Author Archives: Melissa

Off We Go

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Recently, two people in my life have said to me, “Melissa, it seems like you always have a lot going on.”  They are not wrong.

We have a date to leave the dock. But is this a solid date? So far we have had three dates for leaving the dock and they have come and gone for various reasons. We just were not ready. This time, we think, we just might pull it off. I mean, there is a gathering at our place in Olympia so we can say goodbye to some folks, so I guess we better make this one work. Cross fingers, spin and spit three times, say all the prayers and magical incantations.

The plan is to leave the dock August 1. It’s been awhile since I’ve posted an update and there is a reason for the delay.  That reason is not laziness. We were cruising forward, the end of the refit in sight and planning an exit around Mike’s June birthday when the inevitable happened. Life threw in a considerable change of plans and we had to adjust.  May as well get used to this kind of thing because cruising full time is filled with opportunities to learn how to be flexible.  This time it had nothing to do with the boat. It was the guy renting our apartment.

He had finally decided to move out. At the beginning of April. We had planned to leave in April. His timing was not impeccable.

This little apartment was carved out of the main house decades ago.

Now, understand, we bought our house with this tenant in place. He had a solid history of on-time payments and was quiet; two good things that go great together when you are basically sharing your property with a stranger. We are not displeased, however, that he had decided to move. The apartment needed a serious renovation, which we really wanted to get done before we left again.  But we could not do that with someone living there and we were not going to ask him to leave just so we could renovate. Olympia is extremely short on housing of any kind and we just would not do that.

The problem was the timing. I wanted to scream, “Could you not have decided this two months ago?”.  That apartment he lived in had not been updated since Job was tested by a divine being. I’m not going to go into detail here because you might be eating or have a weak stomach,  but let it be said that once he abandoned the apartment, we could not, in good conscience, rent it to someone else without renovations. Complete. Renovations. And deep cleaning. Deeply deep cleaning.  It was filthy.  Almost every single surface had to be redone. The stove was so dirty that I was afraid we’d need to replace it. Mike was still working on the boat and had a full time job at that point. That left the bulk of the work to me. Fortunately, I have wild renovation skills and in a pinch, I can be very focused, if not driven.It’s an understatement to say that this was an intense and all encompassing job. Hideous texture had been sprayed on all the walls, probably multiple times over decades. This included the original picture railings. All of this had to be scrapped off. The picture railings had to be stripped and painted because to buy new ones, and yes, we wanted that period detail to remain, would have been hundreds of dollars we did not want to spend. The paint on the walls was a grey gloss from the mismatch department of Home Depot. Gloss paint. On the walls.  My eyes felt like they were bleeding just looking at it. Countertops in the kitchen were original to the 1960’s and while that sounds retro at this point, in reality it was just nasty and would never be a clean surface again.

Why would anyone do this to beautiful, old growth fir molding?

It took two months. I literally worked on that apartment every moment of every day that I was not seeing clients. I always enjoy my job, but I have to say that during those two months seeing clients was the physical break I needed from the overload of daily manual labor. My body. It is not as young as it was.

The living room got deeply cleaned, the walls scraped of the old texture and paint and repaired where an ancient roof leak had left water damage; the paint literally peeled off the wall in that area, big sheets of rubbery latex peeled back like a price tag. There was the discovery of lovely pink wall paper, probably from the 1940’s. I kept a piece of that on the wall and put a frame around it.  Fresh paint on walls and all woodwork. Italian plaster on one wall, because I love that kind of finish and the apartment deserved it after years of neglect and outright abuse. Molding refinished and rehung. New air conditioner. New smart TV. New light fixtures. You’d think we were going to be living there ourselves, such was the attention to detail, but I don’t know how to do things by halves.

The new space. We love hanging out here.

I left a 5×7″ piece of this in place and put a frame around it as a nod to the history of the house.

