Playing In The Barn: My Hand Slips

     The photo above shows my uncle standing in the barn, decades after my misadventure.  It also shows some of the things I mentioned yesterday:  The bushel baskets, the tomato boxes, and most important for this story- -the ladder going up to the second floor ( its behind and above the tomato boxes).  Now, here’s what happened:

        Neal and I were chasing each other around up, down and around through the barn.  I think I was probably an Indian that day.  I always loved being an Indian.  I scrambled and weaved around the tomato planter on the ground floor, with Neal in hot pursuit, I reached the fixed ladder and rapidly climbed toward our fort in the bushel baskets on the second floor.

          As I quickly scrambled up the homemade wooden ladder, my hand missed the rung above me and backward I went, and down I tumbled, fortunately missing everything except for the floor.  As I fell, I put my left arm out to cushion my fall as I hit the wooden plank floor.

        Once horizontal on the floor, I glanced at my left hand and noticed a newly acquired abrupt jog in my forearm’s normal shape.   Even with my lack of medical knowledge, it obvious that my left arm was broken just above the wrist.

    Neal helped me to my Grandmother’s house, where my mother was called.  A temporary splint was made from a sturdy piece of cardboard to cradle my arm, and I was then driven to the hospital. 

            At the hospital, I didn’t know what to expect, but it wasn’t long before they placed a mask over my nose and mouth, told me to take deep breathes and start counting backwards from 100, as the doctor administered the ether. 

        When I woke up, there was a big chunk of plaster entombing my left arm halfway up to my upper arm, keeping it in a “L” shape, bent at my elbow.  I had broken one bone and fracture another in my forearm.  The next day at school everyone was surprised at my new acquisition and eager to sign their names on my cast, a custom I had never heard of.

It had always been a hassle lugging around my books and my trombone back and forth to school on the school bus, and now having the cast on my arm, certainly didn’t make the situation any easier, but I accepted my fate and eagerly waited for the month and a half for the cast to be removed.  Finally, my sentence had been served and I was driven to the hospital to get the now grungy-looking cast removed.

I sat in the hospital room and the doctor came over with a skill saw looking piece of equipment and when he saw the distress in my eyes, he explained that the saw would just cut through the plaster and because the blade just moved back and forth, even if it touched my skin, I would not be hurt.

As he turned on the saw, and it started vibrating through the plaster, a strange feeling began coming over me.  My head felt woozy.  My field of vision started narrowing around the edges, and became smaller and smaller.  I fell forward out of the chair, and to the doctor’s surprise, I lay sprawled out on the floor in front of him.

As I returned to the world, I found myself being helped back into the chair by some nurses and the doctor and was told to bend down, with my head between my knees.  

“You can’t faint, if your head is lower than your knees.” the doctor said.

A dab of ammonia soaked cotton was thrust toward me and I was told to smell it.  The vapors scoured out my nasal passages, and did a very effective job of waking me up.  

My brain, slowly got back up to speed, and I tried to digest what I had just experienced.  “So that is what fainting is”, I thought.  I had seen plenty of movies and television shows where people fainted, and now I had experienced it for myself.  I didn’t really care for it.

“That was strange,”  the doctor told me, “The saw wouldn’t hurt you,” and it didn’t, but something deep inside me had overcome reality, and down I went. 

        It would not be the last time in my life when “down I went.”

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

My Misadventure Playing In My Grandfather's Barn

 This is something that happened in 1957.

    The first day of school of my sixth grade year was only a half day.  Since we had the afternoon off, my best friend Neal and I were eager to make the most of this last breath of summer vacation so we  were running, chasing, and combating with each other in my grandfather’s barn.  It was a magnificent place, large and cavernous, but full of nooks and crannies for forts and our secret hideouts.

    Sliding open the large central barn door, we entered a dark cathedral-like area, accented with narrow shafts of sunlight slicing down from cracks in the siding.  (Photo below) 

            For the most part, the ground level floor was full of old farm equipment, except for the far end where there stood a mountain made of bales of straw.

    Once through the big sliding door, to the left a steep narrow stairway led down to the cobwebby unused stables in the basement.  It was empty except for the old manure-spreader, a hay rake, and the ancient old hand-cranked International tractor. 

