Change seems to be inevitable right now. Not just the coming of spring that’s evidenced by the green shoots from the flower bulbs that are starting to peek through the mulch and the increasing number of joggers on the streets.
Incidentally, the first shirtless – and brave – jogger was spotted on the sidewalk yesterday morning. It’s pushing 70, but c’mon – jogging shirtless in February is more about ego than the heat!
Part of the change is showing up in the plants that aren’t coming back in the yard this year. Between the drought, the baking summer we had last year and the last two frigid winters, we’ve lost 9 or 10 trees and shrubs in the yard. Some I had hopes for don’t show those early signs of life, despite my best efforts.
So the landscape is going to change a bit. This is unfortunate, because I just had it the way I liked it.
In the house, our apartment tenant asked if we could turn the “swing room” – a room that can go either with the apartment or the house, depending on which door is locked – into an art studio. It’s been a bedroom for our daughter since the remodel, but let’s face reality – that room has been used as a guest room less than a dozen times in the last couple of years. We have another and don’t need it for that and the room, with a second story sun porch and huge northern windows will make a GREAT studio.
So it’s been dismantled, the bed shipped off to the kid’s house to replace a worn out mattress, the linens all sucked down in one of those plastic storage bags.
As someone who would prefer to nail the furniture to the floor when he moves into a house and then just leave it there when he moves out, this is somewhat traumatic for me. Once the decision was made, though, it becomes kind of exciting as the room is remade.
Around town there are changes too, and you have to giggle at some of it.
On the main drag coming into town there used to be a restaurant called “The Peddler”. Apparently it was once quite nice, although I never ate there in the dozen years I’ve been lived here and it closed up several years ago.
There’s a new sign out front, though, announcing that another business is moving from a strip mall to go in there. It’s called “Night Secrets” and is an adult novelty store. Those businesses tend to cause way more controversy than is warranted. A few years ago, one called “Pricilla’s” went in just a couple of blocks away from this location, right at the top of the I-40 exit ramp.
You’da thought they were sacrificing babies there or something for all the fuss that happened. In reality, they sell cheap lingerie that doesn’t show anything different or more than you can find at the mall, crass gag gifts that are intended for adults and a few DVD’s of dirty movies – which I bet nobody buys any more because it’s all over the internet. It really was much ado about nothing.
So things are changing all over. We can fight it or adapt. Most of the time it’s more of a terror in our minds than in reality and most of the world won’t even notice that it’s happening.
You don’t have to like it, but there’s not much point in fighting it. The best approach is to breathe deep and lean into the project.
So in a few weeks, when I think that we’ve figured out what didn’t make it through the winter, I’ll start pulling the dead stuff out of the yard and figuring out how to re-arrange things to fill in the gaps.
And when we get tired of doing that, we might wander through Night Secrets to see what the spring merchandise has to offer.
Probably nothing there suited to my taste, but it never hurts to support an independent business that's trying to hang on in a tight economy.
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