Good evening, from my romantically lit front porch. I am lovvinggg this new lantern that I got for seven dollars at TJmax. It makes for such a lovely writing environment. 
Anyways today was a very rainy Sunday in the Garden, so I was only able to spend a little time enjoying my plants this evening when it finally cleared up.
Just in time to pick some fresh lettuce, peppers and tomatoes for a dinner side salad:)
Despite the rain, I had a great afternoon enthralled in my favorite rainy-day activity….Book store! It was gloomy all morning, started raining by 11, and by 1:30 cabin fever set in…I mean a very serious case. So Ryan and I headed over the bridge, to the mainland, and spent the afternoon browsing Barnes and Noble. This was the first time that Ryan has accompanied me on a “rainy day B&N trip” and I’m not sure that he was aware of the amount of time that I can spend in a book store when the weather is down right miserable (he was a great sport!). My routine goes like this…coffee. browse best sellers. browse fiction. browse nature. browse healthy cooking. browse mags. skim mags that look interesting. finally compile a bunch of things I would like to look over more thoroughly. sit down in cafe and read more… It can be a long ordeal.
At the end of it all I purchased two things, a magazine with lots of great healthy, veggie based recipes and Michael Pollan’s book ”Second Nature”. I have read his book “In Defense of Food” and found it very interesting. He has since released a new book , so all of his best sellers were on display at the store. After reading all of their summaries I was immediatly drawn to “Second Nature” because it is about gardening.
I have recently discovered, since moving into this house and going from small container garden to backyard garden, that gardening is a true passion of mine, not just a hobby. It’s become a way for me to connect to nature, to be outside, and to be completely relaxed. So as I sat down to read the first few pages of this book, several lines caught my attention immediately… “Yet for the most part Americans who write about nature don’t write about the garden, about man-made landscapes and the processes of their making. This is an odd omission, for although the gardener may not at first seem to hold the drama and grandeur of, say, climbing mountains, it is gardening that gives us our most direct and intimate experience with nature-of its satisfaction, fragility and power.” These words captivated me because in the last year of experimental trial and error I have experienced all of those things; the satisfaction of a salad or dish comprised entirely from my garden’s vegetables, the fragility of newly sprouted seeds, and the power that Mother Nature holds to take it all away with one wild storm. But so far the satisfaction has far outweighed the unknown and every morning my garden draws me back in. I watch over it like I would a child and try to observe it objectively, like a diligent researcher observes an experiment.
So I am excited to sit down with this book over the next several days and see how this acclaimed author view’s his garden. It is always a pleasure to read the perspectives of other gardeners and nature lovers. Inevitably I learn something new and am encouraged to glance at the natural world through another’s perspective.
When I finish the book I’ll be sure to share any new perspectives that I may gather.
After B&N, Ryan Clapper and I drove to one of our favorite wildlife spotting locations, the Vierra Wetlands, where he got photos of these awesome guys!
