You may have wondered about my shoes. Fear not, I have, in fact, earned them, and just yesterday scuffed around happily in ankle deep muck in them.
Yes. Ankle-deep. Muck.
I am ridiculously excited these days by ankle deep muck. No, I haven’t got a horse (boy, wish I had – that manure would come in handy about now!), but I do have a garden. Right now it looks like twenty-three two-foot plots in a grid shape, with the odd triangular and boomerang shaped plots on the very edge. It might be the tiniest bit mad to rhapsodize about dirt, because yes, to date that’s all it is, but it’s good dirt. Great dirt, if I might be so bold. It’s the dirt we’ve been working toward for the past… oh, six years or more.
Every year we’ve amended, tossed in various potions and promises in the hopes that we are continuing the process of breaking down adobe clay into reasonable soil. Last year’s backbreaking 15 sq. yards of composting tree leaves finally did the trick. That, and the water-absorbing polymer, the late rains, the freeze, perhaps — everything rolled into one and the Moon being in the 9th House have created the kind of dirt that you step into… and sink.
Thus my new shoes, ankle deep, in muck.
Joy.
Now, all I have to do is finish my $!@$$%&*?# novel, and then I can earn myself an entire new outfit, several new books, possibly a new car… The jury is still out in search of a big enough bribe…