Hello again! Long-time subscribers will have wondered if I’d given up on blogging, and over the past year I did consider whether I’d finally run out of things to share. I was planning to make a big deal of my 20-year “blogiversary” (wow) in January 2025, but life had other plans for me and I wasn’t able to follow through with that. The death of my dad just before Christmas in 2024 knocked me down hard, and the political chaos in my country has affected me deeply and kept me from enjoying life. But even though I wasn’t writing here, I’m happy to say that I’ve kept up my private journaling and therapy, and continued to attend political protests to show solidarity with the resistance and keep my spirits up.

Maintaining good mental health is still a struggle, but nature has given me a boost recently as the birds and insects are gearing up for breeding season. Every day in spring brings a chance of a “first of the year” sighting of an insect, bird, or ephemeral wildflower, and each of those provide a great endorphin boost. My small patch of bloodroot has been blooming this week, and I’ve been serenaded by a white-throated sparrow daily. They have such a lovely whistling song! Warblers have started moving through Ohio and I’m eager to hear their distinctive songs in the coming weeks as I’m prowling around for bugs to photograph.

The past couple weeks have been busy with spring garden cleanup. Getting my hands dirty is another mental health booster, and the exercise is very much needed as well — I feel so stiff and old after winter! I’ve been working to create a new mulched bed to enclose a group of shrubs I planted over the past few years. It’s been a pain to mow in between them, so I just laid cardboard down to kill the grass and put a few inches of mulch on top of it. It’s coming along now, and today I got some bricks to make a neat edge around it. It’ll take some time to dig a proper trench to lay the bricks on a sand base, but I’ll just work on small sections as I feel up to it. It took me two and a half days to cart the bulk mulch from my driveway last week, so I deserve a break.

I decided that the center of this new bed would be the perfect spot to bury the ashes of my sweet kitty Sophie, who passed away a few weeks ago at age 15. I bought this cute little “shushing buddha” statue to mark her grave, and I may add a small bench later. It’s a nice spot for her, I think. Although Sophie was an indoor cat, I would sometimes take her out in the garden to let her experience the open sky above her, and she always seemed to love looking around. She didn’t like walking on the grass, so I carried her around on my shoulder, letting her sniff the taller shrubs and flowers.

Sophie’s dementia symptoms had been progressing quickly lately, and the vet said there wasn’t anything to be done about it and that she would continue to get worse, so I made the painful decision to let her go. It’s been hard to adjust to life without her. For the first few weeks I kept imagining that I’d see her from the corner of my eye, walking toward me. Or I’d think I heard her meowing. It was unsettling and sad. She’d been keeping me awake at nights for a while because she could never seem to settle down to sleep. So even though it was a relief to finally be able to sleep uninterrupted, I cried for a couple weeks as I missed her warm little body next to me at night. She was such a comfort to me and one of the sweetest cats I ever loved. The house feels very lonely now, but I hope that feeling will lessen as time goes on. I realize that I need to keep myself busy now more than ever as I move forward without my baby.

As I was spreading mulch over her grave, a green darner dragonfly flew a couple low circles around me. It was my first dragonfly of the year, and had special meaning to me at that moment. And the next day as I was shoveling more mulch into my cart near the driveway, another green darner flew low past me. I stopped both times to think about how nature (my beloved dragonflies) was helping distract me from my sadness and redirect my energies to something positive. I’m grateful for that.

I hope to maintain my momentum to keep taking care of home repairs and garden projects. I’ve got a major problem with crabgrass taking over in my back AND front yards, so that’s my next big project to tackle. I don’t want to pay for someone else to do it, but I may be at that point now after letting it get too far ahead of me. But fingers crossed that I can make some progress on that.

And I also hope I’ll be able to get back on track with writing here more often. I’ve missed this. Thanks for stopping by to reconnect!