I look forward to refreshing the finish on this yellow cedar, which was finished first in 1991 and has not been touched since then. It’s good to know the previous owner of your boat so you can get this kind of intel about it.

On another note, it’s looking like spring outside, which I notice when I put my winter clothes on to go on my brief forays to the outside world. When we spent springs in Mexico on our boat, I did not suffer from allergies. Or from cold. Our third spring, I think, here and now I remember how spring hates me. Or maybe I hate spring. Or, more specifically, I love spring but my body hates it. The only cure is to get out of this environment again.  I am always cold here except during summer. And it seems I forgot that I also suffer from sinus infections here in the Pacific Northwest season that passes for spring, but in reality is just an extension of winter. This makes me unhappy. I want to go dig around in the dirt, but I’m allergic to everything growing in it, especially the molds that live in good soil. Dislike.

Speaking of spring, it feels wrong that I am not busy buying plants for the garden. Since I won’t be here to care for them, it doesn’t seem prudent to add to the gardens we already have.  I have spent the better part of spring for the last 35 years getting excited about growing new things and plotting where to place special plants in the garden so they show to their best advantage. I love plants. They are so mysterious in their ways!  In spite of the untenable amount of work our old yard in Lakewood was, sometimes I miss my garden there. I miss my greenhouse a lot. One year I started over 100 different kinds of seeds, after spending the long winter reading esoteric seed catalogs and going on a seed buying spree. Fun times!

A few hard spring plants I brought from our extensive Lakewood gardens.

We drove by the old place a few weeks ago and it was the first time I’ve actually cried about missing it. I disliked Lakewood, on the whole,  and do not want to live there again. But I miss my glasshouse.  It still looks like it did when I left. It still has the same “Dream” sign up above the door. It’s like I stepped away from it and never went back, which is actually what I did. Nothing has changed in the gardens that I can see from the road and it doesn’t look like anyone uses the greenhouse. I don’t think I can drive by anymore. It’s too hard.  The man who lives in the house now lost his wife shortly after buying the place. I imagine he does not use the greenhouse. It languishes. I hope he doesn’t languish with it. It’s a sad situation.

The glasshouse at our old place.

A couple of weeks ago our realtor friend, who is a really thoughtful man, called and told me he was listing a house and the owner had left a lot of nice gardening books behind. He wanted to know if I wanted them. His call came after a couple of weeks where I had been regretting getting rid of my rather extensive library of books about gardens and plants and all that stuff. I couldn’t believe it. Do I want the books? Hell, yes! He said they were nice books and I believed him. I made arrangements to go pick them up, not realizing exactly what I was getting into.

When I arrived at the house I was shocked to discover there were about 300 books, all of them like new. Books about garden planning, about famous gardens around the world, about perennials, bulbs, roses, annuals, exotic plants. There was a copy of almost every single book that I had got rid of when we moved out of our Lakewood house. Some of those books are hard to find anymore. Books by Ken Druse, Dan Hinkley, Rosemary Verey, Penelope Hobhouse… I stood, wordless, at this offering from the universal good. Knowing he really needed to move these out of the house, and not having the time to go through them at the moment, I just took them all, taking them to the car in piles heavy with the joy of discovery. It took me an hour to load them all. Good thing I still have my Mexico van! It was a treasure trove for a frustrated gardener.

Not even halfway finished bringing books to the Mexico van. A quick phone pic sent to Michael.

At the house, I unloaded them into the living room and commenced going through them all, picking and choosing those to keep and those to give away to others. It was glorious and gave me an exciting task to do while Michael was in Tennessee. Claire had just flown to Europe for a much needed vacation and I had the house to myself. The living room was literally filled with tall piles of the most glorious books. Just the sheer pleasure of looking through books that were like old friends and finding new ones to explore filled a couple of afternoons. I selected those I wanted and gave the others away but, honestly, if I were in a bigger house I would have bought an entire bookcase just to keep them all. Now I have my library back, which feels right even though I cannot be going about the business of building more gardens at the moment. It’s a promise for the future to have these reference books again. I do wonder about the gardener who bought all of these very expensive books and marked pages carefully with little sticky notes. Who was this person? And how did they manage to collect so many books? I would love to know that story.

After carrying all the books to the car, I noticed this lamp sitting on the floor near where I had been working through the piles. Feeling a little tingle of serendipity, and having been told I should take anything else I found in the house that I wanted, I decided I had room for this. It’s like the Universe spoke out loud in that moment and, in spite of how it’s a little bit kitschy, I felt like it made a certain statement. I’m not sure where it will end up; this house or another one. But with a new, neutral shade, it just might work. I might chose beige, the backbone that holds all other colors together.

I love a weird lamp. Especially with boats on it.

S/V Galapagos, standing by on channel 16 because our radio works again.

Also, it’s not lost on me that my photos are kind of all over the place lately. Someday I will get better at that again. Maybe when I stop using my cellphone and remember how to get other photos onto my computer.