Today I left my office around 12:30 to run out quickly and drop something off at my older kids’ school, plus grab a fast sandwich for lunch.

As I headed down Sutherland Avenue in the Bearden area of Knoxville, I saw a hearse slowly leading a funeral procession of other cars – all with white flags, and all with their headlights turned on – coming up the street toward me from the opposite direction.

Without giving it a second thought, I immediately signaled and pulled to the side of the street, stopping my car as a sign of respect, and intending to remain in place until the somber parade had completely passed by.

It never occurred to me that anyone else would do otherwise. This was a city street – not the interstate – and only moderately busy at midday. Nobody was put at safety risk by cars pulling to the side of the street temporarily. Plus, this is just what people do, or so I thought.

However, while one or two other drivers in the block just ahead of me also pulled over as the mourners rolled past, many other cars aggressively sped around those of us who were stopped, trying to get past. Several drivers even glared angrily at me as they swerved by.

And worst of all, the cars behind my own STARTED HONKING AT ME TO GET OUT OF THE WAY. I couldn’t believe if.

This was all happening while the slow line of grieving family
and friends following the hearse attempted to remain together at the same measured pace while traveling up the street in the opposite direction.

To my utter shock, some of the cars swerving to get around me and the few other stopped cars on my side of the street actually forced the funeral cars to pull to their side, and to stop momentarily to get out of the way! My mouth was literally hanging open at this point.

And the honking from behind had me so rattled by that point that I was just about to cave in and start moving again – despite how much I didn’t want to do that – when the last car in the funeral procession went past. So I started back on my way, really shaken by how some other drivers – at least 15 of them – had behaved during the brief time I was stopped to show respect for this dead person and his or her family.

So am I just an old fashioned outlier on this tradition? Does no one stop for funeral processions anymore? Is it possible that this custom is so out of fashion that other drivers actually didn’t realize why those few other cars ahead of me – plus mine – were stopped on the side of Sutherland at midday?

And what about you? Do you pull over or no? Why or why not?

Whatever other people are doing, I will continue to pull my car over whenever possible anytime I encounter a funeral procession. I consider it simple good manners.
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UPDATE: in reading y’all’s comments, I am being educated that this custom is a regional one, which I truly did not realize. So if you are from a part of the country where no one pulls over, my apologies for unintentionally insulting your own customary manners, which are certainly exemplary, even if you are a yank

Having said that, there’s a big difference between simply not stopping as opposed to honking or forcing mourners to pull over. The former may be a (fading) regional custom, but the latter behaviors are just rude, no matter what zip code you live in.

My 2 cents …

G loves the little garden tools that my mom brought C for her 5th birthday. And check out the progress of our anti-lawn garden expansion.

Am I getting excited about heading up to NYC for BlogHer 2012 on Thursday morning, when my flight leaves at the crack o’ dawn?

Why yes, yes I am.

And this is one of the reasons why.

Thanks SO much to the supercool women behind SocialLuxe for inviting me to be part of the crew presenting this year’s BlogLuxe Awards. Can’t wait!

It’s birthday party say for Miss C, who is turning 5, and BOY is she excited!

The bouncy house rental guys should soon be delivering and setting up, and C says she wants Leo to wear a big pink bow for the afternoon, in homage to her chosen party theme (second year in a row) of “princesses & fairies.”

He’ll love that

Now let’s just hope the mud in the yard dries out a bit before party guests arrive around 3… I have faith that the sun will do its job.

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UPDATE: NC just arrived a few hours early for C’s party. In inimitable NC style, she appears to be rockin’ some dramatic blue eyeshadow, and she brought along a “plus one,” her new pet hermit crab, “Bubbles,” whom she totes around in a hot pink crab cage.

It’s late Saturday night, and I honestly cannot recall the last time I worked this hard – physically hard – for 24 hours straight, and as a result, I am TOAST.

I am exhausted and sore all over, as well as pretty banged up from hardcore digging and hauling. I’ve got new callouses on my hands, a giant bruise on my forearm, and sunburn on my neck and shoulders. But I also feel really great about how much I got done to kick this project off. While the finished garden will take several years to be planted and to mature, and I have lots of finish work to do on pathways, a brick area for sitting, etc over the fall and winter ahead, the basic bones of my new garden have now been put in place. It won’t look like much to anyone else for some time, but I’m tickled.

