The last time we moved, a friend sent me an excerpt of a letter from Mr. Rogers to Amy Hollingsworth, a longtime friend who had moved to a new community (I think her husband was a pastor though I am having trouble tracking that detail down). He wrote,

Just as it takes a tree a long time to begin to grow again once it’s transplanted, so you can give your healthy roots time to find the nourishment of your new soil in your new community. (Quoted in The Simple Faith of Mr.Rogers, Amy Hollingsworth, p. 6)

We too are transplanting. Or being transplanted. Or however that works. Settling into the house, setting into the community… all that jazz. It is often hard to be patient with the process, even though we’ve done several of these big moves before and know (or should!) how it works. As the song from the Daniel Tiger movie about moving goes, It takes time, it takes time to make a new house feel like home.

One of the joys of where we’re living now, for me, is that we have a small back yard, and so I have been able to do some literal transplanting. I am very much brand-new to gardening, but I got eight plants in the ground this past week (2 ea. of foxglove, lupine, black-eyed susan, and English lavender). Here are some of them looking brave & perky:

We’ll see if they take — I am hopeful, though. So far so good. In our front there were already flowers waiting for us: some lovely hyacinths (they are done blooming now but I will dead-head them and see if that forces a second round), some tulips ready to open soon, and something else coming up that I haven’t yet identified. I can’t wait to see what’s there.I also have a new project on the hook:

This is the “Lotus Flower Blanket” from Hooked by Robin, and it is gorgeous. It will be a circular blanket, probably close to a meter in diameter once it’s finished, and uses a whopping kilometer of yarn!

I splurged with some gift money and bought the recommended Scheepjes Whirl yarn, which has an incredibly beautiful slow gradient — you can just see the pink lightening in this shot as it moves toward the edge. This is far and away the most intricate project I have ever done, with the most delicate (and most expensive) yarn I’ve ever used. So far so good.”So far so good” is about the status of our family transplant right now. We’ll get there. We’re getting there.