Red Buds

The smallest things me extremely happy. 

Literally - the smallest things. No...not diamonds!  

I fell in love with a plant at the community garden called Pineapple Sage. There are many types of sage and they all thrive in our Northern California climate. They are drought tolerant and a really good choice for the garden. Supposedly, they are easy to grow...or hard to kill, as they say. 

Pineapple sage has beautiful bright green leaves that smell like pineapple. It's subtle when you're near it, intense when you touch the leaves. In the fall, they develop beautiful red flowers which usually attract hummingbirds. The plant looks great all year round. 

I've taken cuttings from someone else's plant several times to grow a plant of my own. Each time it first thrived and then died. I couldn't figure out what went wrong. Did I overwater it? Underwater it? Too much sun? Not enough? 

When we moved into our new house, I tried again. I planted a cutting in April in a very large plastic pot in a mostly-sunny spot. Again, it thrived and my little cutting was a lovely 2 foot tall hearty plant by July. By August, it was not looking so great and I tried moving it to a sunnier spot. It got worse. It got yellow leaves and looked kind of droopy. I was very sad. I was killing the un-killable plant. 

One day during the Kavanaugh hearings, I was pulling crabgrass and I realized my sage was trying to tell me "Mom, my shoes are too tight!". I was pretty sure it didn't like the plastic pot. It had outgrown it. So Greg helped me dig a hole in the ground and transplant it. He prepared me for the worst: this is risky, your sage might not make it. 

Six days later, I saw RED BUDS. 

This is a wonderful surprise!  Usually plants go into shock after you move them. Although Greg pointed out that the move may have shocked the sage into producing the red buds and the sage might still fail. I tempered my joy and I ran out 3 times a day to check, coo and admire it. 

Meanwhile, I also planted seeds indoors. I kept meaning to not spend $4 on vegetable starters at the nursery and to stagger the growth and not have all the veggies mature at the same time. That's when we eat the same vegetable every day for a month and then it's gone. 

I finally went to the dollar store, bought a thin foil cookie sheet and set it up at the sunniest spot in the house with a flat surface - on my desk by the big living room window. I planted spinach, lettuce, beets, chard and kohlrabi. In this little hot-house environment, the seeds sprouted in the first 2 days. 

It makes me insanely happy to see these little tiny vegetable plants growing on my desk. They are barely half an inch and I feel more pride and attachment than a normal person should. 

Full disclosure - I'm also very pleased that this endeavor cost me one dollar and that my brain found a solution to finding space. The six-packs are recycled, the seeds were free, the soil is from the garden. All I needed was a cheap tray to catch the excess water and to find a good surface in the sun. Don't ask me why it too me so long to figure out that I had room on my desk and yes, it's OK to grow vegetables next to my laptop and bills. Now it seems like it was the most obvious thing!  I would have put a plant on my desk. I just didn't think of it as a place to grow vegetables. Duh!

It was only in the past couple of weeks that I dug up the last of the summer garden. It was hard. I felt very destructive tearing out so many green things for which I felt such pride. The garden is an emotional rollercoaster. One day I'm ecstatic growing tomatoes and a few weeks later, I have to rip the vines out. 

But then (cliche coming...) one door closes and another opens. I see new red buds and forget the loss of rotting tomatoes. 

Decraphobia

I diagnosed myself in a doctor’s waiting room. I have decraphobia. 

Don’t worry - I’m OK.  This happened many years ago. I was waiting for my annual eye exam, leafing through Better Homes and Gardens in the waiting room. One of the writers was lamenting that she has had a fear of decorating - and she named it “decraphobia”. I immediately realized that I had it too!

The symptoms of decraphobia are:

-Fear of painting your wall any color other than off-white. 

-Buying neutral practical furniture and blah curtains to match because you’re afraid to buy the ones you really liked

-Buying something beautiful because it spoke to you (like a red and pink hand-embroidered Mexican poncho) and then getting home and being afraid to display it because it will look out-of-place.

One weekend you decide to overcome your fear and take one baby step:  you’ll paint a tiny space pale lavender and see what happens.  Next thing you know, you’re cringing at the awful purple walls - wait, maybe they’ll grow on me - uh no bit mistake - and now you’ve got the nasty chore of painting it off-white again. What’s worse than a boring off-white wall? Going back to an off-white wall. And another 10 years go by until you are brave enough to try another color in another dwelling. 

Having moved often in my adult life, it was easy to not decorate because why invest in a place when you know it’s temporary?  I also made enough mistakes buying something and hating it. I can’t really trust my own taste.  And what is my taste?  I recently took out every decorative item I have had packed in boxes and assembled them in one place and took a good look:  I have not been loyal to any style. I like too many things! And for those who say, your eclectic mix IS your style - trust me - this stuff really doesn’t work together. I am completely stuck!  I get it now!  Unlike my kids who fearlessly used fairy lights and friends' artwork to decorate their rooms much nicer than anything I ever did, I have no natural talent for this and I can’t afford an interior decorator. 

In other words, I’m going to have to find my own treatment and cure for my decraphobia. 

The journey has begun. 

I took the academic approach:  reading design how-to’s and subscribing to decorating blogs. I find Houzz and Pinterest too overwhelming and hardly use them. I went to the library and discovered The New Bohemians by Justina Blakeney which even comes with a workbook that I found useful. I’ve also gravitated to lessons on Hygge - the Danish way to make a home cozy. 

By coincidence, I started a new consulting gig recently where I have a big blank cubicle right when I had just made the big pile of all my decorative things. I followed the rules of Hygge and decorated the cubicle with a pretty rug, small lamps, fairy lights, a couple of ceramic bowls and baskets, a small sketch by my father, a few Indian fabrics and some green sprigs of rosemary and ivy in vases. And I added a coffee and cookies corner with cute little cups from Israel and a bag of freshly ground coffee. The result is very pleasing, a cozy homey little corner. You could almost forget it's an office cubicle. I did it!  

What I’ve learned is this:

-Find a style or two and be loyal to them. Craftsman and Bohemian are the most us.

-Go with things that speak to you, as long as they map to the style. 

-Have patience. It’s going to take years to curate and evolve your style. Don’t buy something just because you think you need it now. The right things will find you some day.

-Don’t wait 10 years to try another color of paint. 

-The Danish people got it right - you can’t go wrong with Hygge.  I really want to visit Denmark.

Decraphobia is treatable. It starts with awareness and learning, then building confidence. For me, decorating falls under “trying new things” - building a new skill that requires some rules and lots of creativity. I’m usually pretty good at that. I have hope!