Bound To Win A Prize

Our next door neighbor seems to be pranking his bank account. He seems nice enough, but he’s a puzzler. The front of his house appears to be collapsing, but his wife plants roses to climb a pricey arbor. A tenant accidentally set fire to the side of his house closest to ours and the neighborhood rallied around, but repairs were never completed. Siding flaps in the wind and insulation waves a friendly Hello!  Thus, it came as a tremendous surprise to us when a whirling crew of construction workers turned up to tear down the garage and rebuild it. They have been at it for days and they do good work.

 

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The house looks awful, but that it still stands is so confusing. This detail is my favorite. The bulkhead door swung open one winter and the basement door wouldn’t have withstood an unswift kick. Nobody walked around the other side of the house to investigate roaring wind up the inside stairs for over a year. Finally, Pete picked up a stick and cinched it shut. This door has been locked this way long enough to celebrate lonely anniversaries.

 

I do not care much about property, but I worry about people whose motivations I don’t understand and whose actions don’t make sense. They jam my radar. I can’t work out why a guy would buy a house, let it crumble and rebuild his garage – unless what matters to him is at the end of his driveway. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s preparing for an inevitable divorce.

 

 

 

The Darkness of Everybody’s Life

The American Sign Language class I’m taking involves improbable amounts of studying, possibly because I’m not a child prodigy anymore. Even so, spring is in the air. Strawberries are in the markets and leaves are on the grapevines. After work today, Pete and I stopped at the secret organic garden one town over, where we have permission to trim the grapevines that are slowly turning a garden gate into a fragrant wall. Pete brought my left-handed scissors, but the gates were seven feet tall, leaves were mostly out of my reach and Pete’s pruning shears won the day. We stuffed our tools and unusual produce into the trunk of Pete’s car and drove home.

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This evening, Drusy went missing for more than half an hour. I should say we realized we hadn’t seen her in some time and frantically searched the house for her. She is so tiny she had tucked herself into a little corner under Pete’s desk in the attic and fallen asleep. Pete crawled around with a flashlight while I struggled with panic. When he found Drusy, she seemed impatient with us for disrupting her beauty sleep.

The task at hand, however, was more pleasant. Before I go hog wild on weeds, I like to find good instructions. This lady seems pleasant and methodical, so I took <a href=”http://www.maureenabood.com/2013/06/05/how-to-identify-clean-and-store-fresh-grape-leaves/”>her advice.</a> I cut leaves off vines, grouped them by size, wrapped them in cellophane and froze them in freezer bags, careful to label them precisely. It’s a drag to find an unlabeled freezer bag in January and toss the contents, but sometimes I do make mistakes.

 

 

 

 

When You Gonna Give Me

 

WordPress, bless its heart, pushed me out of the nest, forcing me to squawk in a new birdsong. Between the better! bright! idiot-simple! publisher and the new laptop, I feel pretty stupid. I haven’t figured out how to name and tag photos yet. This one of Drusy, Queen of Crunchy Paper, is sitting here with its dull file type name and number. Imagine my chagrin!

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In other news, the crunchy paper has been vanquished and placed in the recycling bin, as a warning to all the others.

His Heart Of Their Anger

Mercury is in retrograde and even if I did not believe in it, I am living that dream. My laptop turned its back on me, my bicycle clangs, my phone rings and people try talking to me. It is Hell. I want to hide out in my garden but we have carpenter bees and the sentry is trying to kick my ass.

shadowy.jpgToday would have been my dad’s 75th birthday. You may recall that he died some years back and has been refusing to phone home since. It’s very inconvenient. I’m sure if there’s an afterlife, he’s annoyed and demanding a taller, stickier croque en bouche.

I know I would.

Hey Where Did We Go

This morning, the temperature was cool and the sky cloudy. After midday, the sun burned off cloud cover and humidity moved in. People complained about the heat and dense air. But you know what I don’t miss? Freaking snow.

Don't miss this a bit.

Don’t miss this a bit.

Sorry, winter people. The worst day of summer is better than the best day of winter.

As I Waved And Went

The Urban Dictionary defines Seedbombing as:

when an individual or group who throws, shoots, or slingshots pellets of dirt filled with seeds, often into empty or abandoned lots; usually part of an urban renewal project or event

Larry: Let’s throw an awesome event where we eat, drink, and mingle in between seedbombing expeditions around the neighborhood!

Jim: Cool! Let’s go buy some seed pellets and slingshots!

Previously on Poor Impulse Control:

We dismantled Dad’s kitchen and I ended up with a bigass container of dried black beans; by bigass, I mean a 7-quart Sysco restaurant container, and by beans, I mean of indeterminate age and/or magical power. For many long months, I stared at this container and waited for inspiration, which means breath of the gods and there’s just not enough Gas-Ex, thank you. One day, a plan came to me. Pete laughed out loud, uncertain I’d do it. Two nights ago, we filled a quart bag with beans and went for a walk. The plan:

1. On a rainy night, fling beans near chain link fences everywhere.
2. Wait.
3. Watch out for falling giants.

The possible results:
1. Planting.
2. Composting.
3. Feeding outdoor critters.

We enjoyed furtively peppering lawns, alleys, empty planters and scrubby gardens with prospective beanstalks, which process became more entertaining the closer we walked to the center of town and spectators. No one asked us what we were doing. No one said, “You’ve literally beaned me.” No. People watched as Pete and I walked by and I exhorted our little legumes to grow toward the sun, be free, be free! This public art project memorializing my father is called the Beany Benediction.

No cows will be harmed in the making of it.

Not to mention this and this and that. Essentially, seedbombing is one of my favorite things and recently, a thing happened.

Ammo, art supplies or weapon of vengeance, but also seeds.

Ammo, art supplies or weapon of vengeance, but also seeds.

Two of my dear friends are retiring, packing up and moving out. They offered me their seeds. I was kind of heartbroken for them, being without a garden for the year or two in which they assemble their new life, but they are joyful. My friends brought me four approximately shoebox-size containers filled with carefully alphabetized and labeled seed envelopes. I started feeling like I’d taken decongestants in a room full of black light posters.

Last Saturday, I sat down with the boxes and discovered my friends had brought me a problem and a solution. More than half of the envelopes were dated three years or older. Once I’d pulled out envelopes for 2011 or earlier and poured the outdated seeds into five pint containers, the project of plantable seeds looked much more manageable.

Yesterday would have been my dad’s 74th birthday and, over the weekend, my youngest sister Dara had her first child, a little boy. For the past three days, I’ve been flinging seeds everywhere while I waited for someone to stop me or say anything at all. No one does.

Everyone fears a random giant.