Gardening (and Remembering) in the Rain

Despite the fact that the rain was threatening and actually falling a bit, the P.R. Garden Club members brought hundreds of plants to the Community Center hallway and outdoor area to make sure that all Point Roberts gardeners had a lot of choices for what they wanted to plant in their gardens this year.  It's certainly prime time for planting: soil is pretty warm, still damp (well, soggy in a few places in my wetland yard), and enough sun showing up now and then to encourage everything to come on up!  I planted a dozen lily bulbs (very late to be doing so) 10 days ago, and they are all up already.  Of course, the previously planted lilies are up about 2-3 feet, so these new ones have a way to go to catch up.  But gardening, as my friend Patricia always reminds me, is always about hope.

In any case, the Garden Club people get our thanks for their generous sharing of their plants.  It's always a good sign that a plant will probably do well in my yard if it's already thriving in a neighbor's/friend's garden.

The Friends of the Library simultaneously threw a big book sale, and as I stood about among the many, many tables covered with books, it occurred to me that the Friends provide us half a dozen times a year with a Point Roberts Used Book Store.  Maybe that's the future of small businesses: they will be like gypsies that come now and then with their wares and we all rush out of our houses to see what they are bringing us.  What the book sale brought me was Robert Graves' memoir, from back in the early 20th Century, Goodbye to All That.  Shortly after the end of WW I, in which he fought and managed to live through, Graves left England for pretty much the rest of his life, ending up in Majorca.  What he was saying "Goodbye" to, was that privileged, class-based life that had lead to, among other things, the awfulness of WW I.  And what he then gave to the rest of us included wonderful poems, stories, and novels, which nowadays are probably best known to the masses through "Masterpiece Theatre" ("I Claudius", e.g.)

"Goodbye to all that" became a famous quotation.  I think about it often as I read the news of our own time and note what has gone, seemingly forever.  So thanks to the Friends for getting me back in touch with the source.  It's a wonderful memoir of a time as foreign-seeming to those of us in our old age as our own childhood usually seems.  But that's another topic.