Stitching With Dropped Threads

Poppy picked up several thick books at the library on our last visit, so I helped myself to one of her choices the other day. It's called Dropped Threads, and it's a compilation of short essays and excerpts by Canadian women, professional writers and otherwise.

I didn't expect to like it. But I did. Not all of it, not every single piece, but as a whole it was a pleasant surprise. Lots of feminism from lots of perspectives, bits and pieces of women's lives, small truths and revelations that I needed to hear.

It's me, it's my age, it's the circumstances of my life, and I'm finding more and more as I creep up in years that I need to hear the voices of other women. Older women. Older women who aren't trying to feed me religious propaganda. I've heard so much of that, and seen so much of it, and continue to see it in a lot of my clients, hush-mouthed women speaking what they've been taught all their lives, and suffering for it. Not all of them, obviously, but enough that it's a worry to me from a health point of view as well as a frustration as a person who's messing her way through life and needs to hear what's real. Needs to speak what's real, not a superimposed "should".

And I found that. I read women talking about aging, and loneliness, and second-guessing. Talking about their bodies, relationships, ambivalence, regret, lack of regret. And spirituality too. Most of it seemed pretty real, their own stuff after peeling back the layers to find themselves underneath.

Getting older is something on my mind a lot these days. Because I am, I guess. But how do you do it? I don't expect a set of directions, but I want to hear other women's walks, and how they came to peace. I want to hear what it is to settle into your own wisdom, and stop chasing youth, how to sink into maturity of years and maturity of vision, and bless that settled-ness that isn't the hyperactive, performance-driven frenzy of the earlier decades.

Dignity. I think that's what I'm struggling for. Not apathy or resignation, but dignity in the fact that I'm a woman almost forty, and then almost eighty. Or ninety, if such things come to pass. Not to compare my greying hair or wrinkles to other folks my age and think how much older/younger I look than them, or how busy/not-busy, smart/not-smart, creative/dull, ambitious or staid or ... or any of those other things that I've measured myself against all my life.

I'm trying to come to terms with myself. A big part of that is being female, and not trying to win male approval by being willing and able to run with the boys. I don't want that. I know I've done it in the past, and I'm not happy about it anymore.

I want to be a person, a woman-person, an aging-woman-person who looks both directions and knows herself.

It's not really about gender, except that this is the gender that I am.

I want to be wise.

Yeah, I know. Don't ask much, do she?

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Basket Case

Another

rainy

day.

So I undertook something I've been thinking of undertaking for a while now, a little fabric "basket" made according to a generous tutorial. However, her dimensions were all given in centimeters, and because all my sewing equipment is marked only in imperial, I did some translation. And a little fudging. Along the way I took some pictures - and considering the gore of my last post, and how I cringed every time I clicked on my own site, I hope this is a little easier on the eyes.

Oh, and her seam allowance was 1 cm, more like 3/8", but I used my standard 1/4" quilting seam.

So, the orange stripe is my Fabric A, and the blue-green print is Fabric B.

I cut two strips, 3"X9", of Fabric A, and a 9"X8" Fabric B.

Pin the A's to the B, right sides together (my A was same both ways), and stitch.

Open seams and press. The completed panel was then 9"X13"

I cut a lining of Fabric C, the same size (9"X13"). I applied a medium/heavy-weight fusible interfacing (don't know which it was, sorry), and then trimmed it all around.

I then folded both pieces in half with their 9" sides matching, and stitched along both edges on both pieces.

(N.B. Purely for your convenience and edification I purposely left my machine threaded with navy cotton, just so you could easily see the seams I'm describing. It was NOT because I was too damned lazy to change threads for something more closely matching. Absolutely not. Far be it from me to take such an easy way out when I could easily have walked across the room to my sewing cupboard, opened the canister, and found something else.)

Now, this is a little trickier to describe than do. Take your lining, fold the corners out, measure up 1.5", and draw a 3" line across. Pin and stitch along the line.

Trim it off to about 1/4". This is what you get. Do it to the outer fabric "pocket" too.

Turn the outer shell right side out, and slip the lining into it. Then fold the edges in towards each other and pin all the way around. Top stitch close to the edge.

