Weekly posts: a Productivity Pause

As my almost non-existent audience may have noticed, I’ve paused my daily blog project. Here are some possible reasons: Most aspects of my life have become exponentially more difficult, even though my immediate family is well, for the most part still employed in not-front-line occupations. First, remote work is, for me as a teaching-focused faculty member at a suddenly fully remote institution, very difficult. I’m not just doing my regular job: I’m doing a much more frustrating, more exhausting, and less satisfying job. Next, our regular childcare situation is of course not functioning. It is literally impossible to do the full time childcare and child rearing while doing the full time other job.

But the more important reason that I’ve paused my daily blogging is that I am in a processing phase. Posts I’ve written or started feel irrelevant in this moment, and it’s hard to know what feels relevant.

I’m processing a new reality, and I’m deliberately removing the daily post project from my to-do-list. I don’t want this project to be just one more thing I need to do. So I’ll be posting, but probably weekly. Maybe when I’m not trying to do too many things at once I’ll be able to do that more effectively and efficiently.

Because an unexpectedly high percentage of my posts have been about tulips, I’ll wrap this up with this: after a hard frost last night, the tulips were frozen and drooping. They thawed. The perked back up. They look a bit wilder, a bit burnt around the edges, a few petal bent back prematurely, but not less spectacular.

The Joy of Tulips

Tulips…whereas my abandoned tulips planted too late have not shown signs of life (yet!), I have been getting a lot more joy than usual from my tulips.

I always love to watch the tight green buds become so incredibly bright. I love the colors and the wild combinations, the way the light shines through the petals. I love watching the colors of each tulip change, the yellow petals with an almost undetectable red edge becomes a red streaked.

At a time when many joys are inaccessible, this accessible joy has expanded more than I would have expected to be possible.

Planting Bulbs

Planting bulbs is always an act of faith and optimism. Last fall, I was out there, in the chill, with a long winter ahead of me, sticking something in the ground to be frozen and thawed repeatedly. It seems so unlikely to work even without the threat of squirrels digging up tasty tulips for a snack. In the middle of my fall bulb planting, it started raining. The kids and I kept at it. The rain wasn’t too hard. Then the rain turned to hail, tiny pellets of ice. I figured I should take the kids in. And I never made it back to bulb planting. 

Photo from Mari Potter@maripotter on Unsplash.

Fast forward four months.

Last weekend, we took inventory. The tulips I planted last fall are just coming up. The squirrels did not get them. I have a fenced in yard without deer, and apparently the local woodchuck isn’t as interested in destroying my tulips as it is in destroying everything else I try to grow (including zinnias and marigolds! It even munched off some hot peppers last summer. Unless that was a spice loving rabbit). Success, of a kind, has already taken place.

My optimism is being rewarded. Some of the edges of the green leaves poking up are tinged with red. Are those the red tulips? Some are curled, others smooth. Even the ones planted in somewhat questionable areas seem to be doing well.

So I did something even more outrageously optimistic: I planted the rest of my bulbs. Not the shriveled up ones, but the ones with weight and in some cases a bit of a shoot coming up. 

It felt like the right thing to do, and even if none of them ever bloom, it was worth it.