The only thing predictable about New England weather is its ability to change. After a few lovely spring days, we are back to rain and wind. It’s a good time to catch up on indoor chores and goof off.

All my favorite items eventually get discontinued. The list gets longer as I age. The latest is Mrs. Meyer’s cleanser. I really do not want to go back to Comet or Ajax. My brand loyalty is rarely in question.

I seeded some sugar beets in the greenhouse. I’ve been planting them for several years. The actual beet root gets quite large. It’s suitable for livestock eventually. My pigs really enjoy them. I imagine cattle would be fans. I’ve eaten some while they are small but they are a little too sweet for my liking. I grow them for the greens which are great in smoothies or cooked with garlic over pasta. The greens from last year’s planting are still growing happily in the garden. In fact, they look better than the over-wintered collards, kale and spinach.

When Mike closed up shop after the sale of Heather Gardens he gave me some very large bales of peat moss. I had the bright idea to use it in the bottoms of seed trays. Not all my bright ideas work as I hope. It takes forever for the peat to absorb water. When placed in a bucket of water it literally floats above for days. Once it’s wet it holds moisture better than any other material.

Peat harvested from bogs is environmentally unsound. It releases carbon into the air when it is removed. I wonder how many eons it will take to replace what I’m using.

I wonder about so many things, like how many tries before a pair of sneakers hang above the road on an electric wire. Oh, and why do it?

I wonder why the forsythia are blooming later than a decade ago when I picked an arrangement for a loved one’s funeral mid-March? This goes with all the other oddities connected, I guess, to global warming.

Deer never used to eat my rhododendrons. Now I have a medium-sized one on the property that has a single leaf on a top branch just out of reach. The deer also sampled the helebores after polishing off the crocus flowers and newly emerging daylily leaves.

It’s difficult to maintain an acceptable amount of good humor.

Last fall I cut a bunch of Sweet Annie. A member of the artemesia family, it is sometimes called sweet wormwood. I’ve used it to make fall wreaths as it smells very nice. I hung the branch in the greenhouse meaning to get back to it. You know how that goes.

At any rate, I am now finding tiny seedlings of it in my other seeded trays. I wonder (still wondering) if I plant it alongside of wanted items if its smell could deter pests or critters? As if!

I stopped at the newly opened Gayle Gardens (the previous Heather Gardens). I purchased some four-inch pots of grape hyacinths and yellow Tet é de Tet é daffodils to spruce up an ornamental pot. They were so cheery and springy that I left them on the kitchen table for several days to lighten my mood.

I watched the collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore multiple times on the news stations. It doesn’t make a person very comfortable about driving.

The container ship that hit it had a load of a thousand containers. Those are enormous by themselves. I started thinking about what a consumer economy we have. Back to wondering for a moment. How many hundreds of container ships traverse the world daily? Much of the goods within the containers go to the big box stores, didn’t get produced here in American and end up in landfills after a season or two of use.

I live in the wrong century.