Lazy W Marie

Carpeing all the diems in semi-rural Oklahoma...xoxo

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space to feel my feelings about Joc

February 11, 2025

My energy has been stalled for a few hours. I thought surely it was just from this spell of cold, dark weather. Or maybe from having a list of important but not very challenging tasks to finish today. Or maybe it’s the ambiguity of not being on a training plan right now. Some days I embrace my freedom and really squeeze a lot out of it. Other days, when I am low on motivation, the great openness is unnerving. I feel unmoored. Whether with fitness goals or caring for the farm or writing or anything, too much blank space can, well, stall me out. I guess I need to reestablish some structure, I think to myself, fill the calendar back up. Train for another marathon.

Then I noticed two prevailing trains of thought, both about Jocelyn.

One has surfaced almost every time lately when I get on the floor to cuddle Klaus, nearly every time we play outside: I am keenly aware that Jocelyn’s dog, Bridget, was a puppy when Klaus was a puppy. They were well acquainted then and even sometimes “corresponded” through the mail, when she and Joc first lived in Colorado. I see Klaus’ silver whiskers and ample belly, hear his gentlemanly groans and notice how his energy is so different now than it was nine years ago, and I cannot help but wonder what Bridget looks like now, how her energy is, what middle age looks like on such a strong and adventurous little woman. These are bittersweet imaginations, and I think maybe I can tilt that scale away from bitter, to mostly sweet. Maybe I can willfully conjure up how the reunion will soon look and feel. Bridget running in the grass towards us, no doubt carrying a rock for someone to throw. Retrieving rocks was once her favorite thing next to chasing bears off their cabin porch and stampeding behind deer up the mountain.

The second prevailing thought is much darker. I have been trying to silence a voice in my head that says, “She’s just not coming home. It’s been too long.” And I have no idea what to do with this, because it won’t stop. Hourly, at odd intervals, it just echoes. The actual words, typed out and spoken silenty in my head, are cruel enough. I don’t have to hear them to recoil. It makes me physically nauseated.

When people ask me if I have heard from her, the truth is awful. I have not. I sometimes hear updates about her, not from her. But I do appreciate hearing her name spoken. When noone asks, that hurts too. But I kind of understand why they don’t want to bring it up. When I see photos of her on my phone or her artwork around the farm, or even when I care for the horses she once loved so much, my god. Everything hurts so much. Sometimes it all serves to keep her “with us,” but right now it is terrifying. And complaining about this pain when so many people have lost their children forever, in undeniable and truly hopeless ways, feels so self indulgent and ridculous.

I still do have hope. Right?

Maybe these are just the emotions I have successfully avoided in all the previous months and years of being extremely busy and overcommitted. I probably was staying busy to not have to feel it all. Maybe this short season of loose schedules and low commitments have simply given my heart some space to unfold. Maybe this is what I have been feeling for a really long time, in other words, and none of it is a signal to any new and terrible thing happening. It’s not a prophetic warning, which is something else I fear; it’s just an emotional landscape finally visible because I have cleared some distractions. Is this a true psychological phenomenon, or have I invented it to make myself feel better? Does anyone know?

I tell myself again that this is just a season. A test. That one day we will be celebrating again, just as we have so many times already! And in that bright future, I will be ashamed to look back at any point before when I had given up hope (which is impossible to do with your children, actually) or indulged in sadness. So today, I’ll finish some work worth doing and get some exercise. I’ll bend some deliberate thought toward good things coming soon. And, because this feels like an instructive moment, I’ll be honest with myself about how I’m really doing: Not great. This is hard.

I love you so much, Joc. Nothing can change that.
I dream of you almost every night, and I talk to you all day, every day,

so much so, that I often trick myself into thinking you’re just across town
and could surprise me at the front door any minute.
I hope you are happy and being loved fully.

I hope you know that we are still here,
still loving and missing you.
XOXO

4 Comments
Filed Under: grief, UncategorizedTagged: grief, hope, joc, love, prayer

cultivating hope & beauty, mari’s pandemic story

March 13, 2022

In early February, 2020, Mari was planning a 50th birthday party for her husband Tony. Though well plugged into the news, they didn’t yet feel that the new flu-like virus was anything to worry about here in Oklahoma. “There had been other pandemics that happened and never quite hit me where I lived.” So they kept their plans, and a small group of loved ones gathered at their home. It was supposed to be the first in a long list of milestone celebrations that year: Tony’s 50th birthday, their two kids’ 18th and 16th birthdays, the anniversary of Tony and Mari’s first date (which is on Leap Day, so they only get to celebrate it every four years), and high school graduation and the start of college for their oldest. It was going to be an extraordinary season for this tight knit family. “2020 was such a year of milestones for us, and we cancelled a lot.”