    Just inside the barn door we could see the second level floors running along both sides of the barn’s interior.  To get up there, one could dash through the small doorway on the right, through the old workshop, then scramble up the twisty steps to a small upper room which was stacked high with old furniture.   (Photo at the very bottom of the page)

    From there, you had several choices:  You could shinny down the ropes back to the ground floor or you could scamper along the second floor open storage area, then jump across and down, to the bales of straw.  If you were brave, you had yet another choice, you could climb up to a third floor platform that spanned high across the ground level to the other side of the barn, skirting along  the un-railed ledge, then climb down to the second level platform that ran along the left side of the barn.

    This second floor area on the left side of the barn, was full of stacked bushel baskets and tomato boxes.  It was where we had hollowed out one of our hideouts.  This second floor on the left, could also be accessed from the ground floor by way of a fixed wooded ladder that ran up the wall.

    The barn which was full of excitement and possibilities, but for a 10 year old, it was also frocked with potential danger.  Jumping down to the bales of straw below, gingerly walking across the hand-hewn wooden beams above the plough and planter, or running along the naked edge of the second or third floor platforms, all had deadly possibilities, but through my eyes at the time, the barn was just a wonderful backdrop for adventure.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan

      This memoir covers an eventful month, followed by a difficult time period in the life of Susannah Cahalan, who, when this happened, was a healthy 24 year old young woman who worked as a reporter for the New York Post newspaper. 

             One day in 2009, she woke up and noticed two red dots on a vein which ran down her arm.  Susannah wasn’t normally a worrier, but she was concerned, thinking that the dots might be the result of bedbugs, but after a search of her apartment, she found no evidence of bedbugs, but nevertheless, she called an exterminator, but he too found no evidence of any bedbugs in her New York apartment.  However, Susannah couldn’t let go of the thought of bedbugs, and demanded that the exterminator fumigate her apartment.

        While still overly concerned by the thought of bedbugs, she experience a white-hot flash similar to what someone suffering from a migraine might have.   This was then followed by flu-like symptoms.  She began to think some sort of pathogen had invaded her body.  

            While her flu symptoms and headache came and went, Susannah noticed that she had begun being overly suspicious of her boyfriend, and even began snooping into his computer to read old emails from his previous girlfriend.   She realized that this was something she would have never done before.  Her headache returned and she began experiencing pins and needles in her arm, which lasted days.

    Susannah’s personality began to change.  She began to obsess about small things, and became paranoid of some people, thinking they were trying to harm her.  Knowing that something wasn’t right, she went to her doctor, who could find nothing, and suspected she was drinking too much, but had her take an MRI, which showed nothing except a small enlargement in a few lymph nodes in her neck.  This made the doctor suggest maybe she had Mono.  Finally having a diagnosis gave Susannah some relief.  

    While dining with her boyfriend before going to a concert.  Susannah became sickened with just the sight of the food she had ordered. At the concert she became dizzy and queasy   It felt like her legs could no longer support her weight.

    Her blood test came back saying she tested negative for Mona.  She began experiencing sleepless nights, and her work at the newspaper began to suffer.  Walking to work in the morning, colorful billboards began to hurt her eyes.  They seemed brighter than she had ever seen them.  She began to cry at everything, thinking her boyfriend didn’t love her, and she was bad at her job.  Her behavior became erratic,  She seemed to be having a some kind of breakdown.

    One night, Susannah’s grunts, low moans, and grinding teeth woke Stephen, her boyfriend.  When he turned over to see what was wrong, he found her sitting up, eyes wide opened, dilated, and unseeing.  Her arms shot out in front of him, and her eyes rolled back, as her body stiffened, and she began gasping for air.  Blood and foam spurted from her mouth through her clenched teeth.  She was having a seizure and the next thing she knew she woke up in the hospital.

    In the hospital more symptoms developed, her usual patience, kindness, and courteousness disappeared, she screamed to get out.  She became very paranoid, blaming people of ridiculous things.  She thought the people she saw on the TV screen were spying on her.  

           Her behavior become more bizarre and abnormal.  Doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her.  Was she epileptic, a manic depressive, there was no solid evidence of what might be causing this abrupt change in Susannah’s personality.  She went from one doctor to another, until finally she was seen by a doctor who was exploring auto-immune infections in the brain.

