The Friday Four, Part 17

~1~

The flower beds in front of our house have never looked great, but I kind of got to the point where I just ignored them as I walked by every day.  Apparently, my husband got tired of how lousy they looked because, over the last couple of days, he did this:

We'll need to seed the dirt outside of the brick edging and get
some grass growing there, but it's such a vast improvement...

Complete with soaker hoses around the roses and everything.  Much, much better.  The next project is the flower beds on the other side of the house.  It must be summer time!

~2~

We have a little space in the backyard that we turned into an herb garden a few years ago.  Every spring the chives, rosemary, sage, and rhubarb come back in reasonable amounts, and I have to replant basil.  The oregano, however, has completely taken over.

You can see the broad-leafed rhubarb on the left and the purple flowers in front
are the chives.  The tall greenery in the back is the sage. And if you look closely
in the back right corner, there's a little sprig of rosemary tenaciously holding its
ground.  Pretty much everything else that's green is oregano.

I had no idea oregano was a ground cover...  I have a dehydrator so I'm pretty sure I literally have a lifetime supply here.  Seriously, though, this is the hardest thing for me in gardening.  Thinning out perfectly good plants and just pitching them seems so wasteful, so because I'm incapable of doing that, instead they go craaaay-zeeee.  Anybody want a starter for their own ground-cover oregano?

~3~

Yesterday was my last afternoon volunteering at my boys' elementary school for this year.  I enjoy making connections with other kids and getting to know the staff, and it's gratifying to feel like I'm doing something concrete to help the teachers who help my kids so much.  (Though I'm seriously considering drawing the line at sharpening pencils.  Do you have any idea how many pencils a classroom of 1st graders can go through?  By the end of that little project I was ready to break every single one of those newly re-sharpened pencils in two, but then I would have had to sharpen more, so I refrained.)  And yesterday I even got some yummy chocolate chip cookies (that I'm not sharing) with a sweet note from the boys' teachers.  Win-win-win.

~4~

Tuesday morning I baked chocolate cookies with peanut butter chips and asked Evan to draw a pretty picture for our friend Sammy.  He decided to draw a bunch of flowers in her favorite color, but since he didn't know what her favorite color was, he drew lots of flowers in all different colors to make sure he got at least one in the right shade.  Around mid-day we drove over to visit her, cookies and pretty picture in hand.  We only stayed for a few minutes - fifteen tops - because she was tired and even the best and most welcome of visitors can be draining.  We sat by her hospital bed, set up in the living room, and chatted about our family's upcoming camping trip, about the hummingbirds we saw around the feeders outside her window, about her favorite color (it's blue, so Evan had it covered).

Wednesday night, she passed away.  Sammy was a dear soul, friendly and feisty, generous, with a great sense of humor and optimism, always ready with a story and a plate of goodies.  It's been just barely a year now since I got the opportunity to get to know her better and I'll always be so grateful for that chance.  My life is richer for having known her.