Shortly after that party, Mari and Tony were enjoying a regular monthly date night with friends at Osteria, an Italian restaurant in Oklahoma City. She imagines she probably ordered a cheesy baked pasta dish. They were excited and getting geared up for a much anticipated Spring Break in California, a family trip to celebrate Spencer turning 18 and soon graduating high school. 

But as news reports about covid-19 gained momentum, anxiety built nationwide. The tension crept closer and closer to home. Things began to feel very different, and Mari and Tony made the difficult decision to cancel their family’s trip. “Things were starting to ramp up and get serious; we were all wondering if some semblance of social distancing was enough. Soon after, it seemed like everything changed completely.” Just two days after deciding to stay home, the state of California entered lockdown. “It felt really real then.”

((Mari is a noticer of quiet, unusual beauty))

Being a military family accustomed to deployment and all kinds of emergency management protocols, Mari and Tony had no trouble slipping into gear when Oklahoma shut down. They are smart and responsive, and they fell easily into their new, necessary routines. Mari’s job transitioned immediately to full time remote work, which was perfectly conducive to Spencer and Marcus both tackling a brand new online high school schedule. The family dog, Trixie, seemed happy to have everyone home, but Mari said, “Sometimes I feel like she looks at me like what are you still doing here?”

Tony was the only one of the group who still had to physically be at work every day, so he was designated as the family shopper. He remembers his first pandemic shopping trip being overwhelming. “People were hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer and antibacterial wipes, he was shocked,” Mari said. “We started buying a pack of toilet paper, Kleenex, paper towels, cleaning wipes, and hand soap every time the stores had a full stock. Not hoarding but keeping a little bit extra on hand.”

Their first covid masks were crafted out of flannel by a friend. “It felt like such a novelty!” Gradually they started ordering more masks online, and now they all have extensive collections.

Lockdown stress snacking included what also became one of many quarantine hobbies for Mom: Home baking! She threw herself into experimenting with cookies, cakes, bread, and tarts, with special mention for a lemon-olive oil tart. She also perfected her schnitzel and pork carnitas recipes. “Baking is good stress relief. Initially, wine was my go to stress reliever, but I quit drinking during this pandemic year, which was not planned but just kind of happened.”

((Mari’s lemon olive oil tart))

Something special this busy Mom accomplished for herself during pandemic was to train independently for her first half marathon. Prior to shut downs, she had already publicly declared her intention to run “Half by Half,” meaning a 13.1 mile race by age 50. She wasn’t going to let a global pandemic stop her, so she and Tony trained that entire spring and summer. Then in the fall, when the virtual race dates rolled around (both the in person OKC Memorial and Tulsa’s Route 66 were cancelled), Mari successfully completed not one but two virtual half marathons. With her husband Tony’s support and motivation even when knee pain interrupted his own running, she met her goal of running each in under three hours.  She said, “My goal became our goal. I just ran around my neighborhood and wherever I could reach by sidewalk.” Incredible! What a respectable accomplishment, to tackle this challenge for the first time and with no crowd support!

((Tony & Mari, training partners for her Half by Half goal!))

Speaking of accomplishments, I don’t know anyone who reads more books than Mari does. She considers it a good escape and touts the Book of the Month Club subscription as a wonderful investment. She has passed on her love of reading to their youngest, too, who haunts the library and has a passion for mycology, government, social issues, and much more.

When they weren’t finishing school work or baking, gardening, painting, or knitting and crocheting beautiful new creations, this passionate, multi-talented group used the long months of social isolation for binging great television. Together, these four happy roommates enjoyed Criminal Minds, vintage Cold Case Files, and every iteration of the Law and Order franchise. I should mention that these folks are true music lovers, and Mari touts the soundtrack for Cold Case Files as especially good. They balanced these dark shows with lighter fare like The Great British Baking Show, Modern Family, Schitt’s Creek, and, of course, Tiger King. This is Oklahoma, after all; Tiger King was almost required viewing during the spring of 2020.