Next the bedroom walls were scraped, during which the discovery of more cool old wallpaper from 1938 with Popeye and Olive Oyl (that link is to the Cooper Hewitt museum website where this wallpaper is listed). That room was part of the main house back when this room was, apparently, a child’s bedroom. Of course I wanted to uncover all of the wallpaper but then was not the time. I covered the walls with my favorite white paint: Dover White. Classic,  and it goes with both warm and cool colors somehow. Interesting serendipity: we have paintings of Popeye and Olive Oyl on the boat; done by our ex-son-in-law during happier times with him. The Universe provided a lovely framed print of Puget Sound in shades of blue at no charge to our pocket book. I decided to make the bedroom a tribute to our sailing days and hung that print and our watercolor of S/V Moonrise (done by Seattle’s Alex Kimball) and a hand embroidered whale done by our friend Lesley.

We got the print for free when a friend received it by accident and was told to keep it. Nice.

In the bathroom, more scraping of the gloss navy blue walls (Really? Gloss navy blue?), and trimming out a terribly badly done shelving unit at the back of the bathtub. New caulking everywhere. New fixtures and light. New mirror. The grey plank tile floor, while not my style, was serviceable and at least easy to clean. That stayed. Towel warmer on the wall for those humid Pacific Northwest winters.

More wallpaper was discovered in the bathroom. This time it was from the 1980’s. How do I know? Because it’s the same wallpaper we used in our kitchen in our first house, that long ago. Claire even remembered it from her childhood.

Can you see the little flowers? They were all the rage in 1985.

If there is anything I feel good about in this bathroom, it’s that shelf. That thing was just a mess that had been covered by a curtain.

Bad phone photo of a badly done shelf. What you cannot see in the photo are the raw 2×4’s and peeling contact paper. I just could not see my way clear to leaving it like this.

In the kitchen, the cabinet doors all got a refinish, which was much more work than I counted on,  and I painted the hinges and metal pulls in order to save a little $$ and time.  I did a concrete overlay on the heavy plywood that was underneath that old formica. That formica peeled right off, the glue was so compromised. New backsplash using beautiful aluminum stick on tiles. Those things are great. I tiled the floor using the same tile we used in the upstairs bathroom and the kitchen in the big part of the house. New sink with a smaller footprint to allow a bit more counter space, and new faucet. Mike installed a light above the sink, and new microwave/hood above the stove. He put in new electrical plugs, and grounded ones at that!  We installed a fold-down counter and I found bar stools at a Goodwill. The kitchen was the most work but it’s gorgeous and, more importantly, a good workspace now. And clean. It’s very clean.

A workable small space with room to sit and visit. Or fold clothes. Whatever you prefer.

The furnishings we got from our daughter, who had those in her last house. When she moved into our house they went into our basement. They are perfect for the apartment and saved a ton of money. Plus, our basement is a lot more roomy now. It’s practically light and airy.

We got this extensive project finished and spent maybe a week resting on our laurels and not letting anyone touch anything in there while we just enjoyed the restful fresh and clean feeling of the new space. Honestly, we just loved hanging out in there. In a wild coincidence, our friends Lynn and Curt Brownlow, who we first met in the Aquatic Park anchorage in San Fransisco on the way down to Mexico, were passing through Olympia and came to visit. What a great thing to be able to see them and have them take the apartment for a spin! It felt a bit like the apartment had been blessed by the the gods of cruising, somehow.

Finally, we listed on Furnished Finder and within a few hours after the listing went live,  it was rented to a traveling nurse. Our daughter, Claire, lives in our house and will manage the apartment while we are gone. It had been part of our overall plan to use this apartment as part of an income stream for cruising, but also be able to have it available when we needed it. Check that off the list. Whew.

The gardens have gone crazy this year.

And now that the apartment is out of the way and my body is on the road to recovery from that, on to boat news.

