July 31.19

Saturday I fell. It was a lovely, slow-motion Swan-Lake-type gardener’s fall, complete with watering can, with a perfect three-point landing: one knee and two hands. Except one hand was clutching a rather full and therefore heavy watering can. My knee landed on the sidewalk, where I left a bit of my DNA.  My hands landed in the soft dirt of the garden, so that was lucky. It was the weight of the watering can that caused mischief.

It couldn’t have happened in the back yard where only the rabbit would have pointed and laughed. Nope. The front yard. I regained my composure best I could and took inventory of my person. All told, very little damage. You know, of course, that the effects were felt later. Not bad, though. Just enough to advise me not to do that again.

Then Monday the refrigerator came. Late. There were moderate problems. The delivery guys were great. So far I can’t get the drawers to work right. There is mysterious goo seeping out of a hinge.

The painters, long delayed because of our soggy spring and sorry summer, started yesterday on the exterior trim and discovered wood rot so bad that I had to call a contractor. I await his return call.

Meanwhile, the daily goes on.  Do we want to know how much time we spend on hold? Is there any way to exact revenge for those recordings? And I’m sneezing my head off. (No loss, you say?) Old age brings allergies?

So when this guy cast his red eye on me and announced himself as the bluebird of happiness I wasn’t buying it. I did, however, hand him a menu featuring hassenpfeffer.

 

July 28.19

A tidy pile of four

arranged in order of size

morphs into a Babel

right before my eyes.

How do such things happen?

Is it among books’ habits

to grow all willy-nilly

and reproduce like rabbits?

 

 

July 25.19

On the outside looking in,

dangled and precarious,

living lives inside

fleetingly vicarious,

plying restless squeegee,

removing layered goo,

so those looking out

have clarified world view —

what compels the doing

only to be done again?

I think they must be writers

nothing else explains this zen.

 

 

More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.

 

 

 

July 22.19

ELEGY IN A KITCHEN GARDEN

My poor beautiful tomato plant,

victim of its own vitality

lies helpless, hapless,

like my old Christmas tree.

Don’t tell me what I should do

or shouldn’t.

Doing isn’t feeling.

I tried but couldn’t,

and that is everything.

 

 

If you are a gardener, dear reader, you know that lessons grow in the garden, some of them dismal. Yesterday a rambunctious wind announced the coming of today’s blessed, cooling rain. I tried desperately to right my gorgeous Beefsteak, but my two hands and two feet were not enough. And the thunder growled.  It was with real sadness I had to abandon the rescue. If you are a gardener, you understand the feeling. It isn’t about what to DO.

July 21.19: Postcards from Emmy

Ice cream as accessory

might not occur to you or me,

but Emmy says in cone or float

it’s absolutely couture haute.

 

Happy National Ice Cream Day, dear reader!

With thanks to the anonymous photographer

and, of course, to Emmy.

 

July 20.19

How long, dear reader, since you shopped for a major appliance? Say a refrigerator? For me, it’s been a long time and my memories were shaped by the days when one went to an appliance store where one could inspect the actual appliance. If purchased on the occasion of a firstborn’s christening, it would last until that firstborn left for college.

I was, therefore, ill-prepared for my recent search for a new refrigerator. I didn’t want frills. I just wanted to avoid ptomaine. Ice would be nice. Actually, anything frozen would be nice. (The freezer went defunct a while back.)

Today one goes to the Internet and to various “big box” stores, where one might find someone with answers to questions. The sales people — when found — are very nice and consult temperamental computers. (I can do that at home.)

Online, one opens a virtual appliance, and reads things called “reviews.” There is no want of opinions on the Internet. I was awash in them. It took about three zillion of them but I eventually discovered patterns: short-time owners ecstatic; long-time (three years) owners despondent. One adjusts one’s expectations.

The refrigerator gasping its last in my kitchen is a 20-year-old Amana. I make frequent runs to the grocery store to buy bags of ice to keep its insides cold, and it is giving its all to keep going until the new one arrives at the end of the month.

Now you know why we’re having this heat wave.

July 19.19

The dragonfly scratched

his diminutive cranium,

accustomed to suburb’s

petunia, geranium.

I was so close

I overheard:

“What is this?”

his exact word.

 

July 17.19

Nemesis: Goddess of Divine Retribution

Vengefulness her main attribution.

My wicked ways put me on the hook

for a plague of ears with a “who, me?” look?

 

July 13.19

Two dazzling things happened yesterday, dear reader!

As you know (or not), I’ve been in the throes of downsizing. I moved into this smaller house about a year and a half ago, and that makes this my second gardening season here. If you are a gardener, you know that you have to earn ownership of a garden; it doesn’t just happen. Nor does it “just happen” that a house becomes home. For me, it’s all a work in progress: this isn’t home yet either inside or out.

However, there were these two heart-stoppers yesterday:

I caught a glimpse of new color deep in a tomato plant. I was down on the ground as fast as my creaking knees would allow and, yes, there it was: the first red tomato! MY tomato! If you have read my blog in the past, you know that until recently my main claim to gardening fame was in consistent tomato-killing. I grew them in memory of my Grandpa Mauck but without much hope of eating actual tomatoes.

(Last year was The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, if you recall. The tomatoes had their revenge.)

And tuxedos in the dill! In my last house I had a magnificent dill patch and these very formal, elegant caterpillars feasted royally thereon. Swallowtails bobbed their thanks over what was left. This year the blasted rabbits ate to the ground every single dill plant I tried to grow, so I planted dill in a pot on the deck. Now come the beautiful caterpillars. Can swallowtails be far behind?

I dance a rheumatic jig and think that maybe home will happen.

July 12.19

Wandering a nursery

as every gardener knows

risks a Chapter 11

a lien or a foreclose,

but I chloroformed my conscience

and did it anyway

wearing mental blinders

lest I seriously stray.

Then came the gardener’s gasp,

that lub-dub of the heart

and a whole new Scabiosa

leaped unbidden in my cart.

I’d never seen the like

of this particular

others that I’d grown

were less oracular.

With buds that look like berries,

florescing into pins,

whimsical and winsome

a gardener’s Mickey Finn,

it mesmerized my mettle

jellied my backbone;

it’s not my fault, of course,

that it followed me back home.