Overdose A Theme

“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers.” Cecil Beaton.
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Younger, perhaps prior to age 6, I would have agreed with Cecil Beaton.  Everything he says about yourself, is for yourself.  Zero thoughts 'against the play-it-safers.'  They shouldn't enter your realm, they matter why?  Who has time?  Isn't the battle between lizard brain & heart enough?
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Because I didn't like garden design rules, at the front end, I've created quite a few.  After intense study, in historic gardens across the globe, in addition to books/magazines/tv/movies/degree in horticulture.
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What a knocker, below.  Broken, it's still marvelous.
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Garden Design Rule: Overdose on a Theme.
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Thrilling rule, you choose the theme.  Following it through, to the max, from macro to micro.  Seems obvious, and simple, but, trust me, you'll scare yourself at times.  Many nights, in bed, thinking, "Should I really do ______ , .........."
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Wise advice I was given after sharing some night thoughts with a friend, "Never make a decision after sunset & before sunrise."  Quite liberating to be released from those chattering monkeys of the dark.

Pic, above, here.

Garden & Be Well,  XO T
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In college for my engineering degree, test days in the classroom were hot.  Literally.  Summer/winter, both, hot.  Will never forget walking out of a thermodynamics exam, and the professor remarking how many more BTU's a working brain puts out than brains at rest.  Hence, the hot rooms.
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I'd rather put my brain BTU's to good use, not waste a single precious unit proscribed to me during my short time upon this Earth.  Give a unit toward the play-it-safers?

Pot Cluster

Pot Cluster, below.
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Quite the thing to do, across Europe for centuries.



Pic, above, here.

Of course there are 2 personalities about the Pot Cluster, "Not in a billion years.", and, "Oh goody, I get to buy more plants."
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Want a Pot Cluster but life is woe-unto-me at present?  A single pot can be your Pot Cluster.  More than a potted plant, it's your spirit saying, "I choose beauty, I choose to smile."
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During the few short days it took to sell 2 houses & buy a house, about this time last year, I bought a lone tomato plant from wallyworld.  Potted into classic terra cotta, sited on axis from every window at the back of the house, leaving my 30 year precious sweet garden, this little tomato plant carried my heart.  Beloved was out-of-state working during the 'festivities' of moving.   He did come home for a weekend, teased me terribly about my Charlie Brown tomato plant.  Of course that tomato plant made the move, Beloved could not believe discovering it had made the move.  That I would "waste" my time upon that lone tomato plant, "You won't get any tomatoes, cheaper to buy them at the store, waste of time to keep it watered."  After the 1st frost, Beloved & I were walking in our new garden and we discovered, at the same moment, my Charlie Brown tomato plant near death, leaves brown/crisp, yet it had a silver dollar sized tomato, pristine, ripe, beautiful orange-red.  That lone tomato worth more than a grocery store full of tomatoes, to me.  With a piquant bonus, Beloved vanquished by a tomato.  How didn't he see at the front end I wasn't planting a tomato, I was planting a metaphor?

Color. Color ? Color !

Remember, designing your landscape, I must know you from the street.
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Parse the words.  To know you from the street, you must design your garden from interior views, and the same brain waves of style, color, flow, texture, individuality from inside to outside.
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A trinity of pics, below, you should all be able to shoot, of your home.  This trinity, below, is a Garden Design, of the ages, quiz question.  
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Today, now, your home/garden, mentally shoot these 3 pics.  Can you produce?
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Every garden needs a color trinity, green-brown-white, is the classic for centuries.  No worries if it's not your flavor, choose your own color trinity.  Produce these 3 pics.  Quiz question remains the same.  Shoot & produce.
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Color.  Color?  Color!  Which will it be?  This is your singular precious life.  Stretch your intelligence, comfort zone, think without your wallet.  Perhaps you need my personal question, epiphanized after too many decades people pleasing, "What would I do tomorrow if I were not afraid?"  When it comes to doing your garden, your best garden, I'm not the person you want to start a sentence, "I can't do that."  Those are 4 failure words.  Best 4 words I was ever told, "Be who you are."
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Studying historic gardens across Europe for 2 decades, this lesson about color, above, and within the pics, below, was intuitively learned.  This stuff, above/below, is not in garden design books.  It's merely in the best historic gardens across history.  Want to recreate the wheel?  Knock yourself out.  Everyone loves the outliers who do, with success.
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Since the start of designing gardens, color was easy to choose, I pull from interiors, what will work with the exteriors.
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Furlow Gatewood's home/garden is over the top with the color trinity.  He makes me see it fresh, as if he invented it.  Better, he owns it.
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Pic, above, here.



