tiff ✦ on the creek blog

Friday, October 14, 2022

2023 Seed Purchases

My seed purchases for the 2023 gardening season!

It might be a little early to talk about the 2023 gardening season (especially since I still need to clear garden beds from the 2022 season!), but here I am.

I got an email this morning from my friends at Burpee & all of their seeds are currently buy one get one free! I couldn't pass that up, so I loaded my cart with everything!

I'd like to do a huge garden next year. I want to try all the varieties of everything!

I'm currently really into small-space gardening, so I got a lot of plants that can be grown in containers.

My current favorite pastime is watching gardening videos on YouTube. There are so many great ideas!

Here's what I bought during the Burpee sale:

Thursday, September 08, 2022

15 Years

Tiff anniversary , family 0 Comments

Our 15th wedding anniversary.

Today was our 15th wedding anniversary.

We were one of those cutesy couples who got married on 09.08.07.

I spent the day keeping myself busy, so I wouldn't have to think about our anniversary so much. Of course, it didn't work.

I can't help but wonder where we would be if James was still here.

Our "honeymoon" was an overnight trip to a small town in Maryland & we always talked about going back there. I wonder if this would have been the year. I remember we ate at this beautiful Italian restaurant in town.

Instead, I spent the day hiding from the fact that my life would never be the same. That the marriage & life James & I worked to build is gone.

Wednesday, September 07, 2022

Love What Matters

Tiff cancer , grief 0 Comments

Details on our story that was published on Love What Matters.

I was surprised to receive a DM last week from Amanda at Love What Matters, inviting me to share our story.

Writing it all down again brought a lot of emotions back up. It's weird because I write about James & our journey all the time. I've become desensitized to a lot of what happened. I was surprised when the article contained a trigger warning. Maybe I'm still not far away from everything enough to see how terrible it was.

It will forever be one of those things I can't believe we went through. I can't believe how we all stayed calm through it all.

Until the night of the ER visit, I had only broken down once. Even when things looked terrible, there was always some glimmer of hope. We lived in a fantasyland where every red flag was ignored because there was yet another treatment. Though the diagnosis became terminal, options were still explored to prolong James's life.

Sometimes, all the medical interventions can't change the outcome.

There was so much more I could have written in the article. The amount of trauma packed into those 7 months is beyond measure. I never wanted to be someone who went through something traumatic.