I tell her I don't think so, but she says "Well, let me outside then. I have to go. Really. I do."
At 6 a.m. she says "Hey! It's morning! Let's go walk!"
I crack an eyelid.
I do not consider this to be morning. I consider it to be closer to the middle of the night. So I roll over and she goes down the stairs in a huff of dog fur.
At 8:30 she tells me deer have overrun the garden and are eating all the lettuce.
I'm out there before I remember- there is no lettuce. Just black plastic and a half a ton of rocks. I know they don't look like much in the picture but those little suckers weigh a lot, especially when you lump them all together.
Which reminded me I needed to plant a few things. This is when I open the package of fake bamboo trellis stakes and find they didn't send the clips to hold it all together. Surprise, I learn later- the trellis kit only includes the fake bamboo poles and not the clamps. You have to buy those separately.
Okay, now isn't that a little like buying a kitchen sink without the faucet?
Oh, yeah. Bad analogy.
Well, buying trellis poles without clamps is like buying um...salsa without chips.
Anyway, being as how I once dated an ex-serviceman, I decide to follow the advice he seemed to live by "Adapt and Overcome." (Don't know what that says about him dating me, but well, never mind. Just go eat some of those chips and salsa.)
Those are my homemade bean trellises. I ran out of bean plants though, so one trellis is a cucumber, tomato, carrot in the middle trellis.
The bean trellis has lettuce in the middle. I figured it might be done by the time I got a bean plant to actually climb my homemade trellis.
Four hours later I went in to do the real job of the day- writing a novel.
3 hours later, I had a kid who wasn't in the plot and there was a dead body in a farm pond instead of in a cafe.
So I went to see Joe on my way to Dairy Queen to eat myself to death.
Joe was way up there...
At the tippy-top of the house he's building all by himself. He clamped two pieces of scaffolding together to get up there, pulled a muscle in his side and then the wind picked up. But Joe was in one of his determined moods, so he wasn't coming down until the last sheet was bolted in place.
Joe leads a fairly terrifying life. Makes stringing bean trellises and getting lost in the woods or finding dead bodies in farm ponds seem very, very tame.
But I still went to Dairy Queen. I just didn't get the usual. I decided to live large, kind of like Joe only not. No medium strawberry sundae with whipped cream for me today, no sir, buddy! I got a caramel sundae AND a diet Coke.
Now that is living large-er.
Meanwhile, back at Joe's- he was staring out at this...
No comments:
Post a Comment