What do a single, great big purplish pimple, water-in-pool-or-lake inflatables that fight fish and the annual near-end-of-year wall photo calendar gift — where all is shown in its glory — have in common with your complexion?
Or in common, getting to moderate-size gardens, having to fight off rabbits — with the help of ma’s could-be-seen-as-scary one-dollar whirlybirds — and growth of weeds that are in some cases funky, and thus putting up a fence or other barrier, or taking it down, to deal with animals and possible veggie thieves.
Maybe it’s all someone or two I know, in those many cases battling the onslaught of mosquitos, worse with the weather-allowed breeding in rain and 90-degree temps that are higher no matter which side of I-94. Who thus may recently have puffed up even more. Like a riverside puffin. Or not really.
— They had the gall to mess with nightly specials. So don’t drive to where you want to drink. The water main broke on a main street, and it set in motion more than three days of work full of “grace,” as since we’ve now mentioned music titles, its gushing through gravel was fixed with the use of many boatloads of water, gallons and gallons worth, donated and piped in by a neighboring music club of note.
And no, we are not talking about a bucket brigade of bartenders, although it was near happy hour …
So the sidewalk stayed open, for clubbers, although a block of the street was dug up and big plastic bucket barriers cut off entry to multiple alleys, two for one, so that barrier to local transport also played in, to parking and people.
But Dick’s Bar played good corporate citizen, and allowed connection of their building’s water source and supply to keep the repair process moving, slowly, forward. You can still see the filled-in gravel on street that shows where the digging was done.
As I swirled my whiskey and water, a Shakespeare joke commenced in my head, so I commented to a new bartender, with a play on the blessed phrase to be or not to be: “Be gone,” oh cursed road and flood, “and take leave of me.”
But with flowing water also was the curse, it occurred to me as I sipped a little, this bit was like Jesus quoted as fighting the devil in the desert, them not using black dirt and vinegar but laying back blacktop and asphalt — so sympathy for him, as on the third day the tide was quelled and the workers rested. There was no further need to walk on water or have the holy kind sprinkled about to bless construction workers. Then in my head with irony, Velvet Revolver: “Like holy water. To wash away the sins of you and I.”—
So what is one to do? Don’t go where you want not to, into Ontario or the like while camping, like where it rains it pours, and fishing, per se. But you might consider reading a book or at least a magazine about how to do it, or bring one on how not to, so double trouble, while being bored in a canoe with one eye out for walleye. Pass the time, which can be seen as tedious, and slap the could-be-bait insects. Until the fish begin to bite. By that time you should have read through to the appendix, the end. Which might steer you to other options for such a outbound trip that would make it more pet friendly.
This after all, is the test for any pet owner. So in which case, you don’t have to pet them more, or sneak them food scraps under an only-in-house table, but both dogs and cats are still entertaining. But do take at least one of them along when duck hunting.
So back to the first paragraph(s) … If you’re allergic to those bloodsucking insects, this is how you will look, cheeks and body, while you’re back planning also Your Big Marital Day after a week up north. No not that day at the merry minnow Minocqua resort, with pix of people with biggest fishes and their fish stories. But the fate of your face’s Spots — and not the bird dog covered in such bugs — will hang in the balance if you choose to go out near sundown. You better take care while trimming your hedges or pulling out potatoes, or snipping those two or three pieces of human-high shrub greenery that are shaped like ma’s broccoli. Round-up and kill the cauliflower.
But gotta get on back, more, to the garden(ing.) Jokes are aplenty, but we hope you will remember this one come tomorrow, or the next hour. A set of small plants suddenly and opportunistically jetted forward like corn stalks and got all kinds of fluffy stuff at the apex. And this was not maltodextrin. Brought in was an amateur expert on horticulture, broadly, who said, if I myself earlier heard the story right, this could lets just say be of great value in an opium den. This is a person you want to get to know. Or not. Are you measured by the attributes, or lack thereof, of those you associate with?
This gets me onto the topic of, again broadly, garden weeds, even those with yellow flowers at the very top, alongside three-prong vine leaves that could poison, that would be a reason to call that horticulturalist. Simply a flower without merit? If they grow too fast and block the pathway that you had used to get back to the lot (and now pot?) line. Or somehow contribute to the slow felling of a tree, that now takes a fall after years of surviving a dead trunk and deadly, slowly splintering winds. A swatch, or do you call it a patch, of weeds that had spread out in front had been trimmed out by a much earlier owner, someone who simply had gotten tired of looking at them, at an angle with the TV.
That one tall drink of water, called a tree, that over decades had absorbed plenty of such, was now dead, but that did not mean it couldn’t still hold a tacked on old birdhouse, beneath several feet of only-there ivy. Placed in that place years after its making, in retrospect, in shop class – a counterpoint, to the one I’d constructed decades ago with splits one-inch-wide at two of its end quarters, unintentional gaps in its “floorboard,” never would have lasted to present day — but there may be a statute of limitations in if today’s birds would have interest. It was painted bright blue, maybe enough so to scare away bluebirds, and had held its color. (I swear, I saw a brownie birdie creep in!)
Kinda the color of, a last subject, ma’s mother-of-bride dress that she broke down and finally bought after a pair of planned trips of try-ons fell short due in part to being up north — which is like both a wild and very tame kitty cat’s color — and for that dress, a bright blue woulda been too “showy” compared to that of the leading lady.
So she’ll just hit the garden and dig in the dirt like a chipmunk, while dodging mosquitos that had been planted firmly on her screen door.