One by one, we’ve been ticking off all the maintenance/ repair boxes–human, house, auto, and feline.

Yesterday was auto–my poor old 2004 Subaru has been sounding like a hillbilly hot rod for months (exhaust broken in two behind cat converter).  It’s not long for this world, but we’ve been patching it together until we can resettle elsewhere and then trade it in.

We were dreading the bad news, and it was worse–after waiting for hours at the dealership, they quoted a figure of (gasp) $3,000 to fix it right!  But, since we just needed a bandaid to get us through for now, they sent us to Kar Kare muffler center down the street, who were able to install a flexible pipe coupler thingie in a few minutes, for under $150!!  When you don’t have thousands of dollars to throw around, a cheap but effective quick fix is a huge relief.  So that was some good news, for a change.  Back to stealth mode!

And now back to gardening.  I’m going to highlight some of my plant successes, now finally emerging just as we’re planning our exit.  Bittersweet, but still encouraging.  I do hope a plant-lover will move in and just stand back and watch for a while, before plowing it all under.  This place is a flower pageant just waiting to happen.

I can’t say it too many times–I’m thrilled with how all the CA poppies wintered over in the rock garden and came back with a vengeance, and how the native red columbine (Aquilegia) took over the front shade garden and multiplied.

They don’t look like anything now, but here are my hops finally growing, and native passionflower (Passiflora) vines coming up everywhere.  Maybe they’ll even bloom this year, before I go.  I’m trying to be optimistic.

The native conifers and deciduous trees I planted (many from my son’s place) over the past few years are now taller than me.  Which isn’t saying much, as I keep shrinking, but still.  Surely a future owner will have mercy and leave them to become a beautiful green screen.  I’ll especially miss the “R&B dogwood” that The Bobs gave me, which is finally taking off.

Here are a couple of perennial cultivar ferns (“autumn”, and “Japanese painted”) coming back from dormancy.  Now I’m glad I didn’t go ahead and order lots of native fern plants, as I had planned.  Or other natives, for that matter.  Maybe it was a premonition?

I’m slowly coming around to accepting the inevitable, but I’ll get there.