As I was working full time on the apartment and still seeing clients, Mike had finally left his job at the State Patrol and continued preparing Galapagos for our trip, going back and forth between helping finish the renovations and working on the boat. We discovered that we could not find our stack pack for the mainsail. Hmmm. It was just – nowhere- to be found and although we generally do not get rid of canvas until we have perseverated for years, we really were not happy with that stack pack and I can imagine saying something like “get rid of this thing because it’s not going back on the boat”. Maybe we tossed it, maybe we didn’t. But we could not find it anywhere. We’d have to get another. This problem was solved directly as Mike’s friend Bruce had decided to set up shop doing canvas work and he took us on as his first clients in order to learn. Got to love the timing of that. It’s good to have friends with skills.

He and Mike designed a pack that is a hybrid of the Sailrite pack and the Mack Pack, tweaking and fitting it until it was just right. We are really pleased with it.  We finally got the mainsail on this boat, with the pack in place, and today Mike will attach the edges of the pack to the mast and that project will be finished. Galapagos is looking like a sailboat again.

We are pleased as heck with this one.

Another addition to the boat this time is internet access with Starlink. Even as I type, the Starlink dish is mounted on the stern rail and is fired up and working. We have been using Starlink as our internet on board for over a week now, testing it out, and have been pleased so far.  What a game changer this will be. We have an idea of how we will manage  to keep the internet from being front and center of our lives while we are cruising, but being able to keep working for awhile (me) to boost the sailing kitty even more and being able to be more connected to family will go a long way towards keeping my own mental health good. I really struggled with missing our kids and family while we were gone last time and while I am finally feeling maybe a little frisson of excitement to get going, there is the pull of my connections to my loved ones that makes me feel emotional. I have assuaged my sadness by buying three new wetsuits in a variety of thicknesses. I’m ready to get in the water!

No trip is without its flies in the proverbial ointment and, as it turns out, our latest fly is  the amount of alcohol we have aboard. I have prepared for two years of enjoying the occasional bottle of wine by stockpiling that and stowing it all over the boat. This is mostly because although Mike is more easily pleased with any number of red wines,  there are only certain types of wine that I actually enjoy and they are not readily available in Mexico. Tequila? Yes. Wine? Not as much compared to the embarrassment of choices we have here.  I just felt like this little luxury would be nice to have, so I have been buying the extra bottle here and there and stashing them.

What I did not consider is that we are going into Canada first to get that circumnavigation of Vancouver Island that we missed the last time we left for long term cruising. The rules for bringing alcohol into Canada are extremely strict and while it’s possible, if not probable  that it would not be a problem, if it turned out that someone decided to charge us duty or if we accidentally did not claim every bottle (because honestly I have no idea how many are on board) we could potentially lose our Nexus privileges. No bueno. Although people regularly bring a lot of alcohol across that border into Canada, claiming that it’s “ships stores for personal use aboard”, I have read more than one account of customs officers that did not find that claim to be either amusing or valid on a personal vessel.  It’s not worth the risk to us.

So I am looking at this as an opportunity to see our kids one more time before we head south. We will offload the alcohol to their safe keeping and then they will drive out to some location on the Olympic Peninsula and deliver it to us when we are back in the US. I imagine by the time we have gone around Vancouver Island we will have a list of other things they can bring as well.

At least these bottles are easy to find.

This will extend our time in the Pacific Northwest a bit because we had planned to just head south from Vancouver Island. But plans change and this is the latest iteration. I have spent some money on that wine and I intend it to be on the boat when we head south.

Our final (maybe?) tweak to the salon was to install our table top on the sturdy pedestal that came with the boat. We had replaced the big, heavy teak table with a smaller, lighter weight oval shape that pleased us more and we had installed that on a Lagun aluminum support that worked brilliantly while living aboard in a marina. We loved the many adjustments we could easily make to the position of the Lagun setup. But I was truly concerned it was not solid enough for offshore use or for even being in a rocky anchorage. So we changed that out for the solid pedestal that attaches to the sole of the boat. It is much more sturdy and I won’t be worried about grabbing the table if a wave rocks the boat hard.  We moved the aluminum support to the other side of the salon and installed that with a little tray that makes a dandy extra table on the other side. We can remove that when we are underway and stow it in the forward berth. The starboard side actually has a nice table that is built into the settee and stored upside down under the middle cushion, but its use divides the settee into two seats and we never seem to use that, preferring to leave that settee free for napping.

