I have a love-hate relationship with my garden. I love the thought of gorgeous flower beds and yummy, homegrown veggies. I hate actually having to work to get them. I love being out in the fresh air, but the minute I step my foot off the sidewalk and into the garden I'm praying "Please don't let there be any snakes. Please, please don't let there be any snakes." So far the biggest scare I have gotten, and it happens every year when I first go out, is when a toad jumps out and startles me and I scream, and the toad, dirt, weeds and whatever tools I have in my hand fly into the air.
My friend Joanne says she gardens by the Pointing Method. "I point and someone else plants what I want where I want it." If she can't convince her husband, she pays someone to do it. While I wish I could adopt her method, it isn't in the cards for me. So every year, with great fantasies of bouquets on every table in my house and BLTs for dinner, out I go.
Yesterday was the first day I have worked in the yard this year and the way I kind of moan when I have to move my legs today is giving me away. I knew my bum knee was not going to let me kneel much, so I spent a couple of hours bending over, (I remember cringing with embarrassment when my mom did that back when I was a limber teen-ager) pulling weeds and generally sorting through the dregs of the flower garden in my front yard.
I do love to pull up weeds right after it has rained because their resistance is at its weakest but all my flower beds are a ratio of about ninety-percent weeds to ten percent something I can't remember what it was when I planted it. It's been a whole year or more and if I can't remember where I parked the car at the mall, how would I remember what that green thing is among all the other green things? So after two hours in a stoop laborer position it still doesn't look like anybody had been working out there at all.
And then there is the business of what to wear. My neighbor, Harriet, always works in her yard wearing cute shorts and matching tops. She is up and out, dressed to work by about seven a.m. And her nails are done. I think she wears jewelry. She goes out every day and takes care of things, like weeds, as they happen instead of letting things go till she gets snide looks from people walking by. It is really her fault that my yard is a mess. I can't compete so I don't get out there. Well, not till after nine or so and a bunch of caffeine.
Sometimes I go out to get the paper in my pajamas and spot a weed that needs pulling and an hour later I realize (as do most of the neighbors driving by on their way to work) that I have forgotten to get dressed. Again. So I go in and put on my gardening clothes: the jeans with artistic holes, an old under-shirt of Dennis's that he says won't stay tucked down in his pants and why did I buy him that size in the first place? and my trusty gardening clogs that let me walk into mud but also let the mud ooze into the holes on top and stain my feet with our Oklahoma red dirt that takes ten minutes with a brush to scrub off.
Oh, and my headband because just the thought of physical labor makes me sweat and it drips into my eyes and I'm blind enough out there what with the dirt splatting up onto my glasses. If I am really planning ahead I put on sunscreen that probably lasts three minutes, but in case the sunscreen doesn't work I have my gardening hat which is especially designed with some space-age material to keep the sun off my delicate skin. My-son-the-doctor, who thinks about sunburn and skin cancer and such, purchased this for me. It is---I swear I'm not making this up---two-thirds of a yard across from brim to brim and, except for the charming ribbons that tie under my chin and produce more sweat, and when I'm wearing it, if I were not two or three times her weight, I could sail off toward Kansas, like the Flying Nun.
I also have gardening gloves that I put on before I start to dig, several right hand, several left hand but not an equal amount of both, so I turn one of them around backwards and wear the pinkie part over my thumb and vice versa. It doesn't matter that my hand is held in a claw position when I do this because somewhere along the line I take off the gloves and wind up with dirt stains on my hands and mud under my fingernails and there ya' go. The brush I use on my feet works a little and scraping my fingernails along the bottom of the soap dish where the gunk builds up works a little but by the end of spring there will be stains on my hands that last through Fourth of July.
And I love having birds in my garden but when I bend down to pull a weed and they dive down and peck me on the behind. I hate that.
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