“We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”

– Native American proverb

You know when all the feels hit you all at once? And they start leaking from your eyes…. Sitting on the patio with Steve, looking around, thinking “we live here”. Not just that but “we are living here”. And the multitude of thoughts that cascade around when I think about my children growing up here, getting bigger, older, weaving themselves into the fabric of the place, having this place woven into them. Becoming part of each other. This place is good for our hearts. And our heads.

Yeah.

It doesn’t take much reminding these days for me to remember to see this place through my childrens’ eyes too, because it’s their lives that are being interwoven with it as much as ours.

I want to keep seeing wishes.

In other news we mowed the “lawn” today. Well, Steve did some, Ben did some, and even I had a go.

The nettles down the end have been left to grow – hopefully they will provide habitat and food for butterflies, and when the butterflies are done with them Steve can have a play with the scythe and I will have a bunch of nettle stalks to play around with and attempt to get the fibres from. Looking forward to trying, anyway!

We’ve left a big patch of beautiful dandelions and daisies near the sheds/barn, and some wildness around the lilacs, although I’ll have to get in with secateurs to sort the lilacs out soon.

And I finally managed to find out what these pretty little white flowers are that are growing on one edge of the garden: marsh stitchwort, thanks to a Finnish-hosted plant identification website Kukkakasvit which actually worked! Might have to see what else it can help me identify!

The wild garlic has flowered (must do a bit of weeding around it),

The big conifers have suddenly opened up their tight tiny pink cone buds into miniature fir cones and there are still millions on the tree. And every knock on a branch sends a cloud of dust – pollen?! – out of the tiny opened up cones.

I tied up all the raspberry canes around the greenhouse frame, and picked dandelions simply because I could,

And I started patching pyjama pants, inspired by japanese boro mending. The main pitfall here is the sensory thing, I wonder whether the love for the patches will overcome the being able to feel the stitching on the inside of the pyjamas. It’s not spikey though so it might be okay. I hate seeing clothes get thrown away. If they are still wearable they get given away but pyjama pants with holes so big in the knees that they’re almost shorts, I can’t give them away. So outgrown pyjama pants are being used to patch up pants that still fit because my boys rip holes in their pyjamas within weeks of getting them, well before they’ve grown out of them.