This past weekend was all about small steps rather than big leaps. My garden is slowly, slowly, slowly coming along. My husband fractured his elbow back in May and he is still healing up, and unfortunately can’t do the digging for us. My brother has been coming over and helping me out – this past weekend we rototilled the front garden area and I hope to plant some things in there around the raspberry bushes soon. It is so weird to be so behind schedule, and off plan. I am a person who makes a detailed plan and then for the most part, checks it off. So this has been a learning experience in flexibility and rolling with the punches for sure. And honestly, I am ok. This just wasn’t the year I guess! Despite the setbacks, we are still doing great with what we have planted – I am super excited about all my radishes and I am going to pickle some of them today. We are also going to try our hand at baguettes (using sourdough since I can’t find yeast still!) and having our radish and butter sandwiches on baguettes, with radishes we have grown and bread we have baked. Simple but good, like my life lately.

We spend our evenings in the front yard, where we actually have some shade, all nestled on a blanket in front of the apple tree. We snack and chat and watch the birds flying about in the twilight. It’s a great way to wind up the evening before going in. We have been doing some read-alouds at night as well, poems from a book called A Poem for Every Night of the Year, and sometimes from Farmer Boy too.

Then this past weekend we took a spontaneous walk through the marsh. Most of our favorite hiking spots are now super crowded so when we go, we try to find some of the smaller, off the beaten trails. Sunday we headed out to one of the places we knew would be crowded, but we only planned on checking out the hive to look for bees, since we were starting bee week this week. Well, no bees, but we decided to wander down one of the less popular trails for a bit. It was such an impulse that kiddo didn’t even wear shoes, we didn’t have our hiking backpack – or sunblock, so it was a quick trip, mostly under the canopy of trees!

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I am slowly learning how to live without a plan, something that is hard for me. But I am learning we don’t always need one.