We use the spool of dyneema as a footstool for now. New lifelines, coming to Galapagos while at a quiet anchorage somewhere. Soonish. Yes, we snugged the pedestal up to the settee because it works for us that way.

 

We really like this Lagun table support. It’s just not solid enough for offshore.

Of course, we have other projects underway because project work is never done. But we did add a sewing machine to our inventory this time around. I had always wanted a Singer Featherweight machine and when I pointed that type of machine out to Mike, within days one appeared, as though by magic, on Facebook Marketplace. It was in Olympia about 5 miles from the marina. These little machines are very popular and a nice one will sell quickly so we bought it the day it was listed. It is literally like new. It has been stored in a garage for a very long time, having been built in 1961 and then used maybe a handful of times by a Scottish woman who decided sewing was not her jam. After giving it a drink of good machine oil and motor grease, it sews like a dream. Lightweight and small, it’s the perfect machine for me to take aboard for minor sewing projects that I would ordinarily do by hand. Mike loves it, too and I envision the day when I’ll need to move over and let him have a go. This will sew through canvas and made short work of finishing off the shade cloth curtains for the cockpit. I have a growing list of little sewing projects that will put this machine to good use.

Note the cat slipcover. I covered all of our “bottom sider” style cushions with colorful beach towels. This is our new pet. He doesn’t need food or a litter box, making him the perfect cockpit companion.

I made these by hand but the addition of additional machine stitching, and heavy webbing, has made them sturdier. We use them all the time.

I’ve got a couple of clients today and a final Costco run on my calendar for later. Mike is blowing up the SUP boards to be sure they are still good. Keep your fingers crossed on that one. We don’t really want to purchase new ones at this point. The cockpit is put together, inflatable fenders are stowed within the easy reach of the lazarette on the aft deck. The boat is washed. We are that much closer to backing out of this slip.

S/V Galapagos, standing by.

 

 

 

Great Refit 2023: Woodworking 101 and Other Projects

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We are truly checking things off the list aboard S/V Galapagos. It’s almost like we plan to go cruising again or something. I remember this part of preparing to go last time. It did not feel real then, and somehow, it doesn’t feel real now. There are always so many things that can delay leaving the dock, and the attachments we form to life on land are many and deep. It’s just not easy to let go of the dock.  And that’s on every level: physical, emotional, psychological, financial.

Preparing to move back aboard and leave my garden. Again. Transitions between lives: not my forte’.

But we’re doing it anyhow because the good years we have left to live and will be physically able to do things like cross oceans are passing. Fast. Here’s a short list of what we’ve done in the last couple of weeks:

1 Dropped sails off at Ballard Sails in Seattle to be looked over, and have a new ATN Spinnaker Sleeve installed so we can reduce the number of shit shows on the foredeck when we deploy that sail.
2. Dropped the Viking life raft off for servicing at the Viking facility in Auburn.

Get a load of all those life rafts!

3. Made a running start on installing the new radar pole on the aft deck. This pole is complete with a davit for lifting our new-to-us dinghy engine. Photos another day on this.  This involved leaving the slip, docking the boat in a tight space with only a few feet to spare front and back, and getting back into our slip…all with zero drama. Zero. Drama. My favorite kind of drama.
4. After much perseveration, Michael has ordered new blocks for the mainsheet, choosing to go with the Garhauer 50 series, which is a step up from what we had. We’re excited to play with the angles of the sheet in relation to our hard dodger once we have the deck block in hand.
5. We’ve brought home all the lines and washed them so we can examine them closely to see which ones we’ll want to replace.
6. Continued reorganizing stowage, getting rid of excess stuff we don’t need, creating a manual spreadsheet (otherwise known as a notebook) noting where everything is stored. Note: old line, stored in a plastic bag, makes a dandy filler for oddly shaped bilge areas, creating a flat platform that allows things to be stowed in those areas safely. Why didn’t I know that before?

