Gardening with Mrs. Wigglebottom

I think gardening must be very confusing to dogs. Three times this morning I had to chase Mrs. Wigglebottom out of a bed where she was digging, while I was digging in a bed. Anyway, in spite of my best efforts to ignore the garden this year, I filled a couple of holes, and dug a small amount of weeds, and took some pictures, and thought about overdoing it and then decided against it.

Anyway, exciting things are afoot in the garden. The irises are getting started. I recommend everyone get one white iris, because they smell like jellybeans. The daisies are in full bloom. This wasn’t a good year for columbine, but the one that came up looks great. The peonies are at my favorite state, where the buds look like big marbles. I forgot to put the hoops on them, so you know once they bloom, they will be laying down. My blue false indigo came back, so I’m hoping to see some flowers on it this year. It grew last year, but didn’t bloom. The roses will put on a show any day now. My yellow knock-out rose is already beautiful. I’m hoping this summer it gets bigger than the lavender, because I’d like for it to fill up that whole corner, but I don’t think it will until it gets the message that it’s just like three inches from full sunlight. It just needs to be a hair taller. Well, if you had a three-inch hair.

I don’t know if you can tell in the picture, but the blossoms this early seem to have a pink tint. Honestly, no wonder people love these roses. They’re beautiful, hearty, and the blossoms are different depending on the weather. Last year, they were all yellow, all the time, though lighter or darker depending on how old they were. This year, it’s like the rose is showing off for the primrose. The front hydrangea are not dead, thank goodness. But man, they did not do well last year.

And that’s everything. Except I did have a thought that the trouble with composting is that you, by laws of physics, have to start a compost pile before you have your own compost. But it’s the smell of your own compost, the rich dark breaking apart of it in your hands that sells you on composting. The other trouble with composting is that it teaches you something we Americans really, really don’t want to know and that is that mostly there is death and rot and breaking down. And we, and everyone we love, and the plants and the animals, are a thin, beautiful, fragile, fleeting veneer of not-yet-dead that needs all that dead stuff to live.

There is no way to live and let live. It’s all done on death.

The garden is a scary place, sometimes. Makes you realize why all our oldest female gods were earth and death gods, when you’re out there, that’s for sure.

Forget Gun Nut, I’m a Suppressor Nut

Honestly, of all the useful gun regulations there might be, why can’t there be one that says that, if you’re going to fire your gun for non-emergency purposes, you should use a suppressor?

I mean, I don’t expect that, if someone is trying to kill you, that you’re going to be all “time out, let me muffle the sound of my gun so that I don’t disturb my neighbors.” But if you’re in my neck of the woods and you’re just target shooting or hunting or whatever folks are doing up in the hills, why do I have to hear it?

Is there some safety issue? Because I have to believe that a bullet travels faster than the speed of sound, so any stray bullet that might hit me is going to do so before the warning noise. Plus, how sound echos around out here, it doesn’t seem like it does much more than tell you someone else is out here with a gun, which, in this part of Davidson County, you should just expect anyway.

And I’m just being selfish about me.

That can’t be good for the shooter himself’s hearing, right?

And yet, my brother leads me to understand that gun nuts would like to be able to use suppressors more widely, but that it’s not allowed.

What the fuck?

This country has some weird gun regulations.