I’m having trouble completing things. Lots of things. There’s my mother’s scarf, which I was knitting her for Christmas. Spring is breathing down my neck, but the scarf is still too short to warm hers. There are the pictures I haven’t hung, boxes in my garage I have yet to unpack, books I’ve not shelved. In my defense, these last have to do with my brief, mad conviction that I would be able to buy a house this year, and so decided not to finish those left-over moving-in tasks.
Nevertheless, I also have not quite finished storing my Christmas dishes (there are two plates stacked “provisionally” on my refrigerator). I only partially changed over to winter clothing, so my closet is a mash of three seasons, plus an open plastic tote that looks like it has been pillaged as I am regularly obliged to rifle through it for missing items. I have an unfinished mosaic in the library, three unplanted six-packs of pansies on the porch, and stacks of partially read books—books everywhere. Books of every genre, each with a bookmark notched in accusingly at various stages of abandonment. This in itself is a sure indicator of an unsettled mind.
Normally I’m a one-book-at-a-time person. Or was. Lately, however, I can’t seem to settle. Here’s a partial list of the books I’m currently “reading:”
· Moby Dick
· Myself and the Other Fellow, a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson
· City of Dragons, Robin Hobb
· Aegypt (audiobook), John Crowley
· 11/22/63 (audiobook), Stephen King
· The Secret of Letting Go, Guy Finley
· A Study in Sherlock
· Awakening the Buddha Within, Lama Surya Das
This is not good for me. I’m half convinced that the book thing is the source of all my other failures in the completion department. Perhaps if I could settle on a book, I could finish all the other things I took up and dropped. The problem is that I have too many choices. I have stacks and shelves and bags full of books I haven’t read yet. I want to read all of them… right now. It’s like I can hear them all whispering to me while I’m trying to focus on the book at hand, asking me to abandon that one and come to them… like Bali Hai.
The other thing calling me these days is the Great Outdoors. Spring is flirting with the idea of ripping her clothes off and running amok in the Ozarks. You can smell it in the air. And I’m itching to get outside and dig in the Arkansas dirt. Those packs of pansies won’t plant themselves, after all.
No real garden this year. Though I’ve given up on the idea of an immediate move, I still don’t feel ready to put a lot of work into a garden that will very likely be abandoned. On the other hand, I’m not prepared to face a summer without fresh cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers, so there’s going to have to be a compromise. I’m thinking Container Garden this year, with hopes of owning our own garden space by next planting season.
I’m half afraid to start gardening, for fear of failing to complete that, also.
One thing I did complete recently, was this sweet little moss terrarium I put together this weekend. I’ve been wanting to build one for months, and this $6 glass candy jar caught my eye while I was junk shopping this weekend. From there, all it took was a moss-collecting trip to the woods, where I filled my pockets with Ziploc baggies of wet moss, a few rocks, some potting soil and one of those unplanted pansies I mentioned. Voila! Little landscape in a bottle! I later added a little plastic sheep from my son’s store of toy animals, to complete the pastoral feel.
It was a little like gardening.
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