nefarious seaman
The realization
... I was sitting on my back porch, observing that holiest of rituals ... Saturday morning. For me all is well on a Saturday morning if I can start it sitting on my back porch looking over a cup of coffee at my flowers, tomato and basil plants, occasionally observing the blue sky through the green cover of the now full-leaved oaks and poplars that line the back boundary behind my apartment. Distracted only occasionally as a squirrel chides a cat from the neighboring yard, tail twitching in time like a rodent-metronome. From the stereo in the living room NPR provides the background entertainment.
It was a week after my latest experience with the Ukranian couple selling flowers by the Thai restaurant. Maybe they are Romanian, I’m sure Romanian passports would surely enable them to buy those heavy black shoes.
This particular Saturday morning I scanned the back boundary of my apartment-kingdom and my eyes fell upon “the soil.” Sure I had soil! It was the last of a bag of “Sta-Green Premium Container Mix with Fertilizer.” I dumped it into a plastic hanging basket left from something I had planted last year. I the followed the old couples directions to a “t”. After placing the soil into the container I dove my index finger into the dirt up to my knuckles. Then I carefully separated the small seedlings (why aren’t they called plant-lings?) And carefully inserted them filling in around them with the nutrient enhanced loam. Yeah, they were a little closer than he had instructed but I knew I would re-pot them into other containers after they grew a bit. Then following her sing-song instruction “plant-today ... water tomorrow” well ... ok ...truth is I forgot them for a day. And I almost panicked when I realized I had actually neglected to water the gift of “a miracle.” My heart sank and I actually worried that if they indeed held some magic power it had wilted overnight right there in my $1.99 plastic hanging basket, like so many neglected plants at a chain hardware store. So I loving watered them trusting that they would indeed recover, since they were after all magic plants of hearty Ukrainian stock ....
I was thinking about none of this mind you at the time my eyes fell upon the white 10" basket of about six plant-lings of 3 to 8 inches in height. My mind was in its Saturday morning place ... coffee, trees, sky, NPR ... suddenly I could not help but laugh out loud, fortunately without a mouthful of coffee because it surely would have sprayed everything within 4 feet of where I sat. As my gaze fixed momentarily on this basket I recognized the plant right away ... “it is a marigold...”
The realization
... I was sitting on my back porch, observing that holiest of rituals ... Saturday morning. For me all is well on a Saturday morning if I can start it sitting on my back porch looking over a cup of coffee at my flowers, tomato and basil plants, occasionally observing the blue sky through the green cover of the now full-leaved oaks and poplars that line the back boundary behind my apartment. Distracted only occasionally as a squirrel chides a cat from the neighboring yard, tail twitching in time like a rodent-metronome. From the stereo in the living room NPR provides the background entertainment.
It was a week after my latest experience with the Ukranian couple selling flowers by the Thai restaurant. Maybe they are Romanian, I’m sure Romanian passports would surely enable them to buy those heavy black shoes.
This particular Saturday morning I scanned the back boundary of my apartment-kingdom and my eyes fell upon “the soil.” Sure I had soil! It was the last of a bag of “Sta-Green Premium Container Mix with Fertilizer.” I dumped it into a plastic hanging basket left from something I had planted last year. I the followed the old couples directions to a “t”. After placing the soil into the container I dove my index finger into the dirt up to my knuckles. Then I carefully separated the small seedlings (why aren’t they called plant-lings?) And carefully inserted them filling in around them with the nutrient enhanced loam. Yeah, they were a little closer than he had instructed but I knew I would re-pot them into other containers after they grew a bit. Then following her sing-song instruction “plant-today ... water tomorrow” well ... ok ...truth is I forgot them for a day. And I almost panicked when I realized I had actually neglected to water the gift of “a miracle.” My heart sank and I actually worried that if they indeed held some magic power it had wilted overnight right there in my $1.99 plastic hanging basket, like so many neglected plants at a chain hardware store. So I loving watered them trusting that they would indeed recover, since they were after all magic plants of hearty Ukrainian stock ....
I was thinking about none of this mind you at the time my eyes fell upon the white 10" basket of about six plant-lings of 3 to 8 inches in height. My mind was in its Saturday morning place ... coffee, trees, sky, NPR ... suddenly I could not help but laugh out loud, fortunately without a mouthful of coffee because it surely would have sprayed everything within 4 feet of where I sat. As my gaze fixed momentarily on this basket I recognized the plant right away ... “it is a marigold...”