One of the hardest parts of getting things started was to turn the sun-fried, weedy clay in the areas where I wanted to add the first plants to this new garden into the kind of aerated, draining, heathy dirt that will actually grow stuff. So using my trusty titanium, serrated hand trowel, I used a modified “double-digging” method to prep the soil by hand. Once I had it broken up pretty well, I added sand and this stuff called “clay breaker” that’s made of mulch n gypsum, and I then hand mixed and tossed til the dirt was (I think) ready for plants. ( As you might imagine, THAT’s where my new callouses came from! )

I also hauled wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of large rocks to the front yard, and then with my neighbor S’s good eye, laid out the bones of my pathways.

I had to flood the path routes with the garden hose to get these big stepping stones to settle in the ground, which made an enormous amount of really muddy mud – the good, old fashioned kind that’s perfect for mudpies and sloshing around in bare feet.

And that’s exactly what the two littles did all evening while I put stones in place – they went nuts having fun in major mud. I will admit that at a certain point I was so incredibly filthy myself that I joined in too, and the girls and I had a blast going wild in the mess. I made them both strip down and let me hose them off from stem to stern before they came back in the house for the night.

Here’s G just before she went full-on mudhog tonight. She was already pretty filthy, as you can see, but trust me, this was nothing!

And speaking of mud, if you can see past all the mud in these photos, you can now kinda, sorta see the beginnings of the actual garden starting to take shape. It will be months before I have all the hardscaping complete, and another full year at least before I have it fully planted. And then, of course, as with any perennial garden, it will take several more seasons to fill in and mature. But as I read somewhere recently, even the most wonderful gardens in the world once began as nothing more than an idea and a patch of bare dirt.

I am happy to say that my modest little garden is now, after the last 24 hours of work, at least a little bit further along than that.

So squint if you have to to look beyond the mud and the spare plantings so far, and maybe you will be able to see what I see here… The bones of a garden-in-progress.

One of the first areas of the new garden where I’ve actually added a few plants is here in the corner, behind the little bench that belonged to Henry when he was a toddler. I have some still in pots that I will put in the ground when I get time, but I like mixing the containers with plants in the ground.

In this photo, the tall plant in the middle there is yarrow., and then the little red clay pot has purslane in it. I’m not sure if you can see it, but in the left corner is a small Chapel Hill lantana, and the deep red flowers in the green pot are Wisconsin Red dahlias. There’s also a young pink penta in the photo, along with several good old pink zinnias.

Here’s a better look at the dahlias, which I love.

This is butterfly weed. I have two of them in this first group of plantings.

This is “blue bomb speedwell.”

And this is Russian sage “Little Spire.”

Have now come inside house to collapse for a while. It is HAWT out there! But check out the progress so far today….

Those rocks are HEAVY to transport from the backyard, up our slanted driveway, and into position in the new front yard garden. I’m also having to soak and dig out the spot where they are going to become the new stepping stones.

Exhausting! (But satisfying)

C is my rock selection and placement consultant. She and I ran into a small snake under one of the rocks we selected to move from back to front. He was most displeased to have his home plucked up and removed today.

Below you see my progress installing what will be central focal point of the new garden until the day in the future when I can design and install a little pond in that same spot.

The plants for that central area are Butterfly Weed, Pentas and Blanket Flowers. Next spring I’ll add clematis to climb up that pointy metal garden spire, which back in June, I rescued from the creek behind our house, where someone had inexplicably thrown it.

So remember how we lost all the grass in our front yard a couple of weeks ago, leaving us with nothing but bare dirt and a few wisps of hay like used-to-be-a-lawn?

Well, despite a momentary glimmer of hope when a couple of stalks of new grass appeared to be emerging, the effort & $$ we put into trying to reseed following the great lawn disaster of 2012 appears to be going nowhere. We have a few areas of fine, downy green fuzz, but mostly, nada.

I’ve been a bit bummed out about how heinous the whole space looks because after all the time and work I’ve put into making the surrounding garden beds pretty throughout the spring and summer, it’s letdown for sure to see my flowers and herbs and veggies now set against a swath of ugly dirt at just the time of year they’re taking off.

Our small front yard is not only our public foyer – as is the case for many urban Victorian houses – but it’s also the only outdoor space available to our kids at this point in our ongoing renovation. Our backyard is a mess still. Getting it overhauled is just not a high priority. We did fence it when we bought the house, but it’s basically owned by our two dogs for now, and while it has huge potential, it’s a rocky, weedy mess now.