One of their longstanding household traditions took on a more special meaning during pandemic: They keep an open jar on their kitchen counter into which anyone in the family, as well as visitors, can deposit handwritten notes commemorating special events and memories from throughout the year, all meant for emptying out and reading aloud on New Year’s Eve or Day. It’s a collective daily diary and gratitude journal of sorts, but for the whole family. Mari remembers writing something one day early in quarantine to memorialize the strange unfolding: “Remember back in spring when there was a pandemic? That was crazy!” She later laughed to think that she had once believed it would all be so brief.

Tony and Mari certainly never imagined that their kids’ high school finishes would be eclipsed by a global pandemic. But somehow they managed to discover some hidden treasures in the chaos and complication. When Marcus started his junior year of high school, he would spend almost another semester at home doing remote learning, and although a traditional classroom setting was needed and preferred for many reasons, it was only by spending so much extra time with their youngest that Mom and Dad became more keenly aware of some symptoms they called “neurodivergent.” They managed to arrange a medical screening and received a helpful autism diagnosis for their child. “I don’t think this is something that we would have discovered had we not had this time, and I’m very thankful for that.”

Then, Spencer was off to college, facing an especially complicated social distancing residential environment and many unknowns. But after all those months in quarantine, he left home with that wonderful cushion of intense quality time with his family. Without the previous year’s bizarre circumstances, his final months at home might have been much more hectic and much less memory-rich. “The family time was a blessing in that we were able to spend lots of quality time with our oldest before he went to college,” Mari said appreciatively.

As the world slowly reopened, Mari and Tony celebrated their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary with a short trip to a small casino resort in Durant, Oklahoma. This year they are looking forward to celebrating their thirtieth! She said of her 29-year marriage: “We’ve had lots of ups and downs and good and bad, though this was definitely a first. We make a good team and are usually able to give each other space when we need it. We’ve learned to talk instead of pop off when we’re feeling feelings, and that has made all the difference. Not that it wasn’t a challenge, but we tried to understand that we were both going through it, and neither of us is spared.”

For Thanksgiving 2021, this tight knit crew happily trekked to Washington DC, thankful for the freedom and means to travel again. Another of their shared passions is a reverence for the seat of government. Mari’s career also happens to be centered in D.C., so this trip was special on many levels, a meaningful compensation after so many delayed milestone celebrations.

Regarding politics, Mari is gentle and mostly guarded with her commentary, but she did divulge her belief that, “Government should calm, not craze, people.” She expressed sadness and anger about last January’s insurrection then relief when things calmed down. She gushed with affection for Amanda Gorman, admitting to having wept during the young woman’s poetic offering at the Presidential Inauguration. Mari said she began to feel calmer and happier around that time, and we talked about helpers and the constant presence of good people in the midst of social chaos.  

Staying connected to loved ones during lockdown was made easier by the internet, a modern convenience for which they all are so grateful. Like many, they had to wait more than a year before visiting family in Wisconsin. In the mean time, everyone was thankful for protected health and, eventually, for the vaccine rollout.

No one in Mari’s household ever contracted the virus, though they have several friends and acquaintances that did. Some loved ones tested positive but were asymptomatic; others were so sick they were hospitalized for weeks. To emerge from this long, difficult year with their physical health is no small blessing. As of this writing, the entire family is fully vaccinated and deeply grateful for that. Mari said of the vaccine, “We weren’t the first in line, but I trust the process and think it’s important.” With every expression of gratitude for their health and their good fortune during pandemic, Mari also expressed compassion for others who were far less fortunate. She was reluctant to celebrate the beauty of their experience, cognizant of the suffering around her.

Looking back over their pandemic experience, it’s easy to see that while this sweet family didn’t have the year of extraordinary milestone celebrations they had planned, they certainly had an extraordinary year in other ways. They accepted the hand they were dealt and played it beautifully, with great love and responsiveness. They humbly gave thanks for their good luck through it all. They extracted from the ever shifting storm some truly meaningful personal connections, improved mental health, more fully developed hobbies and talents, and intimate family memories that will last a lifetime. They traveled intentionally when it made sense. They lived with authenticity and calm. Moreover, they nourished a very real sense of optimism about the world, about life. Mari said that they “spent more time focusing on the good rather than the bad. The good that happens when people pull together in community and support and love one another.”

Mari and I chatted in a soft, circular way about people and groups and human nature, about how we as a population have coped with covid-19 and all the fallout. Through it all, her perspective had that gracious upturned quality: “I’m shocked by how easily the world adapted.” She expressed genuine amazement. Rather than focus on the division or the difficulties, she has focused on how everyone pulled together and found ways to thrive. She has been dazzled by hard workers not seeking attention, celebrating, “good people doing good things just because they need to be done.”

