Where the Wild Fern Grows

Today I was meandering around our yard pulling weeds and picking up sticks after last night’s torrential rain.  I came upon this lovely little fern growing under the Butterfly Bush surrounded by moss…lush, beautiful moss.

Bob and I have decided after spending several hundred dollars on grass seed over the last three years that grass is over rated.  In the spring of our first year living here, we spent tons of money, planted grass seed and had a beautiful grassy park in our backyard.  Every spring day, we marveled over the beauty of it.  Then the leaves came out on the Oak and Hickory trees and by mid summer we were left with only spindly, wispy grass that simply wanted to lay down and die.

Instead of fighting nature by cutting down all of the trees, which the trees were why we moved here in the first place, we’ve done a lot of reading and searching the internet for alternatives to that high maintenance green lawn we expected to have. The only thing we have found that could possibly give us green is moss.  We are encouraging its growth by keeping the yard as clean of debris as possible.  Bob swept the yard with his leaf collector and to our amazement, the moss is growing. Large patches are showing up and the added delight are the little ferns that seem to go hand in hand with the moss.  They grow in the most inhospitable areas absolutely loving cement and stones. One little mound of moss in my flower garden has wrapped itself around three crystals and either pushed them up from the ground or there is a bigger rock under the moss.  We are not disturbing it to see as we don’t want to ruin it.The moral to my story is to trust God, have patience and live with nature instead of struggling against it.  I will let you all know how things go this summer. – April 4, 2020

Sometimes You Need an Adventure….

Wow!  As I look back at my last blog post, it was 2013!  Time flies and how life changes.  Bob and I are still video gaming…Destiny is our latest game of choice.  In the time between 2013 and today though, we “arted” on walls, furniture and more, retired and found retirement to be boring so we bought a laser to art some more.  Bob expressed his artsy side with funky fish and bugs made of wood and copper.  We adventured through the Steampunk theme dressing the part and doing art/craft shows at the Steampunk Industrial Show with  Renninger’s Flea Market in Mt. Dora, Florida and the Shark’s Tooth Festival in Venice, Florida.

Well, the weather got hotter, the traffic totally maddening, the hurricanes too close for comfort and being a farm girl at heart, the last straw was when they built condos on the last grassy pasture at the edge of Venice. That made me very, very sad.

Last year we attended DragonCon in Atlanta with our wonderful friend, Susan Klaus and experienced cool evening breezes in September.  What a welcome relief from those every day mid 90 degree Florida temperatures with humidity so thick sweat ran down your spine and soaked your clothes just walking outside. Driving back from Atlanta we were welcomed by Hurricane Irma that left us without electricity for a week, luckily with no damage to our home.  Bob and I decided it was time to move. We weren’t getting any younger and in 22 years in paradise twice we have had close calls with the hurricanes.  I felt the urging presence that third time’s the charm.

Together we decided it was time to move. We wanted to stay just below the Snowbelt and  with less Florida humidity  Considering what we experienced during our Atlanta visit, we began searching the internet for the perfect spot to move.  Georgia prices were unbelievably affordable compared to Florida.  We could actually afford acreage and not break the bank.  The week before Thanksgiving, we traveled to Georgia, looked at houses, bought a house and by the end of the year packed up our belongings and moved to the foothills of Jefferson, Georgia.

“Georgia?” people, including family, would ask…”why would you move to Georgia.”  Well, let me tell you it was an awesome move. We have seasons once again with little to no snowfall.  We laugh when there is a threat of snow and everything, I do mean EVERY-THING, in the state closes down…and then it doesn’t snow.  Halloween pumpkins don’t rot in one day.  We have lightning bugs in the summer and deer in the front yard. Our home sits on a little over an acre of wooded land providing us with a daily dose of colorful birds.  Gold Finches, Cardinals, Bluebirds, Baltimore Orioles, Grosbeaks and our favorite couple, the Carolina Wrens make up our natural aviary!  We put up feeders and suet and then laughed until we cried at the antics of the squirrels trying to outwit the Slinkys we put on the poles, which is fodder for another post.

Unbeknownst to us upon purchase, our beautiful home was a fixer-upper.  I could list all of the things that we have done, but it could fill a book on its own. We cried over replacing the furnace and roof but we have had so much fun turning this little neglected kingdom into our personal sanctuary that the move became a God given blessing.

The most surprising thing about this move was that our life finally became about “the two of us.” We needed an adventure and this is exactly what it became. We love our family and all of our dear, dear friends we left behind in Florida.  We miss them.  But working through all of the trials, creating our personal space and making this home what it was intended to be has brought Bob and I closer together than ever before.  It is a gift from God that I wouldn’t trade for the world.