(Train of thought continued from here.)
The previous occupants of this house are green-thumb types, and I’m a complete botanical ignoramus, so when new things appear in the garden at various points in the year, it’s a nice surprise for me.
Well, not that pile of feathers and a beak the other day. G was standing in the middle of it when I recognized what it was (could have been worse; it was literally only a pile of feathers and a beak). But I’m pretty sure the previous occupants didn’t put that there.
These flowers also appeared recently, and they do count as a nice surprise. I genuinely didn’t clue in that they must be crocuses/croci/crocus, and searched on the internet to find out what purple flowers with orange stigma at ground level in the early spring might be called. That pointed me in the right direction, but of course I jumped the gun on the “early spring” part, didn’t I?
But it seems that I’ve suddenly had enough of winter. Saturday I didn’t want to go outside at all. I just felt tired of feeling cold.
My disinclination was the greater because lately when I take G into the garden, hoping to teach her to kick a ball, I’ve ended up dribbling one to and fro by myself, trying to make it look like fun, while G intently transfers clumps of cold, waterlogged dirt from the abandoned pot of one deceased citrus seedling to the pot of another deceased citrus seedling and back.
Last time we did this, she came in smelling breath-snaggingly bad from the dirt, and I placed her, fully-clothed, into the bathtub to give me the chance to figure out a decontamination procedure. I don’t know what stomach-churning transformation befell the dirt in those pots. I’m not a gardener, and I’m even less likely to become one now. Maybe G will be one; the odour didn’t seem to faze her.
The time before that, I may or may not have slipped on a slimy patio stone in mid-pointless-dribble, and landed, cartoon-like, on my back, holding my camera safely aloft.
On Sunday, it was more than 10 degrees C out, the sun kept peeking around the clouds, and G was going to go stir crazy if I didn’t take her out. It had reached the point where any self-respecting Canadian would be ashamed to try to maintain a winter funk — except maybe a Vancouverite? But actually in Vancouver you’re lucky to get this much sun in the mid-summer. Joking! Only partly.
The grass even looks in danger of starting to grow normally again. I remember, the last time I mowed it, feeling just about ready for winter (the kind we usually have).
I put G’s shoes and her MEC Ursus fleece suit on her, and F’s deck shoes, a yellow bike jacket, and some purple nitrile gloves on myself. Our yard is reasonably secluded, or I might have had to consider the visual effect of that outfit. We forged into the inhospitable wilderness.
G smurfed around happily while I set about disposing of the offending soil. All the dirt, down to the bottom of each pot, reeked of some stinky biological process.
We stayed out much longer than I’d intended. With no dirt to sort, G did kick the soccer ball, a bunch of times. She appears already to have learned that from somebody else.