I asked Mari to describe for me her spirituality, because while she never mentioned a particular church community, she emits such a sense of behind-the-scenes Zen, an inner sense of orderly peace, it made me curious. She is “technically Lutheran,” but had what she called a “self-reckoning with religion” in her mid-twenties. She now is actively working through her personal beliefs about heaven and hell, about God and organized religion and even reincarnation. This is far from a dismissal, though, and feels more like a wide-eyed exploration. She took Buddhist meditation classes and appreciates modern writers like Brene Brown and Glennon Doyle in varying amounts and for different reasons, and she affirms there is strength in vulnerability but feels like it should be more accessible to more people. Mari feels that we all are on “different paths to the same place, all just trying to get there.” And she wants to live in a way that “inspires better behavior, inspires others to be a good person.” Then she said, “At the cellular level we all need connection and love. Every person just wants love.”

Perhaps the most beautiful thing she said is something that just fell out of her lips so naturally: “There is nothing more holy to me than my kids.” So much of what Mari shared with me about her pandemic experience centered on what her two children were experiencing month to month, day to day, how they were growing, what she feared for their lives or celebrated about them. She is a fully engaged Mom who expects the best from her offspring and wonders how the world will treat them, pandemic or not. This is her religion, it seems, the crafting and feathering of a nest, a strong place from which Spencer and Marcus will soon be flying.

From the outside looking in, she and Tony are doing great. Mari has cultivated a sense of wonder and optimism, saying again and again in so many ways, “There are still things to be happy about!”

Wonder, optimism, and gratitude are the underpinnings to everything here. “I remember back at the beginning, seeing my kids with their eyes reflecting panic and despair at us, and working on trying to hear them out but also encourage them not to panic or get despondent. Now we say to them: Look at what you lived through. Look at what you can do. Look at what the world is doing to make the world a better place than it was when this all began. Because that’s the important thing, right? How we respond to difficult experiences.”

Looking forward? Mari asserted, gently, that she is in no hurry to reclaim the busyness of their life “before.” She craves deeper, if less frequent, connection with friends instead of the more common surface level contact. I love that. I also love her ability to kick off her shoes and curl up her sock feet and sit and talk. To sip hot tea and make prolonged eye contact. I love her ability to share a story and its core meaning, without stuttering or backtracking, without apologizing, just unwinding a golden thread with restful vulnerability. Sitting across from her on the afternoon that we finally spoke face to face, I drank in the slowness and fulfillment that we all were collectively seeking in those sourdough and puzzle-assembling months. She embodies both stillness and exploration, and it is quite beautiful. 

((Some of the slow, lovely handiwork Mari produced during the pandemic months))

As our conversation expanded, Mari added this final layer of humility: “We definitely struggled as much as anyone during this time; we fought and cried and yelled and got sick and dealt with messes and ice storm damage and had disappointments and avoided each other and dealt with hardships, but in the end, the things I want to focus on is not what we endured, but rather what we learned and how we grew. I will never deny the messy or difficult things we lived through, but I will focus on the fact that we lived through them and hopefully learned something.” Personally, I adore this perspective. Acknowledging the hard times is valuable, and making a deliberate choice about how you memorialize those hard times is even moreso.

Mari, thank you for sharing your pandemic memories and for sharing your heart. You make me feel exactly how you said of the world at large: You make me, “want to hope for the best.”

XOXOXOXO

1 Comment
Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged: covid-19, faith, hope, interviews, pandemic, pandemic story

another post about hope for advent 2021

December 1, 2021

Hey friends, hello and thanks for reading along here. Thanks, also, for so many comments and private messages after my most recent post about hope. Apparently lots of us are grappling with hard feelings right now, and it is wonderful to freely exchange the best reminders. Thank you!

P.S., let’s not waste time and energy feeling bad for feeling bad sometimes; we all are in very good company. You have every bit of the wisdom and strength you need for this exact moment in time.

Okay.

Today I have a more lighthearted story about hope.

A few years ago our precious friend Maddie invited us to one of her high school drama musicals, Shrek. (Locals, if you ever have a chance to see a theater production at Choctaw High School, buy your tickets and put on your party dress. The production quality is mind blowing.)

