The Mad Weeder Strikes Again

I was indifferent to gardens in my 20s and 30s. I started appreciating them in my 40s. L loves wildflowers and wildflower walks and he has a front yard with columbine (including a hybrid created by his aunt), hens and chicks from his mother's Downstate yard, irises, poppies from his mother, hibiscus, ajuga groundcover, lilies of the valley (see photo at right), vinca and other plants I'm forgetting. In back he has cacti, false Solomon's seal, asparagus, chives, green onions, yucca, day lilies and gingham girls. He has lilac, honeysuckle and forsythia bushes. All this he will leave when he sells his house this or next year, though he will dig up some of the plants for our new place. We started taking rocks from his front yard to put in our yard. We put them in the trunk of his car and then when we got here we weren't sure what to do with them. I would've just let them sit in the trunk for the next week (We close on the house--see photo--June 30). But he didn't want to drive around with rocks in his trunk. So we put them in my storage area.

This morning I went to Michael McColly's yoga class. I recommend it. What's good is the he talks about breathing and clearing your mind and paying attention to your body. It was odd, though, to be taking a class from someone I know, and to have his familiar voice telling us what to do with our bodies and breathing. My mind buzzed around, as always. The only time I've ever been about to truly concentrate and focus is when I took yoga at the Alliance Francaise. When the teaching was in French, I had to really listen. Alas, the class wasn't always in French. The teacher would let in people who barely knew how to say Bonjour, and then she'd repeat everything in English. That's why I no longer take yoga at the Alliance. When it was an all-French experience, it was like being in a trance, wrapped in a haze of foreign language, and the haze made it feel like you were in a different place.

The yoga room was warm, because for some inexplicable reason, the heat had gone on earlier. I was hot and slightly dizzy. Perhaps the dizziness is caused by gabapentin, which I'm taking to help with the hot flashes. So what should I take for the dizziness?

Yesterday L and I bought flowers in Indiana and today I planted them in two big pots out front. We decided to put them in pots so people wouldn't trample them. Someone walked on some columbine (brought from his yard to mine) and killed it recently. Now I'm afraid that people will pick the flowers because they don't have to bend down to touch them. We shall see. We have cosmos in the middle, and around them I put snapdragons, begonias, and something that looks like impatiens but isn't. At the checkout counter yesterday I noticed special pink garden gloves for sale. With each sale, money goes to Susan G. Komen [foundation] for the Cure--at least $100,000. Both L and I looked at the gloves disparagingly, though I have to admit that $100,000 going to the Komen foundation is better than zero dollars going to the Komen foundation. But I'd rather have $100K going for research on the causes of cancer.

After yoga I walked along Broadway, where there were huge round planters holding flowers in various stages of health. Some pansies were dried up. There were weeds in all the planters and as I walked along on my way to Metropolis Coffee Company and back, I pulled weeds. I love to pull weeds. I love when all their roots (see dandelion taproot on left) come up, clean, like a thorn pulled out of a paw. It is so satisfying. Once last year I had a computer mishap and I was so upset I went in the front yard and pulled weeds. It helped. I used to squeeze the blackheads on my father's back and carefully put them on Kleenex so he could see them, dark on one end and light on the other. That was satisfying, too. You'd think I'd love to clean and would be obsessive about it, but I'm not.

As soon as we close on the house, we're going to hurry to it and start yanking out weeds and pulling off the ivy from the sides. We've already surreptitiously pulled a few lamb's quarters from around the tree in front.