#grief and mildew and elaborate spiritual shit are keeping me BUSY

[ancat-dubh]

Feel like every August since I've started practicing has been a season of madness/badness, which is a shame – the weather's been mostly lovely! I like the pace of the month! – but clocking that that's the case is making me feel a bit less insane and completely out of my body atm, as is my garden reflecting back my own Suffering Season for our first year together.

I've got an explosion of powdery mildew, little light speckles racing along my pumpkins and curling rot-smell into my sage, and all of my plants are some degree of yellowing, drooping, or creaking for my attention in the same pitch as my seized-up pelvic muscles and dull-hum brain. Wet grey English summer etc but also my rookie gardener impatience means I absolutely sacrificed better drainage and better timed co-planting for just getting things in the ground. Next year.

Today, though, I woke up to a flurry of arrivals, some planned, some surprises. The first sunflower, which I did NOT plant but appeared in the herb bed a good month after I'd planted other sunflowers for my Four Sisters bed; the first proper-red tomato, which I'm leaving another day before feeding to my boyfriend; the drama queen first tuft of corn, which literally made me gasp spotting her; last but certainly not least fucking WHEAT and WILD OATS?? Which, it turns out, have been growing out of the landlord-special rock-heap and I've only just noticed. Need to work out a proper introduction/greeting for the latter (suggestions welcome).

All of the arrivals were accompanied by orb-weavers (there's one just peeking out of the sunflower) – felt like a nice little nod from them after we re-formalised our indoor-truce yesterday. I leave them alone high in the corners of my room and they take care of enough mosquitos to justify keeping my window open at night, all v messy-goth couture. One big jumpscare fucker has decided to push the edges of our agreement by hanging out by my light switch. I've tried relocating him the past three nights in a row, but he's so quick I have to give it to him – okay girl, truce. We can only move as fast as each other.