Pic, above, here.
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Fern, viewed from the garden, pulls me in.  Then the brilliant audacity of double axis to the mirror with the fern.  Swoon.

 

Pic, above, here.
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Nothing more to be said about your color trinity excepting, shoot it.  Picture worth 1,000 words.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T

Exterior Trim: Navajo White

I'm working at a project, craftsman bungalo, with good timing, exterior  paint was showing its last gasps.  Much better than paint with fresh new confidence, and the color is wrong.
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They like the soft blue lapboard siding, it will be used again.  Their white trim was so bright it owned the neighborhood.
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Of course they wanted white trim again.  Thankfully, they agreed, the existing white trim-columns-rails-step risers, much too white.
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Which white to choose?
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Navajo White, Benjamin Moore, below.
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Calm, receding, means business but doesn't shout new kid on the block.
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If Navajo White can 'sit back' with this much coverage, below, my client is safe, their Navajo White will let their home/garden speak, not the trim.



Pic, above, here.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T
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Major careers for this couple, 2 small children,  she loves to cook, and hired me because she wants the focus of her entire landscape, it's not large, to be potager, chicken coop, pollinators.  They're doing painting/repairs & tree work this spring, landscape this fall.  She had all the right cookbooks, several shelves, in her kitchen.  Quirky, but that's a realm of assessment, kitchens.  And, you know I don't mean the make/model of equipment.

Tara Turf & Guilds

Visual pun, below.  Formal hedges with Tara Turf.  Tara Turf?  Tall meadow mix of grasses, herbs, flowers, what the wind blows in, singular to each locale.  Mown, as below, creating formal with informal.
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Look closely, below.  This Tara Turf is under fruit trees, an orchard.  Heightening the visual pun, but I'm easily amused (enriched?) by such.
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Under an orchard Tara Turf is also a guild.  Quickly, a guild is a mix of plantings attractive to pollinators which will increase crop yield by 80%, more here, and here.




Pic, above, here.
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Cecil Beaton, below, on his Tara Turf.



Pic, above, here.

Barefoot.  Smart man.
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Garden & Be Well,  XO T
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Beloved is a brave man.  Mowing our Tara Turf too l-o-w.  Walking from the chicken coup, across a meadow of blooming Tara Turf, early this month, I thought to myself, "Cannot believe this is my life."  Within 24 hours Beloved mowed it all away.  All.

Formal into the Wild Wood

"And, I don't want anything formal."
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Gets me every time.  In the early years I would explain how 'formal' is your friend.  Now, I just let it rip, playing with formal elements, don't mention the word, and enjoy, "I love this."
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Because I know what is most important in life, I checked Pinterest late last nite, hoping something new popped up for Furlow Gatewood.  This pic, below, may not be new but I had never seen his allee of mophead hydrangea from this angle.
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Gatewood's allee has sailed a fleet of ships since its debut in Veranda in July of 2013.
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Adore how he smashed formal into wild wood.
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His wild wood of canopy-understory-walls-floors, a total home run.
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Another home run?  No dinky-is-stinky here.
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Further south than my garden, I look at Gatewood's hydrangea, nostrils flared, right eyebrow cocked/loaded, in a momentary whiff of envy.  No near decade of leisurely late freezes, in March/April, taking out hydrangea buds.
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No, there is not next year to get this decadence, below, back.  It is several good 'next years' in a row, to get the decadence back.
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Before you think this is a problem to maintain, notice front/left, a clearly exposed drip irrigation tube.
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Pic, above, here.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara

Mind Wandering by Choice

Pairs of words have thrilled me for decades.  Wildly instructive, good pairs have the power to enlighten, or change habit.  Now, this moment, what pair of words pop as having done this for you?
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Example you ask?  Amusement vs. stewardship.
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Recently, oddly, this pair, want vs. need.
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Culture rewards going after what  we want, what we need, not so much.  In the want vs. need, yesterday, all I could think is the majority of residential landscapes.  Something affordable, easy to take care of, mostly just keep the status quo from the builder or previous owner, enough to keep the HOA from sending nasty grams.  The thinking is not contrived, it is, indeed a no brainer.  Excepting what we need is in the landscape.  Wanting to meet our landscape with a minimum threshold pleases others, seemingly ourselves, while oceans of life we need, flow silently from grasp.
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Miss Katherine Kirkwood Scott's maxim, heard & understood from the source herself, in childhood, "I can live without the necessities but I must have the luxuries."    Oh my, a soup, want vs. need.  Excepting I knew her recipe, intuitively, as a little girl.  The adults laughed, I didn't.  I was 'on it'.  Miss Katherine had opened new realms for me.  Something undiminished decades later

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Pic, above, Martha Stewart.
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From New York Magazine, In Praise of Spacing Out, ", by Melissa Dahl,

Todd Kashdan said. “When we’re zoning out, really what this is, is the incubation period of creativity.” This is where ideas you never would’ve consciously connected seem to come together on their own — suddenly, it becomes clear why your best friend seemed distant at dinner last night, or what you should buy your dad for his birthday, for example. “With mindfulness, on the other hand, you are so in the present moment with your consciousness that there’s no room for ideas to collide,” Kashdan said.   
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In the garden, I know, are answers to life questions/challenges/quirks.  In the garden, I can fully zone out, with intention.  Nature, humble, bold, patient, kind; even when the awareness is outside a comfort zone.  Haven't been outside your comfort zone in 6 months?  Hmm.  That's when I know I'm stagnating.
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 Scott Barry Kaufman and Rebecca McMillian, wrote about zoning out in, Frontiers in Psychology:
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"We mind wander, by choice or by accident, because it produces tangible reward when measured against goals and aspirations that are personally meaningful. Having to reread a line of text three times because our attention has drifted away matters very little if that attention shift has allowed us to access a key insight, a precious memory or make sense of a troubling event. Pausing to reflect in the middle of telling a story is inconsequential if that pause allows us to retrieve a distant memory that makes the story more evocative and compelling. Losing a couple of minutes because we drove past our off ramp is a minor inconvenience if the attention lapse allowed us to finally understand why the boss was so upset by something we said in last week’s meeting. Arriving home from the store without the eggs that necessitated the trip is a mere annoyance when weighed against coming to a decision to ask for a raise, leave a job, or go back to school." 
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Every tangible benefit, above, in my garden.  I wanted a garden, it gave me what I needed.
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With spacing out, and epiphanies, Nature provides another delightful factor, losing all concept of time, what a drug, 'moments of eternity', Joseph Campbell names this.
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Who knew the serpent in the garden, now, is the cell phone?  A killer to zoning out.  Occasionally, my phone is forgotten, going into the garden.  What riches those times are.  On the weekend, by choice, I put my phone intentionally in the garden, away from hearing.
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I'm beyond thankful my gardening life began before cell phones.  How would I know there could be more in a garden?  Of course if the cell phone does this in a garden, the question becomes, what else is it doing?
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Wants vs needs in the garden, pic, above.  Front porch with rails is the ubiquitous, 'everyone wants rails on their front porch', but the narrative, above, is wildly heavy on needs.  Needs so rich it was worth adding 3' to accommodate family, friends, Nature.    
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara

Another 1st Rule of Garden Design

Design your garden, 1st, from inside your home.  Design your garden, 1st, for the depths of winter.
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If your garden is gorgeous in winter, it is gorgeous all year.
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The Garden In Winter, by Rosemary Verey is perhaps the best Garden Design book.