    At one point, he ask her to draw a clock on a piece of paper.  When he saw that she put all of the clock’s numbers on just the right side of the clock she drew, he knew that the right side of her brain was inflamed.  A brain biopsy confirmed she had a rare form of encephalitis and he began to do the slow work that would hopefully bring Susannah back to the personality and life that she once had.

            It was a very long and difficult struggle for Susannah to get her personality back.  Her old friends were shocked at seeing how much she had changed by the encephalitis.   She could barely talk and certainly couldn’t concentrate on anything.   She had lost all of her confidence.   

            When she began researching for this book, she was horrified to see herself in the videos that had been taken of her, in the hospital.   It was like seeing a completely different person.   

           This book, and then a movie based on it, did much to publicize the auto-immune infection and make doctors recognize the symptoms of the extremely rare brain infection.    For me, the book reinforced how a person’s whole personality is dependent on the brain.  

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Showers at Dusk

     We had rain showers off and on all day yesterday.  That is typical Spring weather in the Robson Valley, and certainly welcome, after weeks of no moisture.   The showers continued into the night. 

    When I carried Kona outside for her final pee, the sky was dark, except for an area of light over the Cariboo Mountains.  That light nicely silhouetted  the chaos of clouds and showers falling on the mountains.  

    I have always found it interesting how quickly my feeling toward rain changes.  During those very dry weeks, I was desperately hoping for showe

rs, but after a day of getting them, I was edgy and ready to move on to sunshine and blue skies.

You can take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Life Doesn't Give Up Easily

     Maybe it's because it is Spring, the season of renewal,  but it seems that I have a bit of a theme going here in the blog about new life surprising me.  While, I had some faith that our brutally trimmed willow trees that had topped in February would re-sprout from the top,  I wasn’t 100% sure, but now they have begun sprouting like mad.

    I had the very wrinkled, several-year-old peas that I had planted in desperation, because I couldn’t find the saved planting peas from last year.  Those old peas came up!   Then there was the surprising young plum tree I discovered that had sprouted from the roots of a long dead plum tree.  Life seems determined to persist.

    Yesterday, when I went out to split some of the bucked-up pieces of willow from those topped trees, I was surprised to find that even those sawed-up chunks of wood were throwing out sprouts.  That is something I had seen before with Cottonwood chunks.

    I guess it is these developed survival skills, that keeps lifeforms continuing through the millions of years of evolution.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Two Plum Trees: That Would Something!

    If you plant an apple tree, you will get apples.  If you plant a plum tree, you won’t get any plums, unless you have a second plum tree somewhere in the vicinity.   That has been a problem for us.  

    See the tree on the left,  that was a plum tree we planted probably 35 years ago (I know it doesn’t look it.)   At the time, we also planted a second plum tree, but it died.  That tree didn’t really prosper.  For more than thirty years, it didn’t even put out a bloom, although somehow it managed to stay alive.   Of course those blooms did start to appear, they never developed into plums, because we no longer had a second plum tree.

    In 2012 we bought two plum trees at Costco and planted them in our garden.  After a couple of years we got some plums from them.  In 2018, we had a bumper crop of plums on one of those trees, so many plums that we didn’t know what to do with them all.  Sadly, the other Costco tree then died, so we were down to two trees, the old original one that never flowered, and the bountiful one, that then no longer produced plums, because there was no second flowering plum tree.

    Then a few years later, that second Costco plum tree also died.  I cut it down, as well as the other dead Costco tree.

    Then as luck would have it, after those two Costco plum trees died and were removed, our original plum tree started putting out a few blooms.  More blooms appeared every year, but since there was no other plum tree on the property, those blooms produced no plums.

    Yesterday I made an amazing discovery.  About eight feet away from the stump of that first Costco tree, I noticed some white blooms along the garden fence, where our clematis vine grows.  It seems to be a plum tree that must have come up from the roots of that first dead Costco plum tree.  I assume I hadn’t noticed this straggly tree that had come up because it hadn’t bloomed, and I just thought it was part of the clematis.

    Anyway, miraculously, it looks like we now have a second plum tree in our yard.  I hope that the bees visit both of them, so some of the blooms are pollinated and produce some plums.  I know it might take a couple of years for the straggly plum to really prosper and put out a lot of blooms that will be more attractive to bees.  

    At any rate, at this point I am very happy and hopeful of this surprising development of having the much needed second plum tree.

