A perfect Sunday

After devoting most of the morning today to working on the second chapter of my book, which I had hoped to finish in April but April had other plans for me, we hopped on the motorcycle and rode to Pickerington Ponds, a Columbus Metro Park that we used to visit a lot when we lived in Pickerington and when we lived here before.

It's a wonderful place, where the quietude is broken only by the trilling of the birds, the sounds of the fish jumping in the water, or the strange noise of the frogs that sound like someone is pulling on an electric guitar string (similar to "twang").

My husband took these awesome pictures and he counted more than a dozen birds, including the heron, the red-winged blackbird, and the ubiquitous robin.

Earlier this afternoon, I took a break and went to a nearby farmer's market my husband found and bought the first herbs and vegetables to plant on the vegetable plot that my husband and our neighbor worked hard to restore after it had been abandoned for several years. 

The plot on the back of the two houses, abutting the garages, which when we lived here a few years back, our neighbor planted every May with a dozen different kinds of tomatoes, had become a sorry sight. It was all overgrown with weeds and had become trashed with discarded wood planks. 

My husband and the neighbor agreed to share the expense of a rototiller and on Friday they did the back-breaking work of bringing the area back to life. Today, the neighbor worked on it some more and then my husband smoothed over the tilled soil and it's now ready to become our vegetable garden again, and the neighbor is once more talking about planting his tomato extravaganza of yore.

For our side of the plot, I got two kinds of tomatoes, Cubanelle peppers, rosemary and cilantro, and hope to plant these tomorrow as we inaugurate our redone huerto. I will make sure to take a picture so you can see what the plot looks like. Unfortunately, we forgot to take a before picture of the disaster it used to be so you'll have to use your imagination.

This was a day when work mixed with gardening and with a motorcycle trip to a breathtakingly peaceful place. I couldn't have asked for a better Sunday.