Pic, above, from my previous garden.  30 years, creating a cottage garden.  Moved no plants/field stone/bricks when I left last May, only brought focal points & potted plantings & 7 large quartz stones.  Weeks later, seeing the pile of cottage garden 'stuff' at our ca. 1900 American farmhouse I knew it was inappropriate.  Beloved had his large work truck and 5 of his men on site, I let them gather 2 truckloads for the thrift store.  I stood and pointed and watched the bits/pieces making up a garden seen on TV, in magazines/books, tours, drift away.  Bits/pieces that made up my life.  Nothing to be done but take swift action.  Impossible to live a new life chapter, dragging past chapters.
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The view, above, is now all lawn.
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Christopher Lloyd said, The garden dies when the gardener dies.    
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Because money was nonexistent during early decades at my cottage garden I volunteered at garden symposiums, to get inside free.  Wildly, it was Providence placing me where I should be.  How else to have had lunch & traipse gardens with Christopher Lloyd when he came to lecture, how else to have had lunch & traipse gardens with Rosemary Verey when she came to lecture?
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T

Use the Wonk Factor

Charming.  No element appears new-construction.  Yet much must be either repaired or new.  What a lot of WONK !  As in, this-is-perfect.  Each layer a feast of intellectual intent.  A home & garden with narrative.
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Of course they used ogee curves for the illusion of greater height to the front porch.  Of course they chose a historic lattice, creating a sense of greater space, single shutters down, double shutters up.  Oh my, the front door panels lending greater height, and interest, versus using a ubiquitous 6 panel door.  Color makes the house larger too.  All white, this house would shrink.  Scale & flow maximized, inviting you in.  Photographer capturing fleeting shadows, a story line.



Pic, above, Southern Living.
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There is WONK here.  Every garden & home needs some WONK.
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WONK takes your heart & head.  Often WONK arrives unbidden.  "Oh no, we're keeping that, it's WONKY."  I delight in keeping the WONK factor, it makes a better design.
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WONK is official, it's in the dictionary, here.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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From the 50's, as building to code has become ever more tiresome to the eye, a little WONK gives outrageously good results.

Nitty Gritty of Patio Chairs

Good chairs at the round central table, below, for overflow/extra seating.  Easily stored, easily carried.  However, I know they do not meet your full requirements.  These are not chairs conducive to lingering conversation after a good meal, especially in the evening.  Nor are they acceptable for 'him they call fat boy, clocking in at 400 lbs. with a passion for food and film magazines, who'd been a great critic downtown, he'd politely decline dinner happy to dance down the street drinking vodka in the moonlight, with his aging film queen at 58 odd years of age.' Face it, you'd rather keep this couple at your table.    



Pic, above, here.

Much better to keep Fat Boy, 'in his gray overalls, and the aging film queen, master raconteurs both, for dinner in the comfortable chairs', below.  Perhaps she'd share her story of 'the fountain of youth, somewhere west of Fort Worth, where she met Errol Flynn in the Crazy Water Hotel.'

Pic, above, here.

Who doesn't love good stories after a good meal?  No worries the pastiche is a bit embellished, it's the truth told as it should be when there are fireflies, stars and the moon filtered thru branches of century old pecan trees.
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My girlfriend, Miss Gulf Coast, had a Thanksgiving dinner several years ago, she called me ahead letting me know she'd invited a 'character'.  Bless her.  Older, crooked health, and from the margins of society, he'd created his own world, overcoming a few obvious, yet unknown, poor life choices, with dignity, character, delight.  It was my honor to be seated next to him.  He passed before the next Thanksgiving.  We still talk about him.  Yes, I like a good character at table.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Quotes from, Tom Russell's song, Mineral Wells,
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Almost a decade ago a friend burned me a cd, an unexpected gift.  Written in fat Sharpie, on the cd, Texas Boogie.  Mineral Wells is one of my favorites.
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Honestly, how many times, across decades, can I write/lecture about patio chairs?  And, keep myself amused.  Perhaps you'll tell me a good dinner story that's happened to you.

