Anyone who knows me knows that I don't handle change well. Unfortunately, my life is filled with nothing but change right now. That said, I try to maintain control over everything, even as things are constantly in flux. Famous last words, right?
But you can't control the weather, can you?
On Tuesday morning Rick and I were standing in our garden talking about how proud we were of how great it looked. We've lived in our house for five years today and it seemed like we'd finally gotten a handle on what we need to do to keep our plants and yard happy. We finally installed a drip system for our container garden and all our plants were thriving. We put up cafe lights & planted flowers in our window boxes. We thrifted some great red chair cushions last summer and I had just purchased some awesome dessert pillows for our other chairs. In short, our backyard was a magical fairyland & it was always going to be that way.
Then a summer storm rolled in.
While we were home for lunch it started raining and within minutes pea sized to golf ball sized hail pounded my garden to bits. Thankfully we had enough time to move our car into the garage. Many in Greeley were not so lucky. I attempted to cover my plants, but it all happened too quickly. I was able to save my tomato, horseradish, and a pepper plant. Everything else was demolished. The hail busted all but seven of our cafe lights. It ripped through our chimenea cover and chair cushions. It cracked plastic pots. The hail even destroyed my sister-in-law's plants which were waiting in our backyard until they could move into their new place. This storm rolled in very quickly and caused problems all over Greeley (The gal in this
video lives just up the road from my house).
I'm a little embarrassed to say that I cried very real, very hot tears of sadness as we assessed the damage after the storm cleared out. It sucked, but here's the thing; I really need to work on letting go.
As much as I hate it, I need all the practice that I can get when it comes to change & upheaval. When the fabric of my carefully constructed reality starts to come apart at the seams, I would rather practice with my destroyed garden and not during the big moments in life, you know?
I loved my garden, but all of the in-ground plants will come back next year & some might even bounce back later this summer. We can replant some of our pots, easy peasy. We can replace our lights and cushions. We have a lot of clean-up to do and will need to cut back a lot of the dead plants and we still need to get our roof inspected. All in all, this has been a hard but important lesson in letting go, but all of this is a good reminder to hold everything I have with an open hand. I just hope it's at least a couple weeks before I'm treated to another lesson.
Thanks for the lesson, hail. You icy son of a gun. Always a pleasure.
