Leaf blessings
God is so good!
Today I drove to the Coliseum to get hockey tickets in person (to avoid paying 10 dollars in fees to Ticketmaster Per Ticket). On the way back I got fries from Five Guys: the best fries ever! Then I dropped off a couple boxes of empty canning jars, fifteen years accumulation that I'm not using, with a friend who will use them. I don't buy canning jars; they just come one at a time, with mayo or pickles or a gift brownie mix at Christmas. I felt blessed to be able to talk to this friend and hug her. We both counted our blessings and felt very blessed by God. He is present in our lives!
Then I drove to the ATM to replace the cash I spent on tickets; the ATM is near another friend's house, so after I got cash I went to her house and we talked quite a while.
She's feeling stressed and sad and very busy. We hugged and talked and hugged again. Her whole family was working to prepare for a sale at their family business. I pulled up some wild onions which they had growing all over; she gave me a bag and now I have a pile of wild onion stems to cut up and use like chives. A few of them still had the tiny bulb and roots, so those I planted in my bare backyard. First real plants there, along with the threads of new grass and my daffodils and hosta which survived and are sending up late shoots!!!
I pulled into my own driveway to discover my neighbors were digging out the piles of old leaves from their landscaping. They were bagging it to get rid of. I asked if I could have it all. I helped rake it and they trundled it over, several wheelbarrows full, into my backyard. We talked and got to know each other better in the process of working. They both work full time; I told her, "If I don't see you for another month, have a good month!" She laughed and said, "You too!"
I spread the leaves on the bare dirt and thanked God. I was pondering how to improve the soil brought in to cover the sewer line. It's not fertile dirt; it's just whatever fill dirt they brought. The top of it dried hard as rock, and it's full of small rough rocks. It hardly seems right to call these sharp, rough edged things "pebbles". They're not round at all.
Now my back yard has a thin layer of leaves, not enough to prevent grass growing, but hopefully enough to retain a little moisture and encourage earthworms.
You know, in nature dirt very rarely has such rocks mixed into it. Usually by the time rocks are surrounded by dirt, the rocks themselves have contributed materially to the dirt around them, worn down and smoothed over. Not softened, but less obtrusive. I wonder what the sudden exposure to the insides of rocks does to the quality of soil; what minerals are there in abundance, which normally would have washed away as the rocks weathered over time?
