Wild mustard greens is one of my favorite foods. I like to sauté the greens in garlic and soy sauce. Add a bit of bacon grease, if I feel like being fancy. Yummm. When I was a kid, it was common for the Daddy to pull our car beside an orchard or field full of wild mustard. The parents got out to collect bunches of greens, while I wandered about, gazing and doing who knows what. These days I wouldn't gather any wild mustard unless I knew the property owner and was assured that the property is certified organic. Last year, the Husband and I decided to grow our own mustard "field", not only for food but also to help put nutrients back into the soil. We purchased a pound of mustard seeds online, but sowed about a third of the bag. Toss is more precise. In December, I tossed the seeds willy-nilly into the backyard. Today it's a mini jungle of green and yellow back there. Some of the mustard plants are nearly five feet tall. I read that these plants can grow betw

The VHS tapes have been staring at me in the living room for more than a month. It could even be two months. I think that was the last time the Husband and I opened a bunch of boxes from storage to determine what to use, keep, throw, donate, recycle, maybe repurpose, or maybe sell. I think these VHS tapes are ones that I thought we might be able to sell online one day. This morning I finally did something with 12 of the VHS tapes. I bound them together with duct tape to make two walls for a bottomless planter. That's it in the photo. Pretty cool, huh? The planter would've been made of all VHS tapes, but I didn't have enough tapes. Fortunately, I kept the doors of a small cabinet, which fell apart last year, for the other two walls. I figure the pretty flowers will take the focus away from the funky taping. Maybe later I'll pretty up the planter with color or simply put something beside the taped VHS-tape side. It feels good to make something! Today I'm

Molly the Cat leads me out the front door before breakfast most mornings. "Go see what needs to be done," she telepathically prompts me as she begins her patrol of the perimeter. "No cats here," she sniffs. "Ooooh, ladybug." I check out new flower seed sprouts, note what sprouts need to be thinned and where I might replant them, bend over and pull up weeds, and so forth and so on. Sometimes the Molly's and my morning routine lasts a few minutes, especially when it's cold or rainy. "Forget this," says Molly when she quickly does an about-face several feet from the front door. Other times, we're out there for an hour or so, weeding, planting, digging, watering and whatever this heart pleases. Now and then Molly circles me to make sure I'm doing a decent job. What I like the most is looking up from my task and seeing Molly lying near by, eyes closed and body purring in the the sun bubbles. I feel like I'm doing the

I'm sulking. As in my teenage-self sulk, which was playing my guitar all Sunday afternoon, singing Flowers on the Wall , Elusive Butterfly , Bridge Over Troubled Water , and other angst songs, in the living room. I did do that. One time, during a pause, the Mama called out from the kitchen, "Are you done now?" hahahahaha . The poor Mama. She was a saint to endure two or more hours of my off-key singing and probably out-of-tune guitar. Okay. Focus. Back to the subject I began. I'm sulking. I don't want to do this not-a-hysterical operation even though I know it's a preventative measure that may let me live the full life that I'm meant to have. Don't worry. It will happen. In three weeks, I'll no longer have a reproductive system. I'm way beyond baby-producing time so my fist-size of a womb with attaching tubes and ovaries will be no more. I've never given birth. I wanted five kids. Maybe I have them in parallel universes

I'm creating a structure at the sidewalk end of our front yard. Not a fence. Just look at it. What creature could that evolving spiderness-of-a-something keep off our property? Giggle. Hmmm, maybe that's something I ought not to giggle about. I'm making this not-a-fence out of skinny branches of the fruit trees we pruned a few months ago, as well as from the second-time-with-The-Mama era. I'm not kidding. You can find all sizes of branches in our yard that I'd say were at last 10 years old. Some lie on the ground waiting for their time to become something helpful, such as the stakes holding up the boards that the Mama put around her flower and vegetable beds. Have I digressed? Doesn't matter. :-) That's my story for the letter N , this week's theme of ABC Wednesday . Click here to check out the participants from around the world. How cool is that? Thanks, ABCW team!