View my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Remembering Our Forest Fire: May 5, 2023

     The photo above shows what I saw as I pedaled my bicycle home from the library on May 5th, 2023.  When I got to the highway, and saw all of the smoke, I knew I’d better start pedaling faster, and get home as fast as I could.  Our house is located to the left of the photo at the bottom of the slope.

    As soon as I got home, we figured that we would probably have to evacuate, so we immediately started to gather our valuables together.  The photo below shows the scene from our house as we worked to pack up our car and pickup truck.  It wasn’t long before the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) arrived at our door to tell us that we must evacuate; leaving our home behind to whatever fate was in store for it.  

    It was certainly a memorable stressful moment for us, not knowing whether we would have a home, full of all our hard earned possessions, to return to after the forest fire.   We were very fortunate. 

    While the fire continued to burn in our direction, it began to burn angling upslope, sparing the lower sections of the mountain.  Then too, the wind changed directions and the threat in our direction lessened, and there was rain that night.

    Although we suffered no losses, that fire was sure a wake-up call for us.  It led me to start doing a lot of work on the trees and other flammable surroundings close to our house, in an effort to diminish the possibility of fire on our house.  I still have a lot of work to do in that effort, because the threat still exists.  Summer after summer now, enormous forest fires have been burning unchecked through Canada’s massive forest lands.  Summers have now become a scary time for us, living where we do.  

    This 2023 forest fire didn’t even occur during the summer, it happened in early May, so the Fire Season has really lengthened, because of the changing climate.

You can view my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Monkey Bars

         I figure I probably owe a lot of the physical health I have had during my life, to having access to monkey bars in my  childhood.  As a child we would hang right-side up and upside down, twirl, and do chin-ups on the monkey bars that we had in our yard.  Besides the occasional swings that my father hung from trees, monkey bars were the only constructed playground equipment we had access to in our yard.

        I learned feats like “skinning the cat”, hanging upside down by the back of my heels, and other maneuvers that I don’t know the name of.  It made our muscles strong and gave us coordination.  

        When I began teaching in the one-room school in a remote lumber mill camp in BC, there was no playground or playground equipment for my students to play on.  At recess or during the time when they weren’t in school, there really wasn’t much for the kids that lived in camp to do, so in my free time I bummed some lumber and metal pipe from the camp where the school was located, and built a set of monkey bars so that my students could put their muscles to work.  The photo shows the kids in action on the bars.

        Now days such things as monkey bars are probably considered “too dangerous” for kids to play on.  I am thankful that during my youth, we were allowed, and benefited, from a little danger in our play.

        I have a inversion table in my room and still periodically use it to hang upside down.  While my old body is hanging upside down, I often think about all those physical maneuvers we used to do on the monkey bars as a kid.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

An Evening Drive Down Hinkelman Road

     Just about every Saturday evening we drive out Hinkelman Road to visit with friends.  Quite often on that drive, I have to stop to take a photo, which then often shows up on this blog on Sunday morning.  Last night was no exception.  The yellow green Spring foliage is now out on the trees, and it was being nicely illuminated by the low sun, far down the west side of the Valley.

    All winter long, when we made this drive it was totally dark.  The drive is so much more interesting on these stretched-out days of Spring.

take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Welcome Discovery

     I have recently blogged about the distress I felt upon discovering that I had misplaced the red and black beans I had saved from last year, in order to plant them again this year.  In the blog, I don’t think I mentioned that something else that was misplaced were the peas that I had saved.

    The peas were actually more of a loss than the red and black beans which I had only planted one time.  Those peas were something I have planted for decades, carefully sorting the peas after I had harvested them, saving only those peas from the most bountiful pods to plant the following year.  Losing them was a heavy loss for me.

    Peas are always the first thing I plant in the garden every spring.  They are tough and don’t mind the cold.  This year I was in a dilemma, because I had lost last year’s peas.  It was time to plant them, and I didn’t know what to do.  

    In desperation, I finally decided just to try planting some of the left over peas I had saved from 2022 and 2023.  Certainly they were old stock and I wasn’t sure they were still vibrant,  but I thought I might as well put them in the ground, hoping without much hope, that some of them might still have enough life in them to come up.

