Secret Garden

When I was young, like most girls my age, I watched The Secret Garden. After that any time I was near a large hedge or overgrown bramble I would expect to find a door. One time I did find an old key which I would take with me whenever I thought I was likely to come into contact with a hedge. I never found a door, I never found a secret garden and  I never turned out to be a princess… although that might have been another film.

We did get an allotment though and every weekend my family and I would trudge down to it and check on the fruits and vegetables, pull out weeds, plant potatoes etc. then go home to make rhubard crumbles and eat peas straight from the pod.
For those who don’t know, an allotment is an area of land, owned by the local council, which you rent to grow fruits and veggies.
I think they were originally set up in WW2 when everyone was growing extra food to make up the rations. Nowadays they are mainly populated by older men, escaping their wives for an afternoon with their allotment buddies.

We gave our allotment up when I was about 12, I’m not sure why. Perhaps my parents became disinterested or the rent went up. By then I’d moved on from wanting to find a secret garden but the enjoyment I got from planting a seed and watching it turn into a plant is deep-rooted (lolz punz).

Rus has a balcony off of his bedroom, unused except by the cat, I expressed an interest in getting some plants on it last time I visited, I envisaged growing a few herbs that would make the evening air fragrant as we sat sipping drinks and reading books. Rus went into overdrive and bought about twenty million plants. He then promptly got bored of it and they all started dying off. The mini succulents in their tiny pots remained knocked over by a swish of the cat’s tail, the peppers shriveled up, the herbs dried out and turned to fragrant dust.

I decided to take matters into my own hands and spent the last few weeks slowly working through all the plants, I’ve used my gardening knowledge (all learned from the secret garden film) to check which were saveable and which needed to go. I managed to get rid of a lot of them before Rus figured out what I was doing – he’s somewhat of a hoarder.
When he found out he was a little upset, I’m not too sure why because it wasn’t like he was tending to the plants. To reassure him I wasn’t just recklessly throwing things away I told him my Secret Garden tip; that if something looks dead and you nick it with a knife and it’s green inside then it’s actually saveable with a bit of TLC.
Rus got really excited by this and started chopping at everything and exclaiming ITS ALIVE! like a mad man. Unfortunately they were the ones I’d already checked (and two new ones that I’d only just bought. Which were still green. AND FLOWERING) and his ‘nicking’ was actually chopping off an entire stem so I have a few half-hacked up, but very much alive, plants.
Then he got to the coriander plant which looked very much dead, I’d already tugged at it and it was so dry it just crumbled away, right from the root, all that remained was a little twig that I’d already decided to get rid of. But, Rus had his shears and chopped it in half and sure enough there was a bit of green inside. Rus got really excited that he hadn’t killed all the plants and is insisting I keep it and look after it. So every other day I water a twig in a pot and wonder how I didn’t realise Rus had special needs sooner and if he’ll notice if I just replace it.

Before and after shots…

Suicide

My friend died, she killed herself, and it’s been horrible. It’s made worse by being 6000 miles away from it all and by being told the details on Facebook.

We worked together and she was troubled, she never opened to me directly because I’m twenty years younger and what did I know.

But I wish she had, because I’d have genuinely listened and not used it as a platform to talk about myself, I wouldn’t have encouraged the self medicated wine, I wouldn’t have asked how she was just to hear the latest gossip. I would have tried to help because she was a nice person and deserved a friend. Yet despite meeting her for coffees and going out for meals she never opened up to me.

I wish I’d poked my nose in more, and not been worried about seeming to be interfering. I wish I’d spoken up when I heard worrying snippets of conversations she was having with other members of staff. I wish I’d asked her why she was hungover yet again, and just how much had she drank. I wish I’d shouted at her for repeatedly drink driving. I wish I’d told the ones she had spoken to to try harder to help her.

If anyone you come into contact with is visibly struggling with life, if your coworker is repeatedly coming in stinking of booze, if someone is crying on the bus, if someone has cuts on their wrists, if someone is withdrawing from life, reach out to them. Because I didn’t and now my friend is dead. A mother is dead. A daughter is dead.

And if you’re struggling, if life is really hard for you right now, reach out to someone. Even if they’re younger, even if they don’t have the same issues, even if they’re always laughing. It doesn’t mean they won’t bend over backwards to help you. Because there is nothing romantic about suicide, everything just ends. And even if right now that seems like a good idea, you could not be more wrong.

