Fibermania

You got to have a dream.
If you don't have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?
Bloody Mary in South Pacific

The first house Dave and I bought back in 1982 was at the edge of abandoned railroad property. Nothing was behind us but a field and woods. Pretty trashy rocky woods. But to me it was an undeveloped garden. I had plans for this land, even though it wasn't mine.

We rented a tiller and dug up a long rectangle and put in fruit trees, and veggies and produced a lot of cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes and green beans, as I recall.
Way too many cucumbers. . .

even though we had cucumber wilt and various other pests, I ended up burying 83 cucumbers.
I won't even mention the zucchini. Don't leave your car unlocked in August if you live near me.
I deposited grocery bags full of ripe tomatoes at the back door of our favorite Mexican restaurant, anonymously, several times that summer. Abundance was an understatement.

Then in the winter the damn rabbits ate the bark off our fruit trees, killing them. We learned too late to protect the saplings with plastic sleeves.

And then the drought hit. Three summers in a row. The buds on the flowers never opened.

I can recall the last day it almost rained. Mother's Day, May 11.

The gardening ended, I got a job and in 1989 we sold our house and moved to Cary.
The Cary house had no flowers, no garden and lots of grass. It stayed that way for a few years as I put my energies into business. But can a house be a home without a garden?

Little by little I found spaces to put in plants and in a few years had decided that raised beds were the thing and had those built and filled and blooming, mostly while I was out of town. But then I read that treated lumber is filled with arsenic or something equally as deadly so no more veggies in those beds. Boohoo. A potted patio tomato is not the same, so I put just one plant in the ground and took off for my next trip.
As my business got more and more demanding, I had less time to garden and when I came back from a trip, my tomatoes were drooping from underwatering or even worse, toppled over into the mud, rotting on the vine.
It was the business vs. garden and the business won.

Then Dave retired.

Aha! Someone who was also interested in a nice looking yard...things looked up. He landscaped, and mowed, and mulched and weeded. He sat in the shade by the garden. He basked in the fragrance of the lilies. I had a partner. So wonderful.
And then we gazed over our completed garden and put the house up for sale.

Which brings us to today. At five am I woke up, turned on the computer and ordered more plants. I have a dream.