    It has been very dry now for weeks, and so after planting the peas, I watered the area day after day, without seeing any result.  I had pretty much given up on them, and actually ordered some more peas from a seed company two days ago.  Wouldn’t you know it, yesterday I noticed that some of those old peas had sprouted and were poking up through the ground.

    I was so happy.   After growing, and saving that pea strain for so many years, they begin evolve, adapting to the soil and weather conditions in my garden, so I really wanted to keep those peas, and fortunately, now it looks like I didn’t lose that strain forever.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Fiddleheads

     One of the sights I enjoy seeing as our Spring develops are the ferns.  I have loved ferns since finding fern fossils as a youngster.  I was blown over realizing that the rock I held in my hand had once been a plant that grew 250 million years ago.  Knowing that has always made ferns seem so primal and ancient.  Their existence and survival over all that time continues to fascinate me.

    I love the way ferns develop.  The stem comes up supporting a “fiddlehead” a spherical shape at the top of the stem  made up of leaves.  The fiddlehead slowly unwinds into the fronds of the fern.  The shape of the fiddlehead also reminds me of Art Nouveau works that mimic nature.  

    Because our end of the Robson Valley is part of the Interior Temperate Rain Forest, we have lots of ferns that grow around us.

You can take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Root-Picking

     When we bought our place in the Robson Valley, back in the late 1970’s, we felt fairly financially insecure.  We had saved about one third of the asking price for our house, but at the time, I was unemployed, having quit my teaching job.  I was getting an unemployment cheque every month from the government, but that didn’t cover all of our expenses:  a mortgage, money for renovating the house, and of course, living expenses.

    As we were buying the house, I mentioned to John Peterson, the real estate broker, about feeling rather insecure in buying a house while being unemployed, but of course, he told me not to worry.   He said his family were always looking for workers for various things, and they would call me up when they needed to hire help.

    John did keep me in mind and provided some odd job work for me several times.  Once I had to dig up his sewer line to find a blockage, and another time, he called me to help Bill, his father, dig out his Caterpillar tractor that had gotten bogged down in deep mud on his undeveloped property out in the unsettled Raush Valley.

        Our real estate agent gave me a call with another job offer, again for his father Bill, out at Raush Valley.  This time Bill  was seeking root-pickers. 

        When an area is logged, stumped, and worked over with a Cat, to clear and pile the big debris, there remained a lot of sticks and roots on the ground that also needed to be removed.  This was usually done manually by stooping over, picking up the sticks and roots, then putting them on a pile, to be later burned.  I had never heard of root-picking, but it seemed easy enough.

        I was pleased to have another opportunity to earn some extra money, even though I had to get up at 7:00 on a Sunday morning so I could be out at the Raush Valley at 8:00, ready to work. 

        When I arrived out there, I was happy to discovered that the Blackwater Coop (a group of local hippie, back-to-the landers) were also being employed to root-pick.  Being newly arrived in the Robson Valley, I didn’t know any of the Coop members, Although I knew I had a lot in common with them, since I too was part of the “counter-culture”.   

        It turned out to be a long 8 hour day of stooping over picking up pieces of wooden debris, but I enjoyed working and talking with the members of the Coop, all of who were about my age and held similar values.  

        When the work ended and the Coop members had gone home, Bill Peterson moseyed over and told me I had really done a good job, “Much better than those hippies.” 

         I thanked him, but knew that was just bigoted nonsense, since everyone was out there working together, doing exactly the same thing, at exactly the same pace. 

        I was pretty worn out by the time I got home, but my wife had also been busy in the kitchen and had prepared a nice warm meal for me.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Art Nouveau

     Art Nouveau was an art movement that emerged at the turn of the last century.  It was an effort to make buildings, furniture, graphics, and other objects reflect the lines and curves that are seen in Nature.  This of course meant a lot of images of flowers.  The photo above shows a lamp that came out during the Art Nouveau period.  Its design reflects the lines and pads of a water lily.

    It is probably easy to see why I have always loved Art Nouveau objects.  The beauty of plants and flowers have always given me inspiration and joy.  As you might surmise from the lamp, water lilies were often an inspiration for Art Nouveau works. 

    Water lilies also have a special place in my life, since I had my pond dug.  The purpose of the pond was to create habitat for Nature.  Shortly after its construction, I went searching for plants local to this area to put in the pond.  After the ice melted on Horseshoe Lake in McBride, I gathered some of the large tuberous roots of water lilies that were floating on the surface, brought them home, and stuck them into the mud of my young pond.  They prospered and established themselves in my pond.

