A Green Day, A Lasagna Garden

I spent the morning gardening, but not in my own yard. Through Junior League, I have had the pleasure of spending three Saturdays over the last eight months or so at a farm in Moncks Corner. Fields to Families is an organization that grows gardens to feed the hungry (in cooperation with Whole Foods of Mount Pleasant). It's a wonderful project, and you can find out more about it at http://www.fieldstofamilies.org/

Since the field is (like my yard) made up of red clay that will not grow jack squat (except for some stubborn weeds), a method called lasagna gardening has been utilized. Beds have been built on top of the ground like so:

-Lay newspapers flat on the ground, and wet them so they don't blow away.

-Mix up some peat moss and spread it on top of the newspaper.

-Spoiled hay or straw should be tossed on top of the peat.

-Next, grass clippings.

-Compost on top of the grass clippings.

-Vegetable and fruit scraps, coffee grounds, egg shells, etc. (These can be saved in a baggie in the freezer until you are ready to use them.)

-Chopped leaves

-Potting soil (can be the fertilized kind)

Now, you can plant your seeds or young plants and watch them grow! It is an amazing process to watch!

Not only do I have the reward of knowing I have spent these days farming food for the needy, but I have learned an extremely valuable skill. Today I was picking collard greens from one of the 46 beds at the Moncks Corner farm, and I realized something. In September, I helped build that very bed. In February, I planted those very collards in that bed. And today, I picked them. I truly got to be there at every phase for those collards. Sometime in the next few days, someone who is needy or hungry will be eating them. That gives me incredible joy. I have also pulled weeds. I have planted and/or harvested potatoes, onions, peas, cauliflower, cucumbers, rosemary, field peas, and other produce that I can't even remember right now.

If you haven't done so lately, go out and get your hands dirty. Plant something and watch it grow. It's a miracle, really.

A Battle Royale

"I just don't understand why you care," said my husband last night. This was, of course, in reference to Will and Kate's royal wedding that took place this morning. I tried my best to explain it. It's beautiful. It's romantic. It's historic. It's grand. I remember getting up in the wee hours with my mother, thirty years ago, to watch Will's parents walk down the aisle. My husband wasn't persuaded.

If you're a young girl, watching a prince and princess get married is like a fantasy come true before your very eyes. You can think about what your own wedding will be like. If you're a married lady, it might make you nostalgic about taking your own vows. It made me remember the excitement I felt on my own wedding day. I tried to explain all of this to my husband, to no avail. He just shook his head at me, unable to grasp why I would get up at 5am and turn on the tv, riveted for four hours. Yeah. There are some sports events about which I feel the same way.

Anyway, I thought it was just Chip who didn't get it. Then I logged on to Facebook and saw how many of my friends were posting that their husbands just didn't understand why their wives were setting their alarms to get up and watch a wedding on tv. They were having the same conversations with their husbands!

So yes, I got up at 5:30am and watched it. I loved every minute of it. In fact, it put me in a wonderful mood for the rest of the day. I did have to pause to get dressed, but I raced back down the stairs in time to see the royal couple kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Chip still doesn't get it. I don't expect him to, though, because men and women are just plain different. We always will be, because God made us that way. And praise the Lord for that.

It's almost time for hydrangeas.

I love this time of year, in spite of the allergies that come along with it. There is always something blooming from late February until the end of summer. I have been in planting mode recently, and have been looking for some roses and hydrangeas to complete my planting projects.

I found a lovely hydrangea for only $5 yesterday, and will be getting it into the ground within the next few days. It's already revealing itself to be a soothing periwinkle blue. I don't think they usually bloom this early, though . . . I know they bloom in early summer, because that was the flower I used most in my June wedding, nearly five years ago. On the big day, the cake lady delivered the cake to my grandparents' house several hours before the wedding. It was three delicious, square tiers of mouth-watering sour cream pound cake. The fondant pearls glistened. It was planned that my mother would then arrange hydrangeas in an artistically pleasing way (as only she can do) around and on top of the cake. I knew it would be perfect and beautiful.

Shortly before getting dressed, I floated downstairs (yes, floated - it being the happiest day of my life, and all) and rounded the corner into the dining room. My mother was just finishing up with the hydrangeas on the cake. My hands flew to my face and I gasped. It was literally the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. She had not just used periwinkle, the most common color of hydrangeas, but every color in which they grow. Light blue, dark blue, pink, fuschia, purple, green, white. Every time I see a hydrangea, it transports me back to my wedding day in June of 2006. The celebration of color that decorated my wedding cake was like a trumpet blowing a melody of beauty in harmony with the song in my heart that day.

It's almost time for hydrangeas again, and it's almost time to celebrate five crazy, wonderful years with the love of my life.

New Horizons

The other day, my husband said, "I looked at your blog last night. How come you haven't written anything on it since October?" October? Oh my. I had no idea it had been that long. How easily life can distract us from the things we really want to do. In 2011, I have been hard at work selling my book, A Quiet Cup of Tea both to individuals and to gift shops and bookstores. I have learned first hand that what they say about being a writer is true . . . you only spend about 10% of the time writing, and the other 90% marketing yourself. My husband has been an incredible help to me, schlepping boxes of books to book signings for me, selling books to practically everyone he knows, taking care of our son so I could write and make phone calls, cheering me on.

And yet, there are never enough hours in the day! Isn't that exactly what I wrote about in A Quiet Cup of Tea, though? The main character sets out to do what she wants to do one morning, but her life (as she has defined it, structured it, and as she prefers it) keeps popping up all day long to prevent her from what she set out to do. Like her, though, I find myself at the end of the day blissfully happy and knowing that my life is still heading where I want it to go. "Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart." Psalm 37:4

So the project this week has been rebuilding my website. I think it's appropriate to make some type of new beginning on this Easter weekend. So stop by my website, if you have a moment, and let me know what you think! www.perrincothranconrad.com

My Criminal Past

The door to my old mailbox from Agnes Scott College sits prominently on my bookcase, reminding me of the greatest criminal caper of my life.

When I visited Agnes Scott as a high school student, I looked around and thought, Yes. This is what a college campus is supposed to look like. It was beautiful, with its manicured landscaping and stately brick buildings. The college had just celebrated its first 100 years, and the buildings told the story. U.S. News and World Report declared that we had the Most Palatial Dorms. It was true. Wonderful high ceilings, enormous rooms and well-appointed parlors were part of the package that we called home. Did I mention most of the dorms had no air conditioning? Small price to pay. We all loved it.

For the first three years of my matriculation at ASC, the post office was located in the basement of one of those palatial dorms, Walters. The mailboxes were so charming, with their antique-looking doors sporting combination dials that used letters, not numbers, and only went from A to J. I never knew the combination to my box, nor did anyone know the combination to any of the boxes. They simply stood open. This was a testament to our Honor Code, which I am certain is one of the most revered by its students that you can find. If your box was accidentally slammed shut, you had to ask a post office employee to open it from the inside for you.

When I found out that the new student center was going to house the post office from my senior year forward, I was crushed that the old post office boxes would no longer be used. Instead, we would have modern, shiny, new boxes in our modern, shiny, new student center. One of my friends just happened to be an R.A. in Walters and had *a master key* for the building. After phone calls over the summer, hushed conversations in the dining hall, and secret planning behind dorm room doors that were rarely closed and never locked, the plan was made.

A small group of us stealthily entered the old post office one evening. Screwdrivers in hand, we took our old mailbox doors. Yes, we did it. They were simply going to be removed and used as scrap metal, so far as we knew. We couldn't let that happen to our pieces of ASC history. The screwdrivers didn't work, and it took some good old girl power and ingenuity to get the job done. I don't remember how we did it, but we all got our mailbox doors.

And I have mine. It's my most treasured possession from my college days. I love to hold it in my hands and remember those four years that changed me forever. The education I received was better than top-notch. The traditions of Black Cat, throwing newly-engaged girls into the pond, and choosing class mascots are forever burned on my brain. The friends I made there are forever cherished in my heart.

So, there's my confession. Lock me up and throw away the combination. I'll just get a post office worker to open the door from the inside.

