Back to Normal

Oh what a mess our life has been recently.  So much happening and so much going on that I was real ready for a bit of normalcy around here.  And as some of you know, we tend to not do ordinary normal around here.  But our normal and our ordinary  found us this weekend for Father's Day.  Finally and thankfully. 

But let me travel back in time a bit.  To the day before our sweet GrandGirlie's First Communion.

In my last post I gave you a sneak peak at her dress that I was making.  So, I drove to her house a couple of days early to make sure it fit okay and to hem it.  Papa was going to drive up very early Saturday morning to join us.  Instead our lives took a bit of a nosedive of about the same magnitude as the Fall Off The Evil Ladder.  Early that Saturday morning about 15 miles from our home, M had an accident.  Do y'all remember the Dukes of Hazard and their fantastic magical driving/flying scenes?

Well, picture the Papa in a little green Volkswagen station wagon  attempting the same type of magic.  Does not happen.  Not even a little.  What does happen is a Papa with a broken back from the impact of the vehicle nosediving into the ground.  More like Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall than Duke boy magic.  I must say it threw our lives into a bit of a turmoil.  M could barely move and he was not able to do anything.  Think about that on a super workaholic personality.  Does not mix real well.  But through the magic of modern medicine they put my Humpty back together again with a procedure called a Balloon Kyphoplasty.  After several weeks of recovery,  this weekend our lives were almost back to the way they used to be.  Our normal.   We worked.   Because that is what my Humpty wanted to do for Father's Day.  So we did.

Now, this is the part where I get excited.  Very excited - pmp excited.  We worked  where he wanted.  In the front yard.  We now have dirt in our front yard!  Real dirt, not red clay dirt!!  Plant grass seed, flowers and bushes dirt.  Not slide on your bum slippery when wet, but hard as cement when dry red clay dirt!!!

Remember this part of the yard used to look like this.

By  9:00 Saturday it looked like this.

That is a planting trench that M and Big Orange dug into the concrete hard red clay..

This morning it looks like this.

Yes! That is a planting bed in front of the House on the Hill!!  It runs from the end of the House to the new and still unfinished front porch.  AND yes, that is topsoil in the yard waiting for grass seed!!!

I have rose bushes.

 Knockout rose bushes.

I have a camellia bush.  An Alabama Red camellia bush.

I have thuja arborvitae.  Because it reminded me of the little cedars growing all over in our woods.

I have Alabama Sunset Coleus, Snowball Phlox and Native Grasses.*

I have daylilies.

Just So Ruby Red, Orange Flurry and Stella de Oro Daylilies.

I have a Lady Banks climbing rose rescued from the garden of the Little Old House.  J is building her a trellis!

I have sweet Pinks

and cool rocks.

Really cool rocks.

Oh, be still my beating heart.  I have mulch to spread around flowers.

I did most of the planting using this cute little stool that my Pop made.

It is just the size, but to save it from possible injury I'm thinking I need this.

I"ll really use it since I have a lot more I want to do in the yard.  Like finish building the little rock border wall.  I have planned this in my head for years! 

I was able to do some of the planting while kneeling.  As long as I kept my right foot hanging up in the air.  Try that sometime.  Coordinated and graceful it is not.  J and I together are raking and leveling the dirt for the yard.  Raking is very hard work because of all the rocks and roots in the dirt M brings in.
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It's slow going but this next weekend grass seed should go in!  It's been several years since we had grass in our yard.  Okay, maybe more than several. Construction zones and grass yards don't mix well and the Little Old House was a construction zone for more than a decade.
  
M brought in more red clay and widened the front yard out a bit.  The red dirt is the added on.  It still needs topsoil.

We will be working on making the slope a bit more gradual down into the woods.  More raking.  This shows you just how much M built this end of the site up for the House on the Hill

while cutting the other end of the site down.

Who needs Dukes of Hazard magic driving.  I've got a guy that performs magic with a Big Orange tractor.  And I'm thanking all that is Holy that he is okay and getting back to his normal!

One more look at how it looks now!

Fantastic, right?  Now isn't that pmp exciting?  And now I am off to play with mortar and rocks!

*Native Grasses - decorative grasses that are native to an area.  As in, I walk into the woods, dig up a  clump and plant it in my border.  Instead of paying $16.00 for gallon size grass plants that look just like them.