Also, for some reason our backyard has multiple semi-buried piles of very old detritus, apparently left behind around the time our house was built in 1910 – bits of metal and glass, old nails and even shards of fine china. Since we moved in 6 years ago, Jon has hauled away TRUCKLOADS of this weird vintage junk from the backyard, yet he finds more regularly.

This is how our backyard looks at this point in time. The creek is about 25 feet behind the back fence.

So for all these reasons, the backyard is not yet usable by kids, leaving the small front yard as the only outdoor play space. And now that it’s a swath of dirt and fried grass, the kids don’t want to be out there, and when they are, they become filthy and track dirt everywhere indoors.

After reading up on growing new lawns, I realized that: A – we were likely going to have to shell out the money for actual sod carpet squares to put down over the whole thing to repair the danag, and B – mid-summer is not the smartest time to do that. So I resigned myself to hating what the front of our house looks like ’til next spring.

But then, an aha moment as I was perusing a gardening magazine, where I saw a story on people who had converted their front yards – mostly small, urban yards like ours – from traditional lawn with garden beds around the edges into full-on gardens of various types. The article showcased front yards converted to veggie patches, front yards transformed into formal English knot gardens, front yards morphed into stylishly overstuffed cottage gardens – you name it.

Suddenly, I knew what I wanted to do… And patient man that he is, Jon was cool with me taking a crack at making it happen, especially if it ends up meaning less mowing for him.

So each evening when I’ve gotten home from work, I’ve carefully surveyed our front yard from various angles, and I made a list of what I wanted out of a front yard garden.

My wish list:

- Eclectic, with a cottage garden feel, but with a little more structure & open space than many small front yard cottage garden designs I see.

- Navigable and not so overstuffed with plants that we can’t move around among the plants.

- Builds on the flower beds I’ve already worked so hard on, including my raised beds.

- Have natural stone pathways running through it.

- Make sure there’s still room for the kids to play, and for them to enjoy it as more of an outdoor, fairy-inhabited playroom rather than a “don’t touch!” garden

-Include little “mini spaces” in the garden for sitting.

- Built around mostly easy care perennials that will give 3 seasons of color

Since deciding that the yard will be converted into a real garden instead of being a lawn with a garden, I’ve been clipping photos out of magazines and online, and I’ve sketched out shapes and dimensions on a notepad. I also got input on design from my neighbor S., who is both a keen gardener as well as an architect.

She reminded me not to be impatient because even with my tiny space, the type of garden I envision will be a work in progress for at least several years as I’m able to add elements that I want in the seasons appropriate for adding them. She also suggested starting with only half the yard, and dividing it into quadrants via the stepping stone pathways, and planning for an eventual central focal point, which we decided will likely be a very small pond when I think the time is right to add that. So even though I can’t have the water feature in the center of the garden now, the design will allow that to be added easily later.

I’m excited about this plan!

Obviously, late July is not the best time to plant, well, almost anything. However, on the upside of getting started now, many of the perennials I love the most are majorly on sale now because it’s late in the season. So I decided to start with some bargain basement foundation plants that can happily go into the new garden now, even if they won’t fully hit their stride ’til next year, and then add some easy annuals here and there to make the new garden look a little more “finished” for the last few months of this year. I definitely won’t be able to afford the time or money to fully plant the new garden this summer, but I can get the shape started, and add some things now, and more next year.

So tonight I assembled the plants I’ve bought each evening this week in my late night garden center discount shopping trips, and I dug in.

I will share photos as I slowly make progress on this rather large project, and here are the first baby steps. Remember that it’s all going to look messy, dirty and unfinished for a while as I am in the thick of it. The way it looks as I work isn’t at all the way it will all look when I’m finished

But with that said…

Here are some of the plants I’m putting in in phase one, all lined up on the edge of what’s now a dead lawn but what will soon be my eclectic front yard garden.

Here’s a wider view of the side of the yard to be overhauled. Gotta love that dirt and dead grass.

First stepping stone of pathway in place. All the rocks I will use are ones I am hauling one at a time from our backyard to the front. At one time, someone must have had a real garden back there because under all the weeds and ivy are remnants of stone walls and pathways, so there’s excellent foraging for me to use in my new front garden project.

More progress Saturday morning…

I think my latest bit o’ garden flair looks like a giant soap bubble floating over the plants.

And who doesn’t like bubbles?