Day 11 - Transform

So George and I got to thinking about how somedays, when you're partaking of a 'blog everyday' activity, you get stuck. Some days, it's a wee bit of a stretch. To save ourselves, we've decided we'll put some firm measures in place to make it hopefully a little easier.

One such measure is calling on the list devised by RoseRed this week (who, I note, isn't actually participating in Blogtoberfest but who came up with the list in the spirit of supporting her friends). 

The other measure involves word games. Or rather, opening the Macquarie dictionary and picking a word. Today, this task fell to George's son Pirate Jim. And Kylie has decided to play. If you are doing Blogtoberfest and would like to play, another word will be suggested. Just stay tuned. 

So, to today's word. 

Transform.

I love the idea of transforming things. Taking yarn and turning it into a garment or something useful. Taking words and making a story. Raw ingredients are transformed into a meal. Seeds are transformed into plants. 

Pain and difficulty can be transformed into something positive, like life lessons. Julie wrote about life lessons recently in a way that resonated for me. 

Our physical environment can be transformed too. It takes time, but it can be done. And it can be evidence of other transformation. There's some wonderful evidence in our garden of this. 

We moved into our house in May 2006. Our back yard was a big, abandoned square of dead grass, with an ugly brick BBQ and two rather sad looking trees - an apricot and a plum. With a lot of time and effort, Sean and his dad have been nursing the trees back to health and this year, for the first time, the apricot tree looks like it's going to be productive.

How's that for transformation?

We've taken oak seeds and turned them into saplings which have survived almost a whole year in the pot. That those twigs started producing leaves this month has just blown us away.

And a shrub we can't identify, that was ready to be torn out of the ground, has been trimmed and watered for the last year and is now producing sprays of beautiful white blossoms. I wanted Sean to get rid of this shrub. I'm glad he didn't.

Our first six months in this house weren't happy. We were having a very hard time. Starting to work on the long abandoned garden was an act of faith that we would make things better. We started with planting some sunflower seeds in October of 2006, hoping that the 12 weeks it took for them to reach maturity would be a suitable marker of how far we'd come. 

Since then, every achievement in the garden is another such marker for us. When you're faced with the enormous task of transforming a dead garden to something living, and a suffering relationship into something happy and good, every little step matters. 

The fruit on the trees and the revived shrubs are all very, very good steps and I cherish every single one.

Bells