Is It Spring?

Woke up to it snowing again. Weathermen said it would only be a light dusting and would melt off quickly. I have a half inch of snow on my deck. I swept it off and down the steps to my shop and by the time I got to my shop, I looked back and it was all covered in that white stuff again.

I feel sorry for the workmen who are working on our porch right now. Out in the cold, shoveling all the dirt that was underneath the old porch and hauling the dirt away or spreading around. Meanwhile, I am in my warm house, drinking a cup of tea and looking out at them.

If you should come to my house right now, you would see that my house is rather dusty. It is because things like this on going on.

Sawing cement blocks and they are going to have to saw the old porch steps because David tried a sledge hammer on them the other day and it just bounced off. Bub says the older cement gets, the harder it becomes.

The foundations for the rock pillars were laid.

Stone will be put around these.

The old cement floor of the porch had to be jack hammered and then began the digging up of all the dirt that was underneath.

The wood awaits beside the house for the new porch. It’s so exciting. Years ago David, our daughter, and I went to Monterey, California to visit our son who was in the Air Force and was out there at language school learning Russian. We took a day trip up to San Francisco and stopped at the Winchester House along the way. The Winchester House belonged to the man who invented the Winchester rifle. When his wife became a widow, she began to believe that the ghosts of all the people who were killed by Winchester rifles were coming to haunt her house. So the building of a very weird house began. She had carpenters hired year round to keep adding to her house. She had windows in floors, doors and stair steps to nowhere. She was afraid that if she stopped building, the ghosts would come.

I would like to be like her only in the case of getting things built all the time. I love to watch the process of a project coming together, especially when it is something I have envisioned coming to fruition. I always thought I would have loved to buy old houses and have them brought back to their former glory.

I have seen our old house go from a 1950’s model into a 2014 model, but still keep its old look. It’s been a labor of love and I know I will never stop work on it until I no longer can. I have a lot of painting and staining to do after the carpenters leave. That makes me happy. I love to paint. That’s something else I probably would have loved to do. Be a painting contractor. I have painted every one of the rooms in our house two, three and four times. I read a magazine article one time where a woman who loved to paint said that if her husband would allow her, she would paint her house every year. I am kind of that way. David knows exactly where I will go as soon as we go to Lowes. The paint department. My only problem is choosing colors. I have made some big boo boos through the years like our Pepto Bismal colored bedroom one time. Right now, I like all the colors in all our rooms, but I am going to change the living room color after all the carpentry work is done and all the cracks are filled.

But Spring is slowly coming into the garden. We have many different types of daffodils.

Remember in the Walt Disney version of Alice in Wonderland where the flowers sang and talked? This daffodil reminds me of them.

Other things are blooming or getting ready to burst forth.

A bush cherry. I actually didn’t plant this one. The birds did from seed from another bush in the yard. They do such great gardening for me sometimes.

Baby lilacs that will be much bigger and smell so good in just a few days.

I can’t remember what this plant is called, but it also is getting ready to bloom. Its leaves stayed green all winter.

I can’t wait to landscape around the porch when it is finished. I have already bought a pink flowering almond bush. The one I have now didn’t do too well through the winter and is in the path of the destruction and not faring too well. It might come back with some pruning and tender loving care.