My manual ‘spreadsheet’. Sometimes I just need to be old school. And these lists, divided by cabin, have already come in handy.

7. Replaced the leaky, albeit brand new, Lewmar hatch in the salon. They sent us a new lid. It does not leak. Finally.
8. Removed the clear polycarbonate window inside the cockpit, looking down into the galley. Bought replacement. Refinished teak under that, filled old screw holes with epoxy, sanded, then painted that part of the cockpit with Total Boat paint. It works great and has held up in other areas, including the sole of the cockpit. Replaced window with new, clear version. We are pleased with it.
9. Painted the ceilings and around all the ports. I’m using Dutchboy Cabinet and Trim latex gloss paint in Nantucket Grey. I painted some of our fiberglass with this stuff years ago and it has held up really well under hard use. Impressed. Working on replacing the dated and worn-out curtains. It’s time for a fresh look.
10. Michael climbed the mast and installed the vane for the anemometer. Now we are a yacht. Both wind speed AND direction? Wow. It’s so fancy.
11. Begun bringing stuff back to the boat from the storage unit. Only the important things first. Like books. And Patrick the starfish. But where is our stack pack for the mainsail? We truly are flummoxed. It’s not like this is a small item that can be stuffed in a corner somewhere. Did we get rid of it, because we were never really happy with it? Unlikely. We are generally loathe to get rid of canvas. But searching the basement, the garage, and the storage unit has revealed nothing so far. The search continues.

We know what’s important. Patrick and our snorkel gear.

The big task checked off the list: put the woodwork back around the chainplates. We are dead pleased with how this came together, and with how we’ve showcased our new boat bling. When you pay this much for stainless steel, you kind of want to show it off. So here’s the end result.

The wood we chose was due to a combination of expediency, availability, and cost. A quick stop at our local hardwood shop for woodworkers brought into sharp focus what we’d be up against if we decided to go with something like Brazilian mahogany or, gods forbid, teak. Not only would our costs absolutely be knocked out of the park, but we’d also be faced with needing to have the wood milled, adding time and costs to an already tight budget and timeline. We decided to go the expedient route and get milled poplar, available in a number of different sizes from the local big box store. Although it’s a soft wood, not my preference for this project, the areas where it’s used are protected and these new chainplates are unlikely to leak. I’ve sealed the wood against swelling due to moisture. However,  if this wood, for any reason, doesn’t hold up over time, it will be very easy to replace it.

I apologized to the gods of Teak as I chose all the sizes I needed to do the job, and then stopped by the paint counter to look at wood stains. We wanted something that would contrast well with the blond wood already there, and also be different from the teak trim we have. To try to match that would have been difficult, if not ridiculous. So instead I went with making it look different by design. In the end, I had stain mixed to my own specifications, having the paint counter worker add brown colorant drop by drop until I got the warm shade of almost-redwood I was after.

Re-purposing some extra teak trim at the bottom to give a nod to the rest of the wood trim in the boat.

Back at the boat, the project came together much more quickly than I anticipated and soon our chainplates were the star of the salon, surrounded by painted fiberglass that matches the paint I used years ago to cover the dated almond colored fiberglass used throughout the boat. That paint job has held up really well. I managed to recycle some teak trim we had from other remodeling projects to accent the new frames above and below, tying the new wood to the old. I call this interior look “Nautical Industrial Chic” (TM).

This weekend we are dog sitting with Emmett, who is definitely an adolescent Aussie. We are forced to sit around and do nothing for a couple of days, which is not our style but I guess we need the break. I imagine we will move back aboard sometime in May.

He’s thinks he’s so grown up.

But, wait! There’s more! As though we didn’t have enough going on, turns out we will be losing the tenant in our little apartment early in May.  I look forward to a fast and furious, but seriously long overdue,  re-do of that space before we say goodbye to the dock.

S/V Galapagos, standing by on channel 16.

Afternoon Gin, Because Rain

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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.