My period of mandatory silence is over.  I didn’t intend for it to spill over here onto the blog, but my desperate need to plant whenever it’s not raining, my new obsession with learning to build dry-stack walls, and some news I haven’t yet processed coalesced into me thinking a lot and saying little.  I can speak again, but I need to wait a while before I can sing, so Tethera isn’t performing at Potomac Celtic Festival this weekend and Preachain isn’t doing living history there either.   I’m sad to miss out on two of my favorite activities, but I am incredibly excited to just be at the festival as a tourist for the first time in more than a decade.  Bruce Molsky and Furnace Mountain and Tinsmith are all playing, and I am, quite possibly, twitterpated.  I may have to tape my mouth shut to keep myself from singing along, but I’ve done stranger things at PCF, so I doubt anyone will bat an eye.

In the meantime, see what I’ve been seeing.  My favorite cranesbill is happy in its new bed.

And its less-elegant but no less beautiful cousin is thriving as well.

I bought the most ridiculous composter in the world, and I love it.  Its less-elegant cousin is hiding behind it, working away in the new, sunnier compost spot that we reclaimed from the evil, evil juniper.  (Look at that poke weed mocking me.  I see you, poke, and I will boil you.)

And the rocks, oh the rocks.  This is the flower bed that we had to empty so the plumber could repair the sewer line.  While I wait for the new plants to settle in, I’m experimenting with dry-stacking a low wall.  I hope soon to yank out that cracked old cement edging and have a larger, happier bed with better drainage (oh, how it rains and rains this year!), a functioning water barrel, and something better than this clay in the new section of the bed.

I’ve dug a footing in one spot and stacked and removed rocks over and over, playing with a level and string and eying my antique chipping hammer, but never using it.  Masons work magic, you know.  I already respected them.  I may be on the way to worshiping them.  This stone is alive, and it’s stubborn, and I respect it.  And some of it has lichen, which is so smart it invented soil.  I think I worship lichen too.

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