The Red Queen's Latticework

Most gardens, I get it, are foundation plantings, lawn, a few trees, installed by the builder, recently or decades ago, because the Certificate of Occupancy demanded a specific amount of lawn, bushes, trees.
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What I don't get is keeping those certificate-of-occupancy-landscapes.  It is madness, their pruning, mowing, fertilizing (toxic to soil/water/you or you can make a bomb), weed/bug killers (toxic to them & you).  It's the full Monty, RED QUEEN EFFECT.
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Literally.  "Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying ‘Faster! Faster!’ but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had not breath left to say so.

The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. ‘I wonder if all the things move along with us?’ thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, ‘Faster! Don’t try to talk!’ 

Alice looked round her in great surprise. ‘Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!’

‘Of course it is,’ said the Queen, ‘what would you have it?’

‘Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’

‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.", from,  Through the Looking Glass. 
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Until I fought through living in a Certificate of Occupancy landscape, the Red Queen, indeed, nailed me, and my small thinking.
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What changed?  I went to the bother of getting another college degree, apparently to learn running faster/smarter kept me in Certificate of Occupancy landscapes.  Crazy.  Time + Money spent learning nonsense?  My heart still hungered for living in a beautiful garden.  Off I went to Europe, no money for it, heart trampling lizard brain.
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Got what I was looking for the first study tour, England, in the first garden.  Will never forget that first epiphany.
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Until that first garden, all my energies & thought processes specified you must stand in the street, looking at the house, to design a garden.  In this madness I was equally complicit with my college professors.
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Realizing, in a moment of intuitive enlightenment, gardens must be designed from inside the home.  Designing your garden from inside the house is more than running twice as fast, it is warp speed, you can feel it. Who's living a Red Queen life now?
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Want the garden, below?  Go inside, start designing.  




Pic, above, here.

The Red Queen is merely an arrow in your quiver, for a Latticework Mental Model.  Oddly, learning the Red Queen effect, drenches everything in life.
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For decades I could not abide topiaried plants, below.  Another madness, with arrogance thrown in.  Too rich, disdain for something I didn't understand.  What is there to understand about topiaried plants?  Easy.  They're easy.  Little maintenance, year round impact.  Another arrow for that quiver called the Latticework Mental Model.  And I thought I was merely learning Garden Design.
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Thanks to Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway, his best way to learn, is with a latticework of mental models, below,
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"Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.

What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does…

It’s like the old saying, “To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” And of course, that’s the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you’ve got to have multiple models.

And the models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.

You may say, “My God, this is already getting way too tough.” But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight."



Pic, above, here.

Wow, no foundation planting, below, or now it can be described, plantings at the house once you've become the Red Queen.  I took the pics, below, in England.  Imagine standing in these gardens, at the house, after a lifetime of USA green meatball landscapes.  Liberating.



Pic, above, here.

My heart was seeking these gardens, instead I received an education in life choices and how to change, adapt, grow.  More than 'feel good' words, they've been codified intellectually by Farnum Street, below.



Pic, above, here.
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The Farnam Street Latticework of Mental Models

Psychology (misjudgments)

Biases emanating from the Availability Heuristic:
– Ease of Recall
– Retrievability

Biases emanating from the Representativeness Heuristic
– Bias from insensitivity to base rates
– Bias from insensitivity to sample size
– Misconceptions of chance
– Regression to the mean
– Bias from conjunction fallacy

Biases emanating from the Confirmation Heuristic
– Confirmation bias
– Bias from anchoring
– Conjunctive and disjunctive-events bias
– Bias from over-confidence 
– Hindsight Bias