Sweet Maddie, celebrating with ice cream
on our final day of garden class a few years ago xoxo

In the story, as you may know from the animated film, Princess Fiona is held captive in a castle tower. Every day she pines for her romantic, royal rescue (a story worth exploring in its own right). She sings about it. She gazes artistically through the tower window and imagines how it will happen. She daydreams of her unknown Prince.

Every day of her captivity, Fiona lives in constant, positive expectation of the One True Thing for which her heart longs. She sings, “I know it’s today, I know it’s TODAY!” In the song she laments other princesses’ hard problems and their grim fates, and she continues to count her own days waiting (20, 21, 22, 23… What day is it?) yet constantly asserts. “I know it’s today!”

It occurs to me at this point that many of us are counting years, not days. If this is your situation, please know that I know how much that hurts. My heart goes out to you.

Back to Shrek.

Day after day, Fiona’s answer eludes her. She continues in hope, but night falls and no deliverance. Over and over again, she goes to bed still captive, still hoping. The audience is drawn into her suspenseful waiting.

Until one day.

One day it does happen. All along her rescuers had been on their own long journey, searching for her. She is found and freed and can finally celebrate. Do you know what she sings?

With even bigger exuberance than before, Fiona the Hopeful belts out, “I knew it would happen TODAY!!” The crowd screams as if Russell Westbrook, coached personally by Bob Stoops, just won the Showcase Showdown!! Energy ripples through the building. Strangers hug and high five and kiss each other right on the mouth. An old man stands up from a wheelchair and does a cartwheel. Giant, sequined confetti falls in a slow-motion whirlwind. A horse whinnies triumphantly.

Not exactly, BUT… The crowd definitely cheers, and I do vividly remember sitting there in the dark auditorium with Handsome and our friends, weeping and shaking a little bit, feeling overwhelming joy for this fictional character on stage, ha! Which just means I was feeling what it might feel like for my own prayers to be answered, again.

Because my prayers have absolutely been answered so many times in life, it’s unreal. The deliverance from fear and danger, from threat and grief and so many very real problems and crises… When I stop to reflect on it all, I get tearful giggles. How could I ever ask for more? And yet, life marches on and problems and heartaches are just part of it.

I’ll happily take it all, and lots and lots of it, thank you very much. The beautiful, the mundane, the terrifying, the delicious. I’ll take all the shadows, because I want all the blinding light too.

And when the prayers are hefty and the miracles we need are immense, like they are right now, again, I want to be like Fiona. I want to live in constant, positive anticipation of our deepest hopes being fulfilled TODAY.

One day it will be today. Our disciplined, hopeful singing will turn in an instant to shouting and celebration, all over again. The pain of waiting will be forgotten, all over again, out of the blue.

Out of the blue has been exactly how so many miracles have been delivered over the years.

Jocelyn, in her bliss, that first summer she lived in Colorado.
We rode horses and laughed so hard that day, and my sunglasses bounced off on the trail. xoxo
Jess, planting flowers at her first apartment,
the day she told me about this boy she had just met, named Alex. xoxo

Keep praying, friends, and I will too. Keep imagining and expecting the best of everything. Continue in hope. Every scripture invites us to enjoy this habit. Every good bit of spiritual literature will press you into some theme of inner buoyancy, which is what hope feels like to me.

“Despair is the development of pride so great
that it chooses one’s certitude rather than admit
God is more creative than we are.”
My sister Angela shared this beautiful quote with me
XOXOXOXO

2 Comments
Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged: advent, choose joy, faith, fiona, hope, jess, joc, love, Maddie, miracles

advent 2021, choosing HOPE as a strategy

November 29, 2021

Earlier today I was about 2,000 words deep in an overly effusive essay about hope. This is the first week of Advent, after all, a few days meant to celebrate the virtue. I was excited to share some stories and ideas with you and just typed feverishly all morning.

Then I received some disturbing news wrapped in painful, stabbing words that sparked some deep anger, and my enthusiasm plummeted. I let myself “feel the feelings,” so to speak, until it felt like I was actually spiraling out of control in those emotions. I am struggling lately, as hard as that is to admit, and it doesn’t take very much for me to lose my balance.