    This time of year I enjoy watching the water lily plants slowly develop under the water and begin to stretch out their stems to push their leaves (and later their yellow flowers) to the surface.  Below is a photo showing the plant reaching toward the water’s surface, with one lily pad just breaking the surface. 

   

Take a look at my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

An Encouraging Sprig of Green

     Every time we come down our driveway we are both dismayed and embarrassed at the sight of the willow trees by our house.  They now resemble large Saguaro cactus.   

    In February, we had a crew of arborist brutally cut back the willows because they had gotten so tall they imposed a danger to our house if they were blown over.  This was the second time that we had the willows cut back.  After that first cutback, they put out new sprouts that eventually grew in to huge branches that made the willows as tall as they were before they were cut back.

    This time I had them cut back to 10 ft (3m) so I could take care of them if they started to grow back to high again.    After the arborists crew left, the trees looked horrible, and I know the neighbors gasped in shock when they drove by and saw those high “stumps” that our willows had turned into.

    While I was sure the willows would start to grow back, I was eager for some reassurance.  Yesterday, I got that reassurance, when I spotted a spring of green sprouting out of the brutalized trunk.  A quick inspection of the other trees showed similar green sprigs sprouting on them.   Willows are fighters, and they don’t give up easily.

    We will be happy once they get more foliage on their tops, so they look more like palm trees, before returning to what looks like a normal willow tree that will provide a lot of shade.  I don’t much like the “Saguaro” cactus look they now have.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

The Greening of the Valley

     After our long BC winters, and once the temperatures start to warm, the trees don’t waste any time putting out their leaves.  It seems like the explosion of new leaves happened in just one day.   This period of spring with its newly erupting foliage is on of my favorites.  The light green color of those new leaves add a brilliant accent to the blues of mountain  slopes, with their pristine white snowcapped peaks.

    This morning when I first went outside to do some laps around the pond, I caught the scent of the sweet perfume of the Cottonwood trees; it was wonderful.  When I got back to the house, I saw a Rufus Hummingbird busily slurping up the nectar I had put in the hummingbird feeder.

    Last night I was awaken by a lone mosquito in my bedroom, but this first variety of mosquitoes are easily swatted, so that too was good.

    I recently watched a PBS program on Henry David Thoreau and was struck by him writing that he would often spend the whole day doing nothing, just sitting outside watching.  What a wonderful thought, but sadly for me, this time of year is filled with too many things that have to be done.   Hopefully today I can get my rototiller started so I can till the garden for planting.  I will just have to enjoy the glorious day, in swatches, in between things.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Where, Where, Where? Panic Sets In

    Yesterday I wrote about how it is nearing time for me to plant the garden.  Before I do, I will have to rototill it, but the time for planting, is getting close.  I as it approaches, I have begun to panic.

    Last year, as a bit of an experiment, for the first time I planted red beans and black beans.  Both crops surprised me; they grew well.   As I took the beans I had harvested out of their pods, I set some aside for eating and some to save for seeds that I could use for planting this year.   I also put some more of the beans in envelopes to return to our library’s seed bank, where I had gotten the beans last year.

    Now, why the panic?  Well I did eat the ones saved for that purpose, but when I checked the container where I keep my garden seeds, I was distress to find no black beans or red beans.  What happened to them?  I haven’t a clue.  I have searched every possibility I could think of, but came up empty handed.   I can’t imagine that they were thrown out, so they must be around here somewhere.

    A couple of days ago, I had an idea.  Maybe the beans I gave back to the library’s seed bank are still there, and I could just use those to plant in my garden, but alas, when I went to the library and checked the seed bank, the beans I had contributed, were gone.  I guess they will be growing in someone else’s  garden.  That leaves me sitting here wondering,  “Where could the beans I saved be?”

    I suspect once I have finished planting and filled up the garden with other vegetables, I will find my  missing beans.  That seems to be the way things always work. 

    It is all so discouraging after all the work I did drying, de-podding, sorting, and saving some of those beans for seed in this year’s garden.   For a year I held on to one of those common  gardener’s dreams about harvesting a bigger crop this year.

    Oh well, it is what it is.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca