Gardening and grief
May. 11th, 2009 09:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lblanchardYesterday we puttered in the backyard. Roy built a new "deck" to go on top of the aquarium stand and hold my larger potted plants such as the perennial sunflower. The deck is built from scavenged lumber -- wonderful tongue-and-groove floorboards from one of the houses on the next block over on Webster Street. Possibly we should have painted it, but we didn't.
In a move I may regret later, I took a seedling Virginia creeper that had taken root and barely survived in a small pot for some years, and planted it in the ground. It has tripled in size in less than a week.
We had moved the hosta crates out where they'd get a little more sun (filtered) and a lot of rain water. They are growing exuberantly, even though they've all sported back to plain green. I am thinking about dividing them and planting them directly in the ground to flank the boardwalk to our back house.
While Roy was building the deck, I was scrubbing flowerpots. I had located a suet feeder above a collection of pots, with the result that they were all covered with a film of grease studded with birdseed hulls. It took chemical warfare (aka spraying them with Fantastik) to get the stuff off. I also sprayed the cement paving with Fantastik to loosen the suet remnants on the ground. I swept up great drifts of Darcy fur and seed hulls in various places.
We miss Mr. Darcy. I've stopped stepping around the places where he liked to lie, but I am still conscious that I'm entering his space, especially at night when I don't have to navigate around him in the bedroom in the dark. The directory in which I stored the last photos of him showed those thumbnails whenever I opened the directory above in file manager and it hurts to see them. So I edited a bunch of other pictures in that same directory so they'd be the ones that show.
I dreamed about him last night -- he came back to my great surprise; and his eyes were clear and pain free; and he was happy. No deep meaning there. I miss him but the Darcy I miss is the healthy and happy one.
(What is it about May, anyhow? I've lost someone close to me every other May for the past several years. Do you suppose I should prepare to dread May 2011?)
However. We do not miss the hair. There's a reason they call them German Shedders. We got three Dyson Animal canisters from the second floor. I don't know how many canisters Roy has gotten from the first floor.
There were three afghans (made with remnant cheap yarn), giant granny squares really, that I had over the love seats in the living room. Mr. Darcy liked to scratch his flanks by rubbing up against them. I would wash them, note they were still hairy, shrug, and put them back. Now I am trying to get rid of the hair. They've been through the washer-dryer cycle four times so far and I'm still pulling fat mats of hair out of the lint trap. One of them is that hateful kind of yarn that seems to grow little barbs that snag everything. To the trash heap with that one. But the other two I rather like. So I sat out back in my suet-free backyard, with a nice glass of bourbon and mint, picking hairs out of one of the afghans.
Oh...I will want to remember that I planted the sage in the herb pot this morning. And that the bay tree finally seems to have swelling leaf buds on it.
In a move I may regret later, I took a seedling Virginia creeper that had taken root and barely survived in a small pot for some years, and planted it in the ground. It has tripled in size in less than a week.
We had moved the hosta crates out where they'd get a little more sun (filtered) and a lot of rain water. They are growing exuberantly, even though they've all sported back to plain green. I am thinking about dividing them and planting them directly in the ground to flank the boardwalk to our back house.
While Roy was building the deck, I was scrubbing flowerpots. I had located a suet feeder above a collection of pots, with the result that they were all covered with a film of grease studded with birdseed hulls. It took chemical warfare (aka spraying them with Fantastik) to get the stuff off. I also sprayed the cement paving with Fantastik to loosen the suet remnants on the ground. I swept up great drifts of Darcy fur and seed hulls in various places.
We miss Mr. Darcy. I've stopped stepping around the places where he liked to lie, but I am still conscious that I'm entering his space, especially at night when I don't have to navigate around him in the bedroom in the dark. The directory in which I stored the last photos of him showed those thumbnails whenever I opened the directory above in file manager and it hurts to see them. So I edited a bunch of other pictures in that same directory so they'd be the ones that show.
I dreamed about him last night -- he came back to my great surprise; and his eyes were clear and pain free; and he was happy. No deep meaning there. I miss him but the Darcy I miss is the healthy and happy one.
(What is it about May, anyhow? I've lost someone close to me every other May for the past several years. Do you suppose I should prepare to dread May 2011?)
However. We do not miss the hair. There's a reason they call them German Shedders. We got three Dyson Animal canisters from the second floor. I don't know how many canisters Roy has gotten from the first floor.
There were three afghans (made with remnant cheap yarn), giant granny squares really, that I had over the love seats in the living room. Mr. Darcy liked to scratch his flanks by rubbing up against them. I would wash them, note they were still hairy, shrug, and put them back. Now I am trying to get rid of the hair. They've been through the washer-dryer cycle four times so far and I'm still pulling fat mats of hair out of the lint trap. One of them is that hateful kind of yarn that seems to grow little barbs that snag everything. To the trash heap with that one. But the other two I rather like. So I sat out back in my suet-free backyard, with a nice glass of bourbon and mint, picking hairs out of one of the afghans.
Oh...I will want to remember that I planted the sage in the herb pot this morning. And that the bay tree finally seems to have swelling leaf buds on it.
