Today I went out in public for the first time in eleven days.

I put on long sleeves and hid my hair under my rust-colored hoodie and wore the last N95 mask we had left over from when I painted my study a couple of years ago, and went to Lowes for soil.  My tomato seedlings are roaring along, and it’s time to take them out of their plugs and put them in better pots, but I hadn’t got a teaspoon of good soil left. I’m expecting nearly two hundred dollars of dahlia tubers, 75 tubers, sometime this month–ordered when I thought I’d be growing wedding flowers–and I haven’t anywhere to put them.

It’s strange and difficult to be planning two totally separate gardens–the one that will exist if we’re here for the duration, the one that will exist if we get the new place–and not knowing which one is true until the waveform collapses. I responded by dithering, and by starting more seeds. Some of this is Too Much If We’re Staying Here, but I’ve never had a problem giving tomato plants away.

(I planted 36 more tomato seeds yesterday, in addition to melons and squashes. This is, I understand, Too Many Tomatoes If We’re Staying Here, but I have never had difficulty giving them away.)

Yesterday I also combatted my own feelings of uselessness and fear by hand-making linguine. It was very bouncy–perhaps I should have rested it longer–and didn’t roll out as thin as I would have liked, but it still tasted pretty good.

Rain today, and the sound of cat snores

As I am inside the house for the forseeable future, I might as well bend my thoughts to a less-useless angle than they have lately been taking. If only to keep them from going round and round like a Christmas train.

It is the first of April, 2020. This week I put 25 dahlia tubers into planting trays, not knowing whether or notI’ll be able to put them safely into the ground in a child’s handful of weeks. But still, the thin chance means that I won’t waste them. If nothing else I can send them to friends and ask for divisions after the first light frost, toward the end of the year.

I also started twenty pots or so of herbs this week. Several different sorts of basil (overplanted, so I can prick them out into eighty separate containers in a couple of weeks, and then have a row of it in the ground a little while after that), thyme, chives, summer savory, rosemary, oregano, a handful of other things.

My tomatoes, started eleven days ago when I understood that this year it would be vegetables instead of flowers, are nearly all showing their first set of true leaves. My peppers have not germinated, so I might need to send someone less immunosuppressed than myself to buy actual plants at the farmer’s market in a couple of weeks.

(If they’re still having the farmer’s market in a couple of weeks. As it is, right now it’s “stand at the curb and we will bring you things” only, and even that feels very iffy to me.)

Basically, right now I am trying to keep as much of my focus as I can on the plants, because I have a little bit of agency when it comes to the plants. Not control, precisely, but at least I can see that my actions have meaning.

Today it is raining, so I can’t do the weeding I’d like to do (heavy clay soil = don’t walk on it during the rain unless you want pavement!), so I might decide to do some baking instead.

For now, it’s just one breath after another.