Others
– Bias from incentives and reinforcement
– Bias from self-interest
– Bias from association
– Bias from liking/loving
– Bias from disliking/hating
– Commitment and Consistency Bias
– Bias from excessive fairness
– Bias from envy and jealousy
– Reciprocation bias
– Over-influence from authority
– Deprival Super-Reaction Bias
– Bias from contrast
– Bias from stress-influence
– Bias from emotional arousal
– Bias from physical or psychological pain
– Fundamental Attribution Error
– Bias from the status quo
– Do something tendency
– Do nothing tendency
– Over-influence from precision/models
– Uncertainty avoidance
– Not invented here bias
– Short-term bias
– Tendency to avoid extremes
– Man with a Hammer Tendency
– Bias from social proof
– Over-influence from framing effects
– Lollapalooza

Business
– Price Sensitivity
– Scale
– Distribution
– Cost
– Brand
– Improving Returns
– Porters 5 Forces
– Decision Trees
– Diminishing Returns
– Double Entry Accounting

Investing
– Mr. Market
– Circle of competence

Ecology
– Complex adaptive systems
– Systems Thinking

Economics
– Utility
– Diminishing Utility
– Supply and Demand
– Scarcity
– Elasticity
– Economies of Scale
– Opportunity Cost
– Marginal Cost
– Comparative Advantage
– Trade-offs
– Price Discrimination
– Positive and Negative Externalities
– Sunk Costs
– Moral Hazard
– Game Theory
– Prisoners’ Dilemma
– Tragedy of the Commons 
– Bottlenecks
– Time value of Money

Engineering
– Feedback loops
– Redundancy
– Margin of Safety
– Tight coupling
– Breakpoints

Mathematics
– Bayes Theorem
– Power Law
– Law of large numbers
– Compounding
– Probability Theory
– Permutations
– Combinations
– Variability
– Standard Deviation and normal distribution
– Regression to the mean
– Inversion

Statistics
– Outliers and self fulfilling prophecy
– Correlation versus Causation
– Mean, Median, Mode
– Distribution

Chemistry
– Thermodynamics
– Kinetics
– Autocatalysis

Physics
– Newton’s Laws
– Momentum
– Quantum Mechanics
– Critical Mass
– Equilibrium

Biology
– Natural Selection

More Models:
– Asymmetric Information
– Occam’s Razor
– Deduction and Induction
– Basic Decision Making Process
– Scientific Method
– Process versus Outcome
– And then what?
– The Agency Problem
– 7 Deadly Sins
– Network Effect
– Gresham’s Law 
– The Red Queen Effect

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No, I never find garden design boring.  Never.  Ironic the Alice In Wonderland gardens are beautiful, not toxic, help heat/cool the home, improve property value, are less maintenance, and better for our health, and Earth's.  Here's the choice, Certificate of Occupancy garden or Alice In Wonderland garden?  

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If you've read this far, go you, I want to give you a treasured trinity of thinkers.  Farnum Street, Wendell Berry, Christopher Alexander. 

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Garden & Be Well,   XO T

Girlfriend Pride

When life fell apart, December 1999, I got the memo.  Every dime earned/invested, home, everything, toast.  Oh dear, cliche lived, 'wife is the last to know'.  Whatever.  Did the bible thing, yet 13 years later, still drinking, his car wrecks arrived.  This time, do whatever, leave.  After all I'd had a decade to sow my field.  As the Cherokee say, 'we reap in one decade what we sow in another.'
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Two months after receiving the memo, above, sinking, badly, I got my deer-in-headlight self to a meeting Lois hosted at a local church, focused on helping friends/family of alcoholics.
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A few meetings in, a woman walked thru the door, sat down, and I had instant girl crush.  That night she/I began.  A couple of years passed before I told her my instant girl crush.  She told me, walking into the room, she saw me & knew she had to know me, girl crush for her too.  A couple of years into the meetings a woman I hadn't met shared her story to the group, before she began, I knew, girl crush again, and that nite we started our friendship.  This 'girl crush' thing, about the best thing ever.
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For a decade these 2 women, local Atlantans too, have been my rocks, we share everything.  Mostly, laughter.  Their alcoholic spouses flamed faster than mine, and they divorced before me.  When I asked one how she 'knew' it was time to get her divorce, she paused slightly, and said, "You know the first time you fall in love and you ask someone how-do-you-know-you're-in-love, well, you will know."  Best answer, ever.  I quit obsessing my choices, actions, the bible, and trusted, you-will-know.
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All 3 of us worked hard, got ourselves out of the financial hole the alcoholic threw us in.  Each of us paid for our divorces, none of us got a dime of alimony, we paid bills owed by the alcoholic, yet there is something bigger we each did.  During divorce, each of us bought our own home.  Help from no one.  Family, nor whining in court for the alcoholic to pony up, for a dime.  Freeing the anchor & its chain, leaving them behind, our boats sailed, under our own steam.  No bitterness in this, instead, a rich journey.  I would marry my alcoholic again, just to get so many lessons learned, and having my girlfriends.  Hilarious story, yes?  G*d gave my wasband alcoholism to get me where I am, happy with my life.
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Something unexpected happened to each of us, after divorce, after buying our homes, without planning, something not imagined.  Who knew our stories would get better?  Within a year of each other, we moved from Atlanta.



