March-ing Into Memories

When I first realized that I had some big activities scheduled for every week-end during the month of March, I started to get anxious. March is an intense month of preparation for the extremely intense hours of operation that occur in April and May for all of us in the landscape industry. For the past eight years, since I've been working for Southern Land Company, my family has come to accept the fact that starting the first of April, they will see very little of me until about the second week of June. So March normally is my time to tend to family chores (get the gardens ready on the week-ends, sit on the back porch with hubby and whichever sons show up for the weekend, plan all end of school parties that will inevitably be suggested in the waning days of May), yet I found my self dodging tornadoes at Montgomery Bell State Park with friends from years past the first week-end of March,that included a Facebook flashback to fourteen years ago and a girlfriend weekend to Florida,
traipsing through the Hermitage and east Nashville the second weekend of March with my longtime friends from Chicago,
spending the day with high school friends from Macon, Georgia, the 3rd weekend of March,and last week-end was a whirlwind of activity (which included a trip to P. Allen Smith's Moss Mountain Garden Home!) in Little Rock, Arkansas with friends from those early days of married life.

(I have to give a big thank-you to Caroline and Alvin Laser for rescuing me from a long wait on standby at the airport and giving me a ride back to Nashville. What an entertaining 6 hour drive you both made that trip to be!)
The month was full, the garden has yet to be weeded, the family is already feeling a good bit neglected, but I have to look back and see how deeply rich my life has been - transplanted throughout the years into rich fields of friendship around the country, watered with loving guidance of wise mentors, producing blooming relationships that last through the decades. My life is a garden of memories that has had the refreshing rain of renewal fall upon it.