50 hikes and a turtle hunt.

On a recent trip to Barnes and Nobel I found this little gem of a book. It was just after the weekend before NYE and Rus and I had done NOTHING all weekend, I was going stir crazy, we were both crabby and fed up and realising that we needed stuff to fill our time with.

I have always loved walking and hiking, as a child I would spend my weekends with my family and our dogs on the hills of Derbyshire, playing in rivers or waterfalls, scaring sheep and eating a picnic elevated high above sealevel.
As an adult I still enjoyed trips to the peaks but work prohibited it being a too frequent event. Luckily I was still just a ten minute walk from farmers’ lanes, woodlands, small hills and glorious scenery.
And even if I didn’t have time for that a trip to the local supermarket was a stroll under beautiful trees, past quaint brick houses (and maybe a petrol station or two), over a canal, along a river. Everywhere was nature.

Here in California it’s a different story. I’m living in a city, a concrete jungle, everything is spread out and nothing is a walk away. If I am going on a walk one evening, it’s around neighbourhood streets, past homeless men and along rows of telephone poles. There is nothing quaint, historic or beautiful about this place. Unless you happen to be out at sunset, that can be quite marvellous.

So I’ve been quite keen to try out hiking here, clearly a street walk won’t fill any void but maybe the secret lies within the hiking trails. This book is split into three sections, Coastal, Foothills and Mountain hikes each range from easy to moderate and they cover a wide variety of content, some are nature based in national parts, others lead you to historical places or encourage you to look for fossils, or, like the one we started with, send you on an animal hunt.

The first walk of the book is super easy, it’s in Seal Beach and along a bike trail next to the river. Looking ahead the scenery isn’t obviously beautiful, it’s a power plant.

But!

Because of the power plant draining it’s hot water into the river the temperature has risen and allowed for turtles to inhabit the place. There’s also wrens, hawks, ducks, fish and the possibility of seals in the river too so the entire time you are encouraged to keep and eye on the water and every ripple gets you excited.
Now I’ll be honest, it was no hike in the highlands of Scotland. It was a heavily used hike, in fact I won’t even call it a hike, it was a walk. Along tarmac. With quite a lot of rubbish on the banks. And a couple of homeless people in the way.

One thing I always loved about walking in the UK was that feeling of who may have walked before you, what their story was, were they running from an argument, meeting a lover for a secret rendezvous. And when was it first walked along. There was no replacement for that feeling of walking in another’s footsteps on this walk. Though I suppose this one was about turtles, not history, and in America you can’t have both because Native American’s didn’t walk on tarmac.

Ooops

I haven’t posted in a long time.

I got stressed and anxious and sitting at a computer was the last thing I wanted to be doing. The move kind of sprung itself on me, I had been working towards it for two years and then all of a sudden I was buying tickets and packing my bag and it was more than I could handle – packing up my life as my family are all getting set for a christmas together.

Rus had a few personal things going on in his own world, things that aren’t mine to mention here, but it meant he wasn’t around to chat that much and that certainly made it a lot harder.

I was going to just let the blog go, stop writing and switch to tumblr full time but that isn’t the place for long rambling posts and writing does make me feel… something. I don’t know how to describe it, it isn’t like I’m miserable and this is a place to let go, to release all my torment or anything like that because my life is pretty good right now. I guess I just enjoy it.

So I packed up stuff, kissed my parents farewell and hopped on a plane to LA. A week later I was married and that was a weird feeling. I store Rus in my phone as Husband! just to remind myself that yes that really happened (in a good way).

America is bizarre, it’s very similar to the UK – mainly because of the language, but then it’s very different – mainly because of the Americans. I’m settling in and it’s becoming more normal but I’m still pining for home in some ways. We cooked a big roast dinner on Christmas Eve, it was dark out, we had christmas pop music playing and it was hot in the kitchen so I opened the door sincerely expecting to be hit by that wall of cold air, so cold it catches in the back of your throat and makes your chest feel damp.

Instead it was warmer outside than in the kitchen.

When things like that happen and catch me unawares I want to go and sit on my bed and close the curtains and take a nap. But I don’t, I power through and hope no one notices the lump in my throat.

So I’m hoping writing will help me straighten out any sad feelings in my head, help me document any fun things we do and also give me a bit of a hobby. I can’t work for quite a while and, living with his parents, I have very few household chores to do.