This time of year I have a bad habit of buying annuals. The more colorful, the better. Maybe it is a biological compensation for the especially gray summer we are having, but I can't go near a nursery or store without carrying out a carton full of color — My name is Donna, and I am a pony-pak-aholic.

A friend and I went to a nursery in Issaquah last week. I came home with five potted begonias and two hanging fuschias, white and pink petunias, three different kinds of lettuce and two peppers. Then I needed something from Home Depot: I didn’t find it, but filled the back seat of my car with sunset-colored dahlias, coral bacopa, deep purple heliotrope, and two ground covers. Don’t even get me started on the Sunday farmer’s market: cucumbers, a Japanese eggplant, two more dahlias and three peppers.

Pretty soon the backyard was crowded with my collection. The trouble is, I have a fairly small and fully planted yard, and I wasn't exactly sure where to put them all. I had a vague idea to underplant the perennials, but the tomatoes were going to need a lot more room and sun than that.

I spotted a bed near the dogwood that was overgrown with parsley and mint. It is always hard to start the clearing – I feel a little sorry for the plants that are there. But once I start it becomes easy — there is something deeply satisfying in the tug and the pull; loosening the roots; turning over the soil. Before too long I had cleared the whole bed. I planted lettuce and marigolds and two different tomatoes in the space I’d cleared.

So I met this guy last summer. It happened, as they say it does, when I was least expecting it. He runs an ecotourism company and I hired him to ferry a group of people to a nearby island when the pre-made plans fell through. I am not exactly sure when it happened, but on the way back to town, threading our way through the kelp and the logs, I realized I was having a hard time looking at him for all the voltage running between us.

After dinner we went for a walk. He took my arm and steered us to the end of the dock where we sat for a long time talking. We kissed, tentatively at first and then for real. On the way back to the cabin he stopped to pick us huckleberries in the moonlight. The next day during breakfast a group of orcas swam by the entrance to town, rare for them to be so close in.

We continued through the rest of the summer, working around his busy season and my fledgling career change.  He came to meet me in Desolation Sound, where he met my closest friends and fit right in. He helped make the ice cream and did the dishes and after dinner he told great stories. We went swimming and he got out first and stood on the dock just watching me. I swam over to him and he dropped to his knees and we kissed in the sun, bedazzled. He called when he got home and left a message saying what a great time he’d had, how glad he was to have spent that time with me.

Then in September the phone calls slowed, and he didn’t make it down for my birthday.  Soon after he called to say he’d reconnected with an old girlfriend; she’d actually visited him that weekend. How long have you been talking with her? I asked. Since June, he said, which was just before we met.

You have to clear the energy, a friend says. So long as you are holding on to him, no one new can come in. That means getting rid of everything that reminds you of him. I know, I know. I took down the picture. I gave away his hat. But hearing his voice again makes me remember what it felt like to be held like that again, waking up to someone beside me.

To tell you the truth, I really thought he would call. I thought they would get back together and he would remember why they broke up in the first place and eventually, he would call. Or, of course, they would get married and I’d never hear from him again. Deep down inside, I was banking on Door Number One.

When you really let go it will feel like you are falling, she said. It will feel like there is nothing. The truth is you have to go through that to get to the other side. You have to trust. 

I turned next to the south-facing fence where the chamomile and calendula had run riot, and the sweet pea trellis had fallen down. I took down the old trellis and hung a new one. I cleared the weeds from under the roses. I left some poppies for the bees. I planted the rest of the tomatoes, the brussel sprout plants I’d found at Fred Meyer, and a packet of sweet peas I’d forgotten in May. It took me till dark but I got them all in the ground.