Hosta

 

My winter hosta garden

It's that time of the year again. Planting season. Out in the yard, all of my perennials are coming up nicely. I dumped my usual giant bag of wild flower seeds along the back of the house and next to the front porch. They have sprouted and are growing. Last week I drove out to the suburbs to dig up hostas from my sister's yard and transplanted them in my yard. They look fabulous.

About hostas. Over the years I have spent a lot of money buying plants from HD, Lowes, and garden centers. To save some money I decided to grow plants from seed. Starting in January I would set up tables in my living room and put my newly planted seeds in the window. I watered them and coddled them. Marigolds grew well that way. Last year I tried begonias. The result was just so-so, but I got some flowers out of that. This year I ordered seeds from Amazon. I ordered two hundred hosta seeds of varying types. I carefully planted and watered them, and then I waited. Water, wait, water, wait. After over three months of waiting, this is all I got. One tiny seedling. Very cute and it will probably mature into a nice hosta. The only thing bad about that seedling is that it cost me twenty dollars.

For scale, that is my finger in the upper left corner

Old Friends

 

Leah and I became old friends about six years ago. I say old because I was sixty seven and Leah was eighty eight years old. She was the mother of Gary whose bowling team I am now with. The first time I met Leah, I was watching some friends bowl. She sat on a high seat watching her son's team, with a bowl of candy on the counter in front of her. She was the candy lady who brought candy for anybody who wanted some. Leah was also the arbiter of poker hands. For three dollars you could buy into the poker game. Two cards for a strike, one card for a spare. The cards featured nude men which kind of freaked me out at first. Not because I don't like nude men, but because nobody seemed bothered that they were showing an eighty eight year old woman cards with naked men on them. I got over it. After all, my mom used to have a party cake business and would make you a naked man cake for any occasion. Anyway, without hesitation Leah would look at the cards and declare which hand was better than another. Leah was fun to talk to and I got a thrill out of taking her out in my 1929 Model A Ford a few times. The car and the lady were the same age. We will miss Leah, everybody at the bowling alley knew her and loved her. She passed away on Tuesday.

White Heat

 

Mom, 1949

Yesterday I saw an old man walking down the street wearing a heavy winter coat with a knit hat pulled down over his ears. Seeing that made me think about my mom. It was seventy three degrees outside. The same temperature outside as inside the house. I was wearing shorts and a tee shirt and was ready for this spurt of summer like weather. I was ready, but my body apparently is not. I was cold. Seventy three degrees and I was cold. I seriously thought about turning the heat back on, but then I'd have to listen to Dennis whine about how hot his apartment is. Mom was the same way. She was always cold. I remember when I was a kid and Mom would stand in the corner of the living room where the heat register was, letting that blessed hot air warm her legs. When she got older, no amount of heat could satisfy Mom. When I would visit her, even on a summer day, the house would be stifling and the furnace would be blasting away.

"Mom! (You had to shout) You have the thermostat set for nearly ninety degrees."

"Oh, I do? I was cold."

I would turn the furnace off and open a window. Fifteen minutes later Mom would ask, "Is it cold in here? Aren't you cold?"  No, it would usually still be well over eighty degrees in the house. Mom would sit there wearing a sweater with a blanket over her lap, pouting. Moments later she would put her electric Hoveround chair in gear and zip on over to the hallway. I could see her staring up at the thermostat, at which time I would go over and pretend to turn the heat up. But I wouldn't

That's what I was thinking of as I sat in my recliner chair wearing my shorts and tee shirt. No, I did not turn the heat on. I went and put on long pants, a thermal long sleeve shirt over my tee shirt, and a sweat shirt over that. I also turned on the little fireplace space heater for awhile.

Mom, 2018

Mi Perro es Gordo

 

I put Scout on a diet  over a week ago. I had noticed that she seemed to be extremely overweight. So bad that I had a dream where I was using her back as a table because it was very flat and wide. I waited too long to do this, to put her on a diet. Scout is fat and it wasn't until Bucky came to stay with us that I realized just how fat she is. Bucky is lean, almost anorexic compared to Scout.

In the living room there are five huge windows that look over the street. It is Scout's realm, where she keeps a lookout for trespassers and strangers. She has a chair that she uses to get up on the radiator/window sill so that she can 'Gladys Kravitz' the street. It's the same chair that Bucky, our new roommate, likes to sleep on. Saturday I had noticed Scout limping a little bit. Later in the evening she was up on the radiator/window sill, but could not get down. That's because Bucky was sleeping on her exit chair, so she jumped. The thing about Scout, is that she thinks that she can fly. She jumped the two and a half feet off of the radiator and hit the floor like a sack of potatoes. She let out a yelp and I thought she had broken a bone. For half an hour Scout moaned and cried, so I took her to the Doggy Emergency Room.

First time I had been to the doggy emergency room and I was impressed. The building looks like a human hospital. After being triaged and given a tag to put around Scout's neck, we took a seat. It was a seat that I would get to know very well over the next five hours. Over two hours waiting to see a doctor, and three hours waiting for Scout to get her xrays. During those two hours Scout and I were first waiting, I got to see a large Doberman have diarrhea on the floor of the waiting room, and a small dog that looked like a cross between a Chihuahua and a Beagle, barf up a chocolate Easter bunny. We'll call that, the floor show. Meanwhile, Scout decided that she owned the waiting room and barked at every new dog that entered her new territory.

It turned out that Scout had not broken a bone in her foot but had only sprained it. She came out of the xray department all happy and walking on all fours as if nothing was wrong. She was on a methadone pain killer. The nice lady handed me her on the leash along with two bottles of pain killers and instructions for her to lose ten pounds. Oh, and a bill for nearly eight hundred dollars.

Scout and Bucky