{"id":38267,"date":"2023-04-15T00:01:43","date_gmt":"2023-04-15T07:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=38267"},"modified":"2026-06-06T05:49:48","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T05:49:48","slug":"my-years-are-numbered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/my-years-are-numbered\/","title":{"rendered":"My Years Are Numbered. Give Me Those Blossoms — Now"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"my<\/a>
The front yard garden has been torn out and replaced with a new stone walkway. I need some plants for it, and I need them now; my years are numbered.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The four-inch lavender plants? Or the gallon size?\u00a0My gardener wanted to know.<\/p>\n

The four-inchers are a lot cheaper, she said. But they’re small.\u00a0“They won’t look like much for a while.”<\/p>\n

I don’t have a while.<\/p>\n

“Get the gallon size,” I said. “I don’t want to wait.”<\/p>\n

How much time do I have, really, to wait around for a scrawny lavender plant to grow to full size? For azaleas to bloom?<\/p>\n

How much time do I have for anything?<\/p>\n

Not as much as I thought.<\/p>\n

Before Jon died two years ago, I figured I was immortal. Well, not immortal exactly — but a person with another twenty living, breathing years left to me on this planet. My grandmother had lived to a month short of her hundredth birthday, and I long ago determined that I would do the same.<\/p>\n

\"my<\/a>
Shoots of lavender\u00a0 from an earlier iteration of our front yard garden, back when I had more time to wait around for a four-inch plant to grow to maturity.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With all those imaginary — illusory? — years between me and extinction, I felt immortal. Most of us humans, if death is not right there in front of us, can wrap ourselves in cozy denial and pretend the inevitable is not going to happen, to us.<\/p>\n

That’s what I’d been doing. Until someone died on me — my fellow traveler in life, a man<\/a> born the same year I was, with pretty much the same life expectancy, a fit man who took his vitamins and worked up a sweat regularly on that recumbent bike over at the gym.<\/p>\n

My Years Are Numbered<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Maybe I’m not immortal after all, I’ve had to conclude these past two years. No, not maybe. For sure. For sure my years are numbered.<\/p>\n

Facts are facts, and it turns out that I don’t necessarily have a lot of future ahead of me. Will I have one year, two years, five years, twenty? There are no guarantees for the likes of mortal me and mortal you. I am not my brother-in-law’s 1988 Toyota Celica, which made it to a Methuselan 500,000-plus miles, even if I go to the trouble to get all the oil changes.<\/p>\n

So, I’m thinking I’ll go for the biggest, fattest lavenders and the lushest azaleas on the market. I’ll pay the money. The gardener will get them into the ground. I’ll watch them bloom this summer. Next spring at the latest.<\/p>\n

There’s no time to lose.<\/p>\n

\"my<\/a>
These azaleas will go into the side yard. I’ll be ordering more like them for the front yard. The online nursery gave me a choice: A one-gallon plant for $22, a two-gallon for $37, a three-gallon for $47. I paid the $47. Who knows, I might be at the point where I’ve got more money than time. Left to right: Encore<\/a> Autumn Princess, Encore Autumn Lilac. Photos by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"lavender-stalk<\/a><\/p>\n

My years are numbered. Who knows, I might be at the point where I’ve got more money than time. Give me the plant that’s ready to bloom — now.\u00a0 Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49048,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,14],"tags":[103,2691,187,34,472,2288,2692,82],"class_list":["post-38267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a-case-of-the-human-condition","category-widowed","tag-aging","tag-azaleas","tag-death","tag-dont-miss","tag-garden","tag-landscaping","tag-lavender","tag-on-the-funny-side"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38267"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49052,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38267\/revisions\/49052"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}