Let's see, Torin learned how to eat food, sit, crawl, walk, run and started talking in the last year. Pretty crazy! I mostly just seem to be holding onto his shirt tails as he flies along, both literally and figuratively. He is the apple of my eye and the vice grip around me knees yelling "MUM-EEEE!" He is too precious and it goes way too fast. I just bask in him every day, while hourly having my patience and endurance strained and stretched, and then when he lies next to us at night I still occasionally cry because he's just so beautiful and amazing, and he's my baby, at least for a little while longer.
It's winter. Well, actually winter seems to have been last week in L.A., where we had some chilling 50 degree weather and everyone freaked out for a few days, and now it is back up to 75 and is spring but anyway, it's time to plan the garden again. It's time to get psyched up on seed catalogs and dream big dreams. It's my annual season to beat my head against the wall as I try and figure out a way to grow food in my ever shifting, vagabond life. I've got some ideas though! Almost a year ago we moved down the street from our old house. We've got some more yard and some more sun, but I think I will have to give up on building anymore raised beds in houses that I am about to move out of. I recently got a copy of The Urban Homestead, by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen. Their super cool book reminded me of some of the tricks of the trade that I used to use in my urban gardener days. Some of those same tricks may just come in handy to create some more portable growing and composting options for me these days. For now I'll just say I am going scavenging for 5 gallon buckets and maybe some old tires soon. We'll see what happens.
When I first moved to L.A. I was worried that it might change me, that I might be converted to more enthusiastic consumerism, might become more enamored of television or concerned with whitening my teeth or something. Well, I think it's safe to say that that isn't happening. Other than procuring a mild obsession with cheap Asian spa treatments and recently having a sudden urge to write a screenplay, if anything, my sense of myself as a dirt worshipping, farmers market frequenting, critic of mainstream American culture and lover of 1800s farmstead living has not budged. Well, now I know. You can take the girl out of New England, but not the New England out of this girl. I've done a fair amount of traveling about in my life, but even now, in our fourth year here, I just don't think that I will ever be able to truly call any other landscape home in the same way. But L.A. has worked it's way in there too. This is home now too for sure. I'm still working out my relationship, as you can see. But this is where my son was born, this is where his first little friends live, this is where we work and where his brothers will be. This is home too.
Me and my sweet pea last week in the wintery weather (brrr, 55!)
Lovely post, sweetheart.
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