For a few weeks now, I've been wanting to get a manicure. I wanted someone who is good at it to clean up the rough edges, and make my hands seem soft and smooth and dainty to me. I had to wait until all the broken nails had grown out, but now that they have, I may have missed my window of opportunity. It is planting season. My hands are going to be filthy for most of the next couple months. No matter how many pairs of gardening gloves I own, I rarely use them. There is nothing like being able to feel exactly what is going on when you're preparing a container. Soil has to fill in all the empty spaces below the surface, but not be too tightly packed. I can only work it like I need to bare-handed. I don't know any other way. But I really do like feeling clean and pretty too. I want it both ways.
I have a great track record rescuing clearance rack bedding plants. It's not 100%, but I have managed to grow some hearty, lush specimens from the racks of the withered and burned rejects. I think the less money I spend on the little plants, the bigger and better they turn out for me. The opposite is true for trees. We love planting trees, and we find the tiny little trunks at chain garden centers almost irresistible. I would have to say that our success rate is closer to 50-50 for those trees. The bald cypress I have been worrying over for weeks is a replacement for a plum tree that drowned early on, and the peach one slot up from it is a goner. All of those are from Lowe's. But the weeping willow is from a locally owned nursery, and we bought it last spring before the man left. It was a little older and taller than anything available at a big box store, and it cost ten times as much. It was worth every penny. I keep crossing the dog poo wasteland, and braving the unmowable swamp, just to go stand beneath it, and admire how quickly it is growing. That corner of the Park is going to be lovely very soon, as it grows in. I hope it is ready to stand on its own soon, so I can remove the obnoxious white rope supports I threw on it as a stop-gap measure last summer, when it kept tipping over to the ground. It's quickly becoming my favorite tree in the Park.
At sundown, it was time to gather up all the kitties and close the back door. The two youngest girls were the last to be caught, and they tried to elude me on the far fence, by the baby trees. Athena flattened herself out flat in the weeds, hoping I wouldn't see her (but she kept watching me with her ears standing tall, above the grass). I love watching the two black girl cats, and appreciating how remarkably different they are. One is a giant floppy bear, incredibly passive, and developing a serious addiction to fresh catnip. The other seems destined to stay tiny, and she is made of mean. She's aggressive and bitey and will not let anyone tell her she's not the Queen Bee. But they both fit in perfectly in the Pride and in the Park. It reminded me of a movie quote. On my due date for the younger daughter, we all went to see Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, and I hoped that I would be engrossed in it enough that fate would see fit to start my labor (it did not for another week). While she was too young to understand a word of it when we saw it in theaters, that movie became my older daughter's favorite when she was a little girl, and we watched it over, and over, and over. Playing with the two black cats in the yard made me think of Morgan Freeman explaining to the little English girl who thought his face was funny and different, "Allah loves wondrous variety." Turns out I do too.
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