One valuable lesson I have learned in this ongoing emotional rollercoaster is that when I sense my feet are on the banks of quicksand, when I feel that out of control kind of grief about to overtake me, it’s time to reach out to someone else. Not for salvation necessarily, but to be a help if possible. It’s good to reach out to someone beyond the situation at hand, pray for someone totally unrelated to my current crisis, and widen my view until my heart expands past this immediate pain and I regain some perspective. Our grandmother Ina Lynne was know for practicing a version of this, and she was one of the gentlest, strongest, most forward-thinking women I have ever known.

So I called my sister Angela, just to say hi and let her know I was still praying about something she had shared with us. I used my most stupid fake-chipper voice.

Can I pause here and say what a blessing it is to have siblings who are your friends and confidants?

We chatted only briefly before she asked about my girls, and my stupid chipper voice faltered. We have grown close enough now that I can no longer hide much of what’s going on inside me, and actually this is wonderful.

“This is not hopeless,” Ang said. I physically crumbled against the wall and started crying. She did not know I had been writing for the past three hours about hope.

“You have every reason to be hopeful,” she asserted, in a low, denim-velvet voice, both soothing and authoritative. She knows a thing or two about hopelessness, recovery, addiction, alienation, and more.

She also knows about healing and the power of community and HOPE. She works for an agency by that exact name, by the way, and their mission is to usher the least hopeful among us into new lives.

We spoke for a few more minutes about odds and likelihoods and statistics, about patterns and trauma all the many hardships inflicted on our kids over the years. But the real message between us was the power of Love and prayer and the reality that hope flourishes into actual, living-proof results. She got me to refocus on the future instead of wallowing in hate for the people who have hurt my girls. I hate that I need this redirection, but I do sometimes, and I am grateful when I get it.

We get to choose hope. We get to let it warm us and strengthen us while we endure the unknowns. Hope leads us into better choices and better habits and better outlooks. We expect more from ourselves and hold higher standards for each other when we side with hope and remember that despair is a shifting illusion.

Sure, we get to feel the fear, and the pain, and even the rage, and then we get to actively set our feet on solid ground and walk the much better path.

I am so thankful Ang picked up the phone while I was still on the brink of emotional quicksand. Part of the magic, as I am sure you already know, is that in reaching out toward someone else, chances are pretty good that the connection will lift you, too.

For my family, I choose hope. I choose to believe that healing is real and overcoming is what we were born to do. I choose to believe that Love transcends literally every hardship, and the fate others have chosen does not have to be ours.

“Hope is not a strategy.”
“You must not have been here long.”

XOXOXOXO

2 Comments
Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged: advent, choose joy, family, grief, hope, love, miracles, trauma

choosing some unreasonable hope

September 26, 2021

At Lowe’s this weekend, I wheeled my cart full of rescue plants from the clearance rack in the garden center to seek out more rescues in the houseplant department. An elderly gentleman approached me, indicated my bedraggled looking bounty, and asked with too much skepticism in his soft corduroy voice, “You think those are gonna snap back?”

I was used to my Grandpa being playful and teasing and having fun, so I thrust one skinny arm into the air, gestured affectionately at the plants with my other arm, and replied with too much excitement in my own voice “Yes, I choose to believe!!”

“You think you’re just gonna water ’em and they’ll be ok?”

At this point I blacked out, spiraling into a messy explanation of all the things I might do to revive them, like trimming and soaking and shading and super-thriving, and yes of course watering and singing them Norwegian Wood, trying hard to conceal from someone else’s grandpa my growing dread.

He blinked at me, furrowed his brow and dipped his chin low, then walked away. Did not even say goodbye. Clearly I had misread his tone. So I tried to reconnect with this stranger by calling vaguely toward the back of his sloped shoulders, “They’ll snap back right?” He swiveled his head in an elliptical shape that could have been either an affirming nod or a dismissive shake, I wasn’t sure.

I looked down at my mostly dead growing projects, thought of all the brassica plants already suffering at the farm thanks to selfish, unrepentant chickens, and wondered why I hate myself so much.

On the bright side, we have lots of mulch, and mulch covers a multitude of garden sins.

The End.

“There is no medicine like hope,
no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful
as expectation of something better tomorrow.”
-Orison Sweet Marden

4 Comments
Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged: gardening, hope, thinky stuff

Hi! I'm Marie. Welcome to the Lazy W. xoxo

Hi! I’m Marie. This is the Lazy W.

A hobby farming, book reading, coffee drinking, romance having, miles running girl in Oklahoma. Soaking up the particular beauty of every day. Blogging on the side. Welcome to the Lazy W!

I Believe Strongly in the Power of Gratitude & Joy Seeking

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