First girl crush bought a home off the coast of Georgia on a barrier island.  Visited her last month for the first time.  Ironically, she mentioned having let G*d know she was ready to have a man in her life, to share the daily mundane of living.  G*d provided, her father bought a boat, and is now living at a pier near her.  G*d has a huge sense of humor.



My other girlfriend bought a home on the Gulf coast.



I live between my girlfriends, at a large lake, on a small historic farm.



Miss Gulf Coast called the other day, I was in the grocery store, we caught up a bit.  I have not been to her new home yet.  She bought the land, chose the blue prints, hired the general contractor, and built her home herself.  Have seen pics along the way.  Don't know when but I will be in her home before summer's end.



All pics from The Style Saloniste.

These women are my team, my family.  We did it.  Without trying.  It has been, always, one-day-at-a-time.  Everyday with laughter.  It's odd, in my new farm house, ca. 1900, it feels like living someone else's life.  Miss Barrier Island said the same thing.  We are floating.  Alas, 'father' is literally floating at the pier.  We didn't see that coming.  Beloved thinks he's the coolest man EVER.
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Jeff, at one of Lois's meetings, said, "I can't think myself into better actions, but I can take actions to make my life better."
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Garden & Be Well,  XO T
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Since it's tax day a bit of tax advice if you're married to an alcoholic flaming out.  Do not sign a joint return.  You will be liable for everything, past/present, if alcoholic walks away.  IRS can legally come after you, and will, for all their unpaid taxes and penalties.  When I got my memo I never signed another joint return.  Would not have been able to buy my home, and would have lost all my savings, again, if I had.
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Credit card experience immediately after the memo.  Blessedly I had no credit cards with my alcoholic spouse.  However, my name was on one of his maxed cards, but I was not an 'obligor'.  Saved money for a year to hire an attorney.  I had designed her garden years ago, and liked her demeanor.  It took months to get my name off the card.  She called monthly with updates.  My fear grew at the expense.  But I had to get off that card.  Finally, I was legally off.  If I had not done this, I could not have bought my home, debt on that card, entirely his, would have wiped me out.  Back to my attorney.  Told her, when she called of her winning news, to send the invoice.  Without hesitation she said, "I'm not charging you anything, this was a pleasure for me."  Then her story poured out.  When I designed her garden, she had just divorced her alcoholic spouse.  Much later, she remarried and moved out-of-state.  I designed that garden too.  Alas, last year, her beloved husband died.....
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Little did I know the sisterhood of help that would cleave to me, in great love, and joy, consistently arriving, consistently.
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When a girlfriend, a couple of years ago, had alcoholic spouse issues, I was able to offer her a home to live in, her own space, no charge.  She didn't take the offer, but it felt awesome to offer.  Years before this, I had a girlfriend offer me a home to live in, no rent.  I know what that offer feels like on the receiving end.
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Here I am, with Beloved, in our new home.  We've, mostly Beloved, been working the back acres, and finally this summer, I can begin my acre, nearest the house.  I can begin my acre, nearest the house.  I'm gardening.