I don't have spots in front of my eyes, I have spirals. I've been staring at spirals for so long, putting tiny stitches and pins in the lining of the coat, watching the needle go up and down, around and around. My head is swimming. And the sound echoing in my head is obnoxious, a repetitive, grinding percussion. I think this is why I don't do certain activities like running. I hear a 4/4 beat in my head, each time my feet strike the ground, and I let some slow-driving lyric run over and over, never resolving into an actual song, just mentally looping until I want to scream. I got that same torturous earworm from the sewing machine today. But I can't stop. I'm so close to done, but the deadline is racing toward me. I have too many time-consuming steps left. I doubt I will get to sleep anytime soon tonight.
After a week, I am certain that Mr S-P did not readjust the sprinklers to a less-frequent pattern. He turned them off. The sprinkler control says "Run" but nothing has happened in a week. I need to start running them manually, and when I kicked it off today, I think the entire process was done, all zones, in seven minutes. The grass is looking terrible. The neighbor who just moved said when the house was on the market, they were dumping gallons of water to get sod to take. So now that we cut it back, the youngest sections seem to have already died back. But it gets worse from there. The ground is cracked in a lot of places. It looks like I am balanced over a sinkhole that is going to collapse any day. And that is not as much of a joke as I want it to be. In the news this week, there was a water main that broke and caused a sinkhole that ate a car maybe a mile from our Boulder condo. It made me remember that there had been a water main break in our alley, behind our house, that flooded the basement (long before we bought) and made the back concrete slab subside several inches and slope toward the house. What are the chances that these cracks in the ground are as deep as they look?
I got very mad at Elsa last night, when I was tucking the dogs into bed, and I noticed that she smelled like tomatoes. Well, not the fruit, but the plant. I knew that meant she had trampled them, assumably chasing some sort of garden pest. When I inspected the garden this afternoon, I was even more convinced she had gone after a mole... at first. There was indeed a tipped over tomato cage, and there were several trampled sunflowers and basil plants. There was even what looked like a dug-out spot under the container tomato that we brought with us from the Park. Upon further reflection, I really don't know who caused what. I watered the garden with a hose, and it just poured into the chasm and never seemed to fill up and puddle. She might have done less damage, and the dry season might have done more.
I don't know how much longer I will have warm sun to ripen all the green tomatoes hanging on the vines. They don't seem to be moving along very quickly. I've been waiting for the black tomatoes for weeks, and they don't change at all. There are hundreds of little yellow tomato flowers that have just been pollinated by the gajillion bees and hornets. Is there time for any of this before the first frost? I bet there are just a few weeks, tops, before that happens. I think I may get in and start making cut sunflower arrangements more often, to see whether it will make more sun reach the tomatoes. My daughter made the first one (of many) today. I think I may cover the upstairs with more of them. Seems like a reasonable solution, and a pretty one too.
No comments:
Post a Comment