The Front Yard Irises

See what I mean?  In real life, that nandina is a crazy dark beautiful red, but you can’t really tell from the picture.

Hot Bee on B. action

At a less-classy blog than this joint, the title of this post would be a euphamism for masturbation.

Lucky for you, I’m just coming in to report that, while I was waiting for Rachel, I was lounging in the hammock and a bee landed on my toe.  Yes, my first instinct was to scream and shake my foot, but then… I might get stung.

So, I sat there, still as I could, while the bee just hung out on my foot and, after a while, it flew off.

I wish I’d had the camera.

Neither Here Nor There

It’s hard for me to talk about class.  I grew up on small Midwestern towns  and I felt solidly middle class.  My best friend for a while was the mayor’s daughter.  I ran around with the police chief’s son in another town.  (But I also ran with kids that “everyone” repeatedly told me were trash.)  My dad was a minister and my mom taught school.  That seemed middle class to me.  There were many years when my mom didn’t have a teaching contract, so she subbed.  And, in retrospect, it seems obvious that my mom needed to work for us to have enough money to get by.  And many months, especially when I was little, where we ate corn bread for dinner at the end of the month because it was cheap and we kids believed it was an amazing treat.

And then I went to college and learned what middle class really was.

And then I got a job and got a raise that put my salary above my Dad’s.

It’s a weird moment when you’re 28 and you’re struggling to pay rent and you’re eating rice for dinner every night and you realize that you make more than your dad did when you were in high school.  There’s not really any preparation for that.

But my point is that, growing up in small towns, there were class issues.  But the distance between classes was very small (even if it was, in many cases, insurmountable).  And all the differences we thought were so clear and universal didn’t mean shit when you went to a place that was 100,000 people, not 2,500.  So, I thought I was solidly middle class, but I had two pairs of shoes at any given time–every day shoes and church shoes, even in college.  And my prom dresses were either borrowed or home-made.  And I only went to one formal at college because I certainly didn’t have clothes to wear to it.

I was lucky I came up during the grunge era, because a girl could get away with two pairs of jeans and seven t-shirts and two flannels and no one thought anything about it.

I don’t know if any of this gets to what I’m trying to say.  Probably it doesn’t.

What I’m trying to mull over is just how a girl such as myself gets, in the same day, called an elitist and gets used as a local-color prop.  It both seems weird to me and exactly right.

Sunday Gardening Update

God, it feels like ages since we’ve had a good gardening update, doesn’t it?

Anyway, the garden is completely in.  The peppers transplanted just fine, but the tomatoes are moping around.  Though, I have noticed that tomatoes seem to like to mope around every time there’s a minor change.

NM has her tomatoes and she kindly pretended like she hadn’t left them in the care of the world’s worst gardener and this afternoon Rachel is coming over and I am going to load her up with everything else I have left.

Hurray!

Now all I need to do is acquire some hose.  Though, I have to admit that, while I was laying in the hammock yesterday, I had a brief plan to kidnap W. and make him come over and design a contraption that would suck water out of the creek while there’s still water in it and then somehow collect rainwater for storage for when the creek goes dry.

And don’t get me wrong.  I believe W. could make me such a contraption.  But I worry that it would cost me 5 times as much as what just buying a lot of hose would.

Anyway, what’s going on in y’all’s gardens?

Poor Dog

It’s been the kind of weekend where, when the dog is standing there on the sidewalk seemingly undecided about whether to come in or go pee or maybe just lay down and die, you ask yourself–“Is it possible the dog is hung over?”

Poor Mrs. Wigglebottom, she could not look any more pitiful.  Her eyes are kind of droopy and her tail hangs down in the most pathetic way and she is not that excited about raising her head too high.  And standing in the sunlight seems to leave her dazed.  Even now, she doesn’t want to come up on the couch.  Which is weird behavior indeed for her.

You can see why I wondered.

But then the hacking cough started.

Dear readers, I think the dog has a spring cold.

I want to tell you about her exciting day, yesterday, but I wasn’t here for the end of it, so I don’t know if it ended in tragedy or not.  But when I left, she had spent the whole afternoon…

Oh my god.  I can’t believe I’m about to write this.  I’m afraid to write it for fear that something happened after I left.

So, what I’m about to tell you, let’s take with a huge grain of salt.  Maybe things went horribly wrong after I left and since the Butcher is still gone from his out all night plans I haven’t been able to hear.  Maybe she’s moping around because she’s a mass murderer.

Caveat, caveat, caveat.

But by the time I left to go to Kat’s thing, Mrs. Wigglebottom had spent the whole afternoon HANGING OUT WITH OTHER DOGS!!!!!!! in the back yard.

And it was fine.  After a while, even, she got bored and spent about a half an hour trying to con someone, anyone, into taking her on a car ride.  Then she seemed to want to go in, but she didn’t want to be alone in the house.  But it was fine.

I don’t know if this is because these are the same dogs that always come over and we’ve always just made Mrs. Wigglebottom stay in the house, so she already knew their smell or what, but it was nice, and I hope it stayed that way after I left.

And I don’t know where the camera went or I’d post you a picture, because we went out yesterday to discover that the front yard irises have bloomed.  And they are amazing.  The bottom parts are dark purple and the top parts are lighter, with this yellow splash in the middle and the nandina, which I think I remember I told you decided not to die, is this fiery red behind them and it’s like…

I mean, let’s be honest.  I’m not that great a photographer and our camera is not that great.  But if it catches even one quarter of how beautiful that corner of the front yard is, I cannot wait to show you.

The thing that just kills me about it is that every time I go out in my yard and see something new, I feel like these people who lived here before me left me another present.  I mean, not me in particular.  That would be nice, in its own way.  But it makes me feel so warmly towards them that they left this beauty for anyone who came after them.  They or their nephew I guess, who didn’t just dig everything up in order to “clean” the house up for sale.  Anyway, that family.

That that family would have that small and hardy hope that, if they left this stuff, someone might appreciate it just makes me feel so good towards them.

And that it’s me who gets to benefit from it?

I feel very, very fortunate.

I think that’s the thing about a beautiful flower, when you see it where it grows.  You can’t help but feel lucky that fate has brought you to the right place at just the right time to see it.