I am writing and posting this because a friend laughed out loud and said, “You should put THAT in your blog”.
I have a planter in the front yard. It replaces the tree that had grown there for many years. It was a good tree. It gave the front room shade and the side walk shade and was a good size with a nice Y shape for the average twelve year old to climb and sit in (also the precocious eight year old). But it had to be cut down. It had been attacked by the Ash Borer and for several years had been getting sicker and sicker as the buggers clogged up it’s arteries and starved it. (No Malice Here grrrr)
At the same time my mother had been getting more brittle in her bones (osteoporosis) and more toxic in her blood (renal failure) and though an avid gardener, less and less able to bend and tote and kneel and get up again. (Context here: she was in her 90’s!) I built the planter with the help of F.H. and his brother. Lots of tumble stones made a circular planter high enough for her to sit at and dig and weed whatever flowers she chose to put there.
The brothers did an excellent job. The planter was level and attractive and took away the sting of losing a beautiful tree and to some extent the sting of my mother’s growing lack of autonomy.
-Recent years the roots that remained beneath it have continued to grow and rot. This year with a lot of rain this growing and rotting under the ground has been food for a bumper crop of mushrooms. The other result has been that the stones have gotten wonky.
I got in my head that I was going to “do it right” and then as the summer came and went I convinced myself that there were SO MANY THINGS I needed to buy before I could fix it properly and therefore I couldn’t fix it. Yesterday looking out my basement window at the front of the house I finally realized, “When have I ever done anything properly?!!!” So in the heat of what might be the sort of weather we wanted in August I finally got out there and took the thing apart (well half apart), threw some pea-gravel down that I had for another job I didn’t get around to and put the stones back and it looks fine.
So my new personal slogan is, “Why put off until tomorrow what you can do a half-assed job of today?”
And why not blog about it? The answer to the question, “Why I do things?” is I do things* because why not? Seriously.
*Mostly things that are not immoral, illegal or fattening. 😛
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