Itchy

Slowly I am getting things done, not necessarily the things I itemized the other day, but things. For instance, I weeded the front flower beds today. They are no longer, strictly speaking, flower beds. Last year, at great expense, we had landscapers come in and redo our walkway, which entailed taking out the bricks that had formed the sidewalk since we built the house in 1990 and replacing them with large slabs of shale. We brought the gardens forward and put a border of small stones directly at the outer wall so that the water spilling off the eaves (eaves troughs are a joke) wouldn’t splash dirt back on the white siding (which is terribly stained from years of this treatment). The landscapers ripped out all the plants that were there and put in flowering shrubs and mounds of good black dirt and cedar mulch. It looked really nice.

We feared that the shrubs wouldn’t survive our harsh winter. Well, Hubby feared. It never even occurred to me to be concerned. We never protected them and just piled snow up around and on top of them when we shoveled the walkway and driveway. They not only survived, they look great. But the were not alone.

The lily of the valley I brought from my mother’s yard years ago continued to come up, as did the two different kinds of mint I had planted. Lupines germinated from last year’s seeds and, of course, there were dandelions and various other insidious weeds. Some small animal has been digging in the dirt as well.

So this afternoon I proceeded to yank out the interlopers. We bought three huge bags of red cedar chips which have been sitting unopened on the driveway leaning against the side of the house for months. The plan was to spread them in the spring. I wonder if putting them down now is a good idea, or if I should just drag them into the garage and wait until next spring. In the meantime, the mosquitoes found me and gave me some gorgeous bites. I even had one black fly bite on my leg that bled profusely. The lupines were covered with aphids, and I just grabbed and yanked, my hands coming away covered with sticky stuff.

I think that, plus mending a rip in one of Buddy Boy’s T-shirts, is definitely enough for one day.

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