This morning, I sat down to work on my work-related on-line course, and.... pfffffttt. My filing drawer overtook my attention, and my fav office creed kicked in: File, don't pile. In my pile, I found my old butterfly gardening journal. It's a good journal. Well filled-in, photographs and negatives from pre-digital days, references to my blog, news articles, e-mails, penned notes. Very thorough. And very, well, cut short. The last entry was Summer 2011.
Seven years...
I thought: I'll check my blog, where's it at? Last entry was Friday, January 1, 2016. Two years ago. Two... Broken picture links, and some weird notices about updates to the Blogger community.
Closure time.
Except, yeah, hardly anyone knows I got rid of the garden. So, here's some closure. The space is bare of bfly plants, just the statuary, brick and trellises remain. The greenery you see here is grass. The decision to raze the garden wasn't that hard, actually. The pipevine had overtaken EVERYTHING, and I had a growing fear that furry and scaly animals would or already had nested in the mess. Nothing else was growing properly - no blooms, just ragged, leafless stems suffocating for the most part, bits of branch poking their sadness through the vine. And, yeah, butterflies weren't much around anymore.
It took me the better part of two days to pull, cut and chop everything out. It was a few months ago, maybe summer last year. It's been awhile. The resurrection of the journal is what got me here again, to write, to close. I actually do have thoughts on next steps.
In the years I've had the garden, I grew to love some plants more than others, and if I do ever plant anything bfly-related again, it will be a cassia. The candlebush variety. The one I had got a ton of action, beautiful yellow sulphur bflies. But, even it succumbed to The Vine. In the meantime, the cat house is a pleasant part of my back porch yoga space, and the key lime tree is green from all this rain of late. It's small and bushy but lush, and has sweet little buds at the moment. The giant swallowtails like it. I like it.
You?
