Eastern Tiger Swallowtail on Bright Lights Cosmos. I followed the butterfly around for a while with the camera, aiming for shots --- this is the best with the stems, blooms, and butterfly against the plain background of the house.
I took photos of Dora, too, who had been barking at me to go outside until finally I went with her to sit in the sun. See her smile of satisfaction:
This afternoon she goes to the vet, so there may be less smiling. But she does love to languish in the sun and will pester me until I consent to sunbathe with her. Here's another of her favorite spots for this activity:
Today is the 2-year anniversary of my beginning the Wool& 100-day dress challenge --- a life-changing endeavor in so many ways. Sometimes I think it's made me boring, because all I talk about anymore is clothes. But that's not precisely true. I talk about clothes here, so I don't have to think about them so much anywhere else, while I'm wearing them, and that is life-changing. The weirdest things can be, and so often actually are, means of grace. For me, the grace for which that challenge was an instigator and an ongoing means was the grace of deliverance from crippling self-consciousness about my appearance, the feeling of never looking right, whatever right was. It is a true deliverance, and I'm grateful for it every day. And if I'm a little more boring now, well, I'm maybe a little more peaceful, too, which is worth it.
Here I am on that long-ago Day 1. I was in the middle of my Wiseblood Books residency, finishing Works of Mercy, but had come home for the Viking Son's 19th birthday the day before. Before I turned around to go back to the residency, the mail came. I'd lost my phone, so all I had was the crappy webcam on my laptop, but I used that thing valiantly for some weeks to take photos, until finally I started using the cheap Moto phone my husband had bought for some trip or other, which I used until just before the Norway trip, when I bought a Google Pixel (whose camera I am clearly still enjoying a lot). I wore my lapis-blue Camellia dress through the rest of my residency and beyond, all the way to the end of October. On the hundredth day, I went to the mountains to spend the day with Marly, but not before reflecting on my experience. All kinds of garden things were in development at the time, too, as my post from that day reminds me.
Here's how it all looks today, two years minus a hundred days later:
The patio we'd just finished building then --- the walk much encroached-upon at the moment by blue sage.
The garden itself, which looks kind of a mess, but a lot of things I want to grow are growing:
I have a counter full of tomatoes, and I can go out and pick peppers whenever I need them. Eggplant are coming along. Chard is huge. Brussels sprouts are progressing. Herbs are flourishing, though my cilantro has died back and needs to be replaced.
And we have pollinators:
I think in the fall we're going to re-weed-cloth and gravel the garden, which should help keep weeds down. Right now we have pine-straw mulch, but that breaks down and becomes dirt, in which weed seeds lodge and creeping things like ground ivy grow a little too well. It's too hot to do anything now, though, and that's fine. What needs to grow is growing, and it will all keep itself until we can do some heavy maintenance in the cooler weather.
And the dress? That dress I wore for a hundred days, beginning on this day two years ago?
She's ready for action. As ever. She's even more so, actually, since I redyed her this royal blue last summer.
And it's funny. I think I'm about ten pounds heavier than I was two years ago right now. I'm not happy about that, but it is what it is. And yet I don't really feel bad --- as in unattractive, I mean. I don't even feel less fit. If anything, I'm more fit because I walk so much with Dora. And I put on this dress and feel . . . great?
Yeah, great. Great is how I feel. Not that I don't feel that way in all my dresses --- I do. But this is the dress that started it all.
I haven't felt like doing any more challenges since that first big one. I just can't be bothered anymore to wear the same dress every day. But I wear a dress every day, and I feel . . . yes, great. I feel great.