Today, I’m breathing for those of you with stomach aches. Somehow, that helps. Really. Tonglen is, perhaps, the best manifestation of compassion I know. Stomach hurts? Offer it up for all those folks who have REALLY bad problems w/ their stomaches: starvation, cancer, the big deal aches. Breathe in pain, breathe out peace. Repeat.

Mine is just a small nag, so I distracted myself with garden dreams. In which my wonderful husband indulged me fully — buying me daylilies as an early Mother’s Day present! He bought me not the pale pink ones — which I bought myself (they’re Catherine Woodberry, very fragrant!) — but Hyperion, an old (also fragrant) type.

The first house we owned, I was a young and pretty ignorant gardener. Which is sooo unfortunate, because we moved in to a house w/ an amazing garden. I hadn’t learnt that you do NOT tear up anything for the first year you live somewhere, though, so I dug into naked lady bulbs (lycoris squamigera) with no idea what they were.

She — although it might have been a ‘he’; I’m projecting my own many generations of women gardeners — had planted Hyperion daylilies — hundreds of them! — as a border on the back fence line. Easily 100 feet of daylilies, all marvelously sunny & fragrant. She’d also planted beautiful fragrant roses beneath the casement windows. And a pecan that was probably 70′ tall when we moved in.

What did I learn from this? Besides how much I love daylilies, especially Hyperion daylilies (which happen to be some of the most expensive of ALL daylilies)…? I learned to join the city garden club, for one thing. Except that when I went to join (the only way for a poor gardener to access great gardening books), the woman in charge said they didn’t really have any gardening clubs for someone my age… 🙂

I also learned that gardening is a waiting game, as much of my life seems to be. You need to take the long view (good practice, that). And that gardens are unpredictable, even if you have a plan carefully drawn out, and think you know what you’re doing.

Because here I am, decades later, still trying to figure out how to plant around what’s in a garden bed. A bed I planted myself! And I’m doing it with a stomach ache, at that. I’m sure there’s a new lesson to be gleaned from this, but right now? I’m just glad I have daylilies coming next week. If I’m lucky, they’ll bloom this summer! In the meantime, I’m breathing for you.