Hard on a Mother's Heart

My son's closet had become stacked and stuffed with boxes and bags of baby toys and clothes too small for him. It was time. Oh, how I hate this task. But we have a garage sale in two weeks, friends who are about to have a baby boy, and a consignment sale at my son's school in six weeks or so. It had to be done.

So I started a stack of baby clothes for the garage sale, a stack for our friends, and a stack for the consignment sale. Oh yes, and I also started a stack of things which I will continue to horde, because I could not part with them. Some of these latter-stack items included the wildly expensive Strasburg Children outfits he has worn to church and such. So gorgeous, and so John-John. These were the kinds of things I used to fantasize about dressing a child in before I had a child. But some of this stack also included, to my surprise, some not-so-fine items with which I just could not part. There were some pajamas which immediately flooded my brain with images of my tiny son wearing them, smiling and laughing. It was almost as if I were trying to put part of him, part of my little boy's childhood, on a stack of things to be sold for $1 each in my yard. Perfect strangers would carry them away, unaware of the memories they held in their hands.

My eyes became moist. I started sniffing. Then I just full-out cried. Tears streaming, mouth open, like Nancy Kerrigan grabbing her knee and yelling, "Why?! Why?!" In my head, I would say things like, This is what he had on when he took his first steps. or This was a hand-me-down from my cousin and he wore it all last summer. or I remember when he used to wear this sweater to Mother's Morning Out. And the craziest one - This is what he wore the night we went to the emergency room. I certainly don't want to memorialize that, but it's part of our story, as a family. To give away his clothes makes me feel like I'm giving away part of our story. No one who picks them up for a $1 in my front yard could ever know that they hold a piece of Conrad history in their hands.

I wanted to put it ALL back in the closet. But I took a deep breath, said a prayer for strength and wisdom, and managed to clean out more than I kept. Oh, it's hard. And even I don't understand why I kept some of the random things I did. Even now, I'm tempted to go back into my garage sale bags and just make sure there's nothing else I need to keep . . .

Anger Management

Last December, my family and I moved into a brand new, beautiful house. Kudos to my husband for providing us with such a lovely house in a great neighborhood. We had an empty field next to us on one side at the time, which I knew would eventually become filled with other houses. That time has come. It just so happens that the lot directly adjacent to us is one of the last to be finished. They are still framing the house next door, hammering as I type this. I am truly not bothered by the construction, as it is temporary, and means we will have new neighbors in a few months. What fun! I do love to take baked goods to new neighbors and pleasantly confuse them with old-school Southern hospitality. No one expects it in this day and age. My son actually enjoys the construction, what with power tools, cement mixers, cranes and other fun equipment that he can watch in use from the kitchen window.

But on Friday, some of the workers (Brazilian, I believe) decided it would be okay to store bathtubs in our side yard. There was plenty of room on the lot where they are building, but they decided our nice, green grass was a better place to put the bathtubs. I didn't like their decision. But I decided to wait and see what they did about it on Saturday. I spent the morning doing volunteer work in a vegetable garden being cultivated to feed needy folks with an outfit called Fields to Families. Very dirty, sweaty and rewarding work. Had a blast.

Now, it must be a cultural difference, which is why I mention the nationality of these workers, but apparently they believe there is nothing wrong with trespassing. When I returned from my volunteer work, someone had delivered enormous roof-shaped trusses to MY front lawn. "Well, if we run out of room here, we'll just put it on the neighbor's lawn." is what they must have thought. This is beyond me. They continued to walk back and forth in my yard, even using a powersaw and nailgun right next to the corner of my house. And, to make matters worse, one of the tubs had been propped against the side of my house. In a fit of rage while the workers were away at lunch, I stormed into my side yard and yanked the tub down onto the ground. I got a fiberglass splinter in my thumb, which I suppose serves me right.

Unfortunately, no amount of phone calling or indignation could move these items until Monday morning. My husband speaks Spanish, which is similar enough to Portugese, and managed to communicate a simple message to them early Monday morning. I believe it went something like, "This is my property. I want all this stuff off of it." It was all moved by mid-morning. It's a good thing my husband handled it, and not me. And it's a good thing I don't know how to cuss in Portugese.