Therapeutic Rain

Saturday is my favorite day of the week. I think it's the day I am able to be most happy in my own skin. It's often I day where I get to do what I love to do and today was no exception. I spent the morning cleaning and making homemade granola with coconut oil, brown sugar, oatmeal, flax, poppy seeds, pumpkin seeds and hazelnuts. I am already just about tired of strawberries so I had my granola with fresh cubes of mangos.

Next, I tackled a corner of my garden that really irks me. This is was the dumping site of an invasive plant called lamium. Ground zero. It's full of old bramble sticks that end up grinding into some part of my tender skin and pull at my hair. It's dark and tangled and working in it makes my glasses fog up so I'm like a half-crazed mole slashing at the undergrowth. This task required patience and stamina. I realized that given the plant has shallow roots, the hand shovel is the best tool for the job. I rooted out the demon weed and created clarity where there was chaos. It was most satisfying. I even grew to like the rank menthol odor of the broken stems.

After a quick lunch I headed to the school garden at City Hall to do some clean-up. A university age student smiled at me with a big mouth of braces. "I don't mind this rain," she said. "It's almost therapeutic." She was right. It was a soft, warm rain. The kind of rain that embraces you gently and leaves you better off for it.

I picked a few strawberries and pulled out the spent borage plants, generally tidying up the garden and deadheading the cornflowers, violets and calendula so they will bloom again. I noticed honeybees foraging in the rain at the nepeta and bumble bees at the borage and lavender. A couple came by to admire their young collard greens. They had to order the seeds from the States, doncha know. These Canadians don't appreciate collard greens. A family came by and gave me some garlic chives to try in my salad. I sat in a corner of the garden under a yew tree and let the rain perform its therapy on the city.