(Note the matching topstitch thread. Can you see the navy inside? No, neither can I.)


This is what you get!

I think next time I'll cut a 2-7/8" X 5" piece of stiff cardboard and set it in the bottom between the shell and lining layers before stitching them together at the top, to give it a sturdy base that you could load up with bits and pieces without having it sag. And next time I'll make a handle too.

I think I'll make several for Christmas.

Yes, I said that. Christmas. Ouch.

When I announced that we were getting chickens this year, a lot of people asked me if I thought I'd be able to do the butchering myself.

Apparently I can.

But I don't like it.

This poor bird was so sick, laying there with its head in the dirt... Yesterday at least it looked around every now and then. Today it was nearly comatose, and was having so much trouble breathing. It's been a very cold, and recently wet, spring. I think it was pneumonia.

So I got the axe. And after apologizing profusely, I dispatched it.

I don't want to talk about that part anymore.

You know, there I was apologizing to this animal, and I think it bothered me more that I'd called it into being on my farm and its life went for nothing, than the killing itself. It died because I'm inept at raising chickens, not because it was ready for the next stage, sustaining my life.

But I felt worse just watching it die slowly. When I killed it, I suffered a bit, but it didn't. And I think that's the important thing. I think. It's all got me a bit flustered.

Then a couple hours later I heard this horrible little skreeing from the area of the back porch. I opened the door, and there was the kitten with a mouthful of struggling baby chickadee. Mercy. I shut the door again.

Wherever I look, there's the Janus-face of life and death.

Discard

There are several excellent reasons why baby quilts are the best quilts. Let me tell you about it:

1. They're small. That means they're a lot easier to quilt on the machine, and a lot easier on my back.

2. They're small. That means that I can used up bits and pieces of fabric, things I don't have enough of to piece a larger quilt with.

3. They're small. If they're an eyesore, they're not a huge eyesore, and when the baby gets a little bigger, people have a very valid excuse for passing them along.


Poppy's been attending a youth group at one of the local churches, and the couple that runs it is expecting a second child. I very much appreciate that they're willing to undertake that project (the youth group, I mean - baby-making is their own look-out), so I'm making a quilt.

These are fabrics that I've had way too much of for way too long. Poppy swore blind that she loved them and I got enough to make her a bed-size quilt, but after the purchase she informed me she loved them, but not in that way.

(Yeah, heard that one before. Oh, my heart...)

So there I was left with her expired passion, and I've since made two laps quilts and several baby quilts with the heap. This is it. I'm done. All the niggly leftovers are going in the second hand bag.

But all the same, it's kinda pretty, and I've satisfied my stash-busting instincts. I guess even unwanted leftovers have their consolations.

Chateau Chicken

Thistledilly

It's dandelion season. I live in the midst of a dandelion forest. In fact, there are places in the "lawn" that look like they were deliberately sown to dandelion, because there's nary a blade of grass. Not even quack grass. That's quite an accomplishment. Maybe later in the year I'll go out and dig roots and make a batch of wine. At the very least I know it's "organic".

This place has been so neglected for such a long time, and often when I'm gazing, stupefied, at some clump of desolation, I think about the word "organic" and wonder what its applications are. My dandelions are organic, but that kind of organic doesn't look very fruitful by human terms.

Organic Thistle. I've been punching through the thistle patch with my shovel, breaking off the tops so they don't go to flower. I gave up on trying to dig them up by the root. Hah! They go on forevah.

Chickens, doing chickenly things. Pooping, eating, flapping, shrieking. Growing. Astonishingly. We were planning on putting them out on grass this weekend, but the forecast is for rain and thunderstorms, so perhaps we'll bide our time a bit longer.

One-Eyed Jack, the preening one. I thought he died a few days ago, but it must have been another runt, because here he is in Cyclopean glory. When everyone else in the coop had pneumonia, Jack's eyelids on the one side swelled up and stuck together, and that along with his runtiness made him easy to spot. The sickness has passed, but his eye is still mostly shut. And he's still a runt. Or she. Maybe it's One-Eyed Jill.

I'm astonished every day when I go to check in the morning, and this bird is still wandering around tipsily under the legs of its giant siblings. If it makes it through to the bitter end, it won't be so much a chicken dinner as a chicken nugget.

When I'm working on our farm, I'm hard. Hard like weathered, not hard like brittle. Like a "bottle in the smoke", a drinking skin.

I do what needs to be done, but that's not what I think needs to be done from inside the house. I haul big food-sacks, and behead thistles, and carry five-gallon pails of water. The place looks bad. There are days when I'm out there, and I look around at the ugliness, and the loneliness, and there are tears running down my face because I can't see the beauty, and my heart is cracking with all kinds of grief, and all I want is to get the hell out. But I do it anyway. The chickens get fed, the garden has a chance to breathe because it isn't choked by weeds. When it's time to butcher, I'll do that too, and maybe the tears will splash on the meat. And I'll do it, and carry on with it, because I'm tough. Something inside me is hard, and hardening.

I need this. I need the other things too, the study and the companionship and the therapy work, but I need this too, to keep me on the right side of real.

I was thinking this afternoon, about real, about really real. There was a time in my life when I used to worry about whether it was right or wrong to wear jeans to church. In a world where food comes from the ground, that's not a real question. It has nothing to do with morality. All the lists of do's and don't's from church that I used to fret about, or the lists that accrued inside my head, the ones of my own making, they're so far away now. Now it's about whether or not the chicks and the garden have water, and that's about it.

That's who I am today. Could be different tomorrow.

Home Alone

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.

Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall.

You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words “I have something to tell you,” a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

from Best American Essays, 2005, page 28, Brian Doyle, Joyas Valadoras

Stilled Life

Today.

Started early, as usual during the week. We're up at 5 to get the Spousal Unit to the bus-stop. It's so light in the morning now - if I wake before the alarm there's really no way of knowing what time it might be from the piece of sky through my window. The sun's been up for hours. It was worse when I lived 400 miles further north though. There the sun barely dips below the horizon at all. Or so it seems.

From the bus-stop back to the chicks. They're so big and voracious by now that by the time I get to them in the morning the feeders and waterers are empty. Mercy. I didn't realize I was in the market for avian elephants.

Altogether we've lost 24 so far. We finally went and got some antibiotics for the water, because it was beginning to look like we might lose all of them. Since that we've only lost a couple. I didn't want to, but I also didn't want to have nothing to show for this endeavor at the end of the summer. We'll keep them on it for a week and a half longer, and then pull them off. Since we got them, people have been coming out of the woodwork to share their experiences with Cornish Giants, and they all said the same - these birds are bred for antibiotics and factories. It was the Cornish Crosses we wanted, the ones Joel Salatin recommends, but those weren't available. Oh well. Live and learn. We'll try something different next year, and hopefully by the end of the summer we'll have a little flock of laying hens to try our hands at.

The birds are two weeks old today, and to celebrate that they got extremely belligerent. They puff out their chests and explode in each other's faces. Charming. I think I won't have as much trouble with the butchering as I thought.
"Homeschooling". Patch's reading-readiness has taken some big leaps lately. Hallelujah! He wants this so badly, and it looks like it's finally on the map. He loves real, meaty books, things along the lines of Terry Pratchett. For years we've been pulling them in from the library in audio format, so he could have that autonomous access. Now that the symbols are making more sense for him, he's decided to work on Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By. He breaks it down as he can, phrases here and there. It's still beyond his fluency, but it's not beyond his sophistication or his pride. He's never tolerated the condescension of "readers". He'll get there. I'm so happy for him.


Garden. After the chicks, I was out busting the clods from my last unseeded bed. This is hard work for me. I'm such a wimp!

Big, bright, and bold. I got the purse done on the weekend, but I feel a bit too... conspicuous carrying it around. I know big purses have been really popular for the last decade or so, but I can't get over the diaper-bag effect. I think this purse will enter a library raffle and find new life on someone else's arm.

Jess, my girl who gives the coyotes a severe barking when they need it. Geez those things are loud! They park next to my window and make their horrible moaning and wailing in the middle of the night. I get up and flash the house lights at them, and that seems to unnerve them enough that they go find somewhere else to hold their convention.

Groan. Just when I got the kids sleeping through the night...

The proportions on this photo are so ridiculous. It looks like her feet belong on a poodle!

Baby. Just because he's so cute.

Attacking his mum. This is the part just before she hangs a lickin' on him.

test?

We've had 15 or 16 chicks die since we got them just over a week ago. I hate that, especially since I don't know why it's happening. We go in, and feed and water, and everyone seems to be moving around fairly briskly, and then when we check again a couple hours later, there're a couple corpses.

And I think it's the not knowing why that's bothering me the most, because then it feels completely random and arbitrary.

Sometimes things die, and sometimes there's an apparent reason, and sometimes not. That's the way it happens. And sometimes in spite of the sadness of it, it's a blessed relief too.

I imagine abortion is like that, sometimes. Before I had children, and even up until a few years ago, I couldn't imagine wanting an abortion, no matter the circumstances. And now, knowing a larger world, I hate to imagine being stuck in a culture without the option. I know I'd go that route, under the "right" circumstances. I've been thinking about that a lot in the past few days.

My friend found out this week that the woman who gave her up for adoption had been gang-raped by six men, hired by her mother to keep her from insisting on property rights. Abortion wasn't an option then, and I'm glad of my friend, but oh god, what a situation.

Sometimes there aren't any happy solutions, and we never know the whole story. And sometimes things die. Mercy.

Bach and Bamboo

I've been craving a new purse lately. The one I've been hauling around for the past couple years is looking pretty battered and bruised, not being exactly high-end to begin with, and constant employment has worn it down to the nubbins.

And it's spring - I want some "pretty" in my life. (Without spending $150!) So I drug out the fabric bins, and bought some bamboo handles, and started playing with newspaper templates. I think I've got something that'll work. I'll post more pictures when I'm done. Still need to pick up some interfacing to hold the inside cell-phone pocket.


Poultry Report

So far we've lost 8. Ding-Dang! These darn broilers seem to make a hobby of dying!

Here's what I did, and you can laugh if you want. They were all looking so distressed and unwell, and I'd frantically checked and double checked on feed and water and shavings and temperature, and everything was as it's "supposed" to be, but they were still lying around and panting and making horrible noises and I was having nightmare visions of losing the entire batch.

Then I remembered the Bach flower essences that I've been using on myself and my family, and that there's a bottle of something called 5-Flower, or Rescue Remedy for emergency-type situations. I've been using it on my hands and wrists after therapy sessions, and on the Spouse's headaches, and sometimes on clients when they've got unrelenting knots. But you can use it internally too, and now and then I'll take a few drops just to settle.

I took the chickens' waterers, refilled them, and put 5 drops of Rescue Remedy in each. Then I put them back in the brooder, told the chicks to LIVE, and tucked everyone in for the night.

The next morning there were no dead chicks - first time since we got them! I took the boards off and they all started running around very energetically, and nearly crawled up my arm to get at the chick-starter I was pouring into the trough.

Hurrah! We have had one die since, but it was one that had already gone paralyzed and couldn't move to the feed or water. Today, cross my legs and hope to fly, it looks like a grand day for chick un-mortality.

I swear, I dreamt about chickens all night. Who knew this chick-anery would be so fraught?

Meet My Peeps

So, I walked up to the counter at the Co-Op, and left with a boxful of LIVE ANIMALS AND THEY DIDN"T EVEN ASK TO SEE A PERMIT OR ANYTHING!!! It was such a peculiar feeling, just like when I left the hospital with Poppy - feed it, keep it clean, and beyond that just do whatever feels right, huh? I didn't have a clue, and it didn't seem right to be entrusted with a helpless human being.

I don't have a clue what to do with chicks either, but I'm beginning to have more faith all the time in the natural propensity of living things to continue living in spite of me. I mean, we've had a dog for six whole days now and she hasn't died. The cat's been hanging around for seven months, and not only lived herself but put out a bud that lived. Even my trees pulled through (though I'm having some niggling doubts about that Evans cherry...). Geez, my kids are 11 and 12! So I guess there's a pretty good chance that majority of the chicks will survive my attentions long enough to make it to dinner.

You know what? (I didn't know this before we got interested in ordering chickens, so I'm sharing my wonderment.) Baby chicks can easily go 24 hours without food or water, and they mail them all over the place. Mail them! Mail order chicks. Makes me think of mail-order brides. Though brides don't come in cardboard boxes, of course.

It's also extremely strange and new to me to care for animals that I intend to eat. Wow. Strange isn't the word. It feels... very spiritual, in a fear-and-trembling sort of way. I'm going to care for them as best I can, and when the time comes, they'll contribute to my well-being. And I'll look them in the eye everyday knowing that's how it will be, and when it comes time to butcher, it'll be my hand. I don't know why this strikes me into the soul, but it does. The spirituality of Real.

I'm so much tougher than I used to me, and so much more tender. Sometimes I feel like I'm going to spill over with compassion for this world and its foibles. Even my own, occasionally. And at the same time as I'm feeling that, I know there's little room for folly or illusion, or ya lose yer chickens.

Thus sayeth the High Priestess of the Brooderie.

Jesus For The Masses

Heard during the BBQ, spoken by one very religious man in his late sixties to another of the same:

"For the longest time I couldn't figure out how everyone in the whole world at the same time would be able to see Jesus coming back in the clouds. And then one day I was watching Oprah, and it suddenly came to me - it's going to be on T.V.!"

Word.

Nudged Over The Brink of the Sink

My spouse served as godfather at a baptism this morning, and afterward we were invited to the family's house for a BBQ.

I thought I'd help out with food prep, so the first thing I did on arrival was nip into the bathroom to wash my hands. This is a home with three small children, so the bathroom looks as bathrooms will under those circumstances - utilized.

Now, I'm not an entirely unfettered freak about cleanliness, but I do have this underlying urge to bleach things. Thankfully I'm far too exhausted almost all the time to disinfect doorknobs the way I might otherwise, and I'd like to think that I'm enough in possession of myself that even if I weren't too tired, I'd still be able to refrain.

However. Little kids are kind of... well, bacteria-laden. In a rather blatant way. I'm sure we're all completely loaded up with various bugs all the time, but the little people show theirs so much more visually than the taller varieties, so when I'm around them I have to work harder at not thinking about it.

But I tipped over the edge while I was washing my hands. Posted on the wall next to the sink was this little ditty, to be sung to the tune of "Put Your Fingers In The Air":

There are germs everywhere, EVERYWHERE!
There are germs everywhere, EVERYWHERE!
On your face and in your nose
On your hands and on your clothes
There are germs everywhere, EVERYWHERE!

And then... nothing. That was it. Probably this lyric offering was complements of the local preschool, but it still seemed unkindly brief, and I'd like a word with the librettist. There are germs EVERYWHERE, and - ??? What? What are we to do about it? Doesn't this seem too cheerfully fatalistic? I'm merely a perpetual perambulating host for the unseen hordes? Where's the plot, the heroic stand, the conquest and sterile denoument?

Ugh. And now here I am typing on my loathsome keyboard. Somebody pass the Lysol.

And Then There Were Three...

We have a dog.

The name she came with was Justice, but Mercy might have been a better virtue. Or Amity. Or Docility. Stern Justice just isn't so much in her nature. So now she's Jess, which I figure is close enough to the original that she won't be completely unaware that we're addressing her, but makes me a bit more comfortable calling her. Rather than calling for Justice, which would have a rather naive air about it, really. Justice. Ha.

She's an indeterminate cross between Bernese Mountain Dog and Husky. This makes her somewhat larger than I was strictly looking for, but she's not too enormous, and has the sort of coat that will allow her to live comfortably outside even out here on the prairies during winter.

We have a dog. Good Lord.

She's digging in the yard, but she doesn't bark, loves the kids, has a sweet temperment, and probably won't live more than 10 years total. She's 4 and a half now. I think I'll be able to handle it that long.

We now have a cat, a kitten, and a dog. I've got a hundred chicks arriving on Thursday.

We'll have gone from zero to 103 in six months. Population explosion.

And there's something wrong with my camera. When I first got it, the colours were fairly true. Now they all look sort of washed-out and overexposed, even on a sunny day in the shade. Drat. Oh well. Hardly a priority at this point.

On Being, Simultaneously

Today I planted beets. While I was on my knees measuring out the grid, pushing the soil gently over the seeds, watching the tiny, brilliantly red bugs I've never seen before, I was thinking about how strange it is. It's very strange that I kneel on the dirt in the sunshine with gnarled seeds in my hands, planting for the future, because at the same time, there are people screaming for their lost children, and homes being lost to fire, and bodies suffering torment. But I was just kneeling and planting in peace.

Friends of ours lost everything except their house in the recent fires. They'd lived there almost forty years, built it up from nothing, built their home, and a greenhouse business, planted gorgeous trees... while I was planting beets, they were trying to identify their possessions that were stored in the garage from twisted, melted remnants. Trying to recover pictures of their daughter killed in a car accident twenty years ago. Trying to do all this with bodies torn in the haste of trying to keep the flames from taking everything.

They thought they'd be planting beets. And if they'd been planting, there would have been other people, other places, that were struggling just to survive that self-same moment. Maybe me.

It's so strange that I can hardly think about it. Somehow it doesn't make sense, that while I sleep, others suffer, and when I suffer, others sleep. There are times when we all seem to be so devastatingly connected that it seems impossible that what I experience, you can remain unaware of. But that's really the way it is.

And tonight I can't comprehend it at all.

Thrives On Neglect

These past few days it's been snowing and slushing. (That's what Poppy calls it, when that heavy whitish stuff drops from the sky and goes splat and makes mud.) And cold. Today is supposed to be better, but it's been SO cold this week - overnight lows of less than freezing.

Thankfully most of our plants haven't put out any flowers yet. The only one that did was a haskap (not haksap, as I mistakenly thought it was before, many pardons). It's the Siberian blueberry-type thing that we put in last year and got mowed by the young man we hired to help out around here. Didn't think it would come back, but there you go. Awfully tough, apparently. I guess it would have to be to live in Siberia.

But about five days ago while I was wandering around inspecting the fruit trees and bushes, I noticed that this plant had several white flowers, so when the temperature was set to drop, I dropped a couple five-gallon pails over it and its sister to preserve the blossoms. The pails stayed on for two days, and came off yesterday afternoon to let the bushes have a boo at the sunshine. It rained last night, and doesn't appear to have frozen, so hopefully the little flowers are still sturdily attached to the stems and we'll see some fruit in a few months.

Maybe I shouldn't even have bothered with that, maybe it's overkill. These plants are reputed for their extreme hardiness - just leave them alone and forget about them and then come back and grab a handful of berries later on. Nice, huh? If only we were all that accomodating. They should splice haskap genes in with the human race, don't you think?

Gardeneers

Up and Coming

There's a lot of growth happening around this place.

The kitten, of course, growing at a small mammal's greatly accelerated pace. It's really quite astonishing how quickly the little animals mature, compared to us; how quickly they go from being an easy snack to being the snack-er.

We're certainly hoping that somebody makes a snack of the new pocket-gopher. Honestly! Just get rid of one, and before we've properly finished crowing over its remains, there's a new mound in the front yard! Roxanne has been rather preoccupied with her kitten's recent mobility and keeping him from falling to his death from the top bleacher in the auction mart (I'm going to assume that mother knows best, but I have to say that I wouldn't choose to keep a toddler up there....), so she hasn't been on ground patrol. And this is what happens to farm security. Huh.

All those dead trees I was lamenting? NOT DEAD AFTER ALL! Land-o-Livin'! There are buds coming out on all three, even the cherry that the deer stripped the bark off of. And the haksap that got mowed to nothing by the hired un-help last summer, even it's regenerated. So we've got a total of 2 haksaps, one cherry-bush, a long row of raspberries, a strawberry bed, one each Brookgold and Brookred plum trees, a September Ruby apple tree, and an Evans Cherry tree. Wow! This year I want to add a crabapple, not to mention a some fertilizer. I figure with all those different varieties, we're sure to always get some form of fruit coming up, even if every year isn't good for every sort.

I'm so pleased that everything didn't die over the winter. I guess sometimes even when things look dead, they're just dormant.