Being an animal lover, my eye is always drawn to stories and articles in which they feature.
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My girlfriend caught Covid in the first wave. It was a really bad time for her but thankfully she didn’t need to be hospitalized. She is however suffering many long Covid effects. Brain fog, hair thinning and worst of all … loss of taste and smell. It’s been almost two years and still nothing. She says the only flavor that breaks through is salt. Can you imagine only tasting salt for two years? I’m crossing my fingers for the hamsters.
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Shame I can’t talk the husband into it. He’s a pretty boy…
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This made my heart smile. Every store/business should adopt a shelter dog!
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A random chicken is loose in our town. I shall update the post if he struts by our house.
I used to have a beautiful perennial garden in our back yard. It was a lovely little brick bordered bed and over the years I filled it with a varied assortment of colorful flowers.
There was purple lupine.
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The harder to grow white lupine.
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And some fabulous red bee balm.
A few years in, a little apple tree seeded itself and since I didn’t have the heart to pull it up… it grew happily alongside the phlox, black eyed Susans and Shasta daisies.
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My garden made a wonderful foreground in photos of the big barn construction progress.
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And I had many happy years of bright blooms and vases full of freshly cut flowers.
Until my husband bought the beast.
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The monster zero turn lawn mower that flings grass clippings and weeds what seems like 100 miles. No matter how many times I begged him to reverse direction and steer clear, over the years my bed was overtaken by weeds. No matter how many of the damn things I pulled, dug up or chopped… I couldn’t contain the growth and they slowly started choking out my flowers.
By 2019 I gave up.
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I bought numerous bags of mulch.
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Weed whacked everything down to ground level…
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And covered the whole thing, leaving only the tree. And while I missed my riotous blooms, the aesthetic was pleasing enough to satisfy.
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Of course the husband and his big orange beast kept throwing grass in the bed so I kept getting down on my hands and knees to weed. Until I blew out my knee in the fall of 2020 and could no longer crouch or kneel without considerable pain.
So I gave up again, and now? It looks like this.
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A large brick bordered bed of weeds. It disgusts me on a daily basis but I vowed not to touch it again until a new, taller stone border could be built. And now that the husband is retired with nothing but time on his hands….?
Rhubarb time. When everyone who grows the noxious plant tries desperately to pawn it off on unsuspecting strangers. This rarely works, but if you’re visiting Maine in June, be warned.
Our small town has a wonderfully inventive food bank and is supported by many of our organic farmers. You never know what they’ll whip up next.
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Lots of items are advertised for free around these parts.
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No free turtle? I’ll pass.
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Believe me when I say you don’t want this fellow nibbling on your toes.
I saw something interesting advertised on Facebook the other day.
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It’s some kind of fruit filled bubble that bursts when dropped in cocktails and I thought hey… that might be fun for the man cave bar. Until I saw they were $25 per plus tax… and $24.95 shipping. Undeterred, I sought them on Amazon.
While I was a bit disappointed they didn’t have the same brand, I was tickled by the imposter bubbles’ name.
Eight years ago the flowering pear tree we’d planted by the bird feeders when we moved to this house died. My late mother, who loved nothing more than sitting on the deck watching our fine feathered friends, told me we needed to replace that tree because the birds missed it. Sadly, she passed two months later… and because she wanted me to make the decision what to do with her ashes, I laid part of her to rest with a beautiful tulip tree in that very spot.
Unfortunately the tree wasn’t hardy enough for the rugged Maine winters and croaked two years later. As did the flowering dogwood we planted after that and the Rose of Sharon after that. Two years ago when our neighbor gave us a few river birches to plant in front of the man cave/barn, we transplanted a flowering plum to my mother’s spot. It did well, for two years.
But now….
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There it goes.
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Undeterred and very determined to give my mother the tree she wanted… we went to an extremely expensive nursery where I paid an astronomical sum for a flowering crabapple.
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It was a beautiful specimen. Tall and bursting with good health.
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So in it went, with my mother.
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My fingers and toes are crossed this one makes it more than two years.
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Because if this one dies, I’m really going to wonder if my mother is trying to tell me something.
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Where there's only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
River's world..... 