The Last Day of April

I heard that April was colder than March.  Crazy, eh?  Yesterday I went out and dug up all the lilies of the valley that have escaped from the bed behind the kitchen to give to DS & DIL1.  They've got shaded beds in front of their house that are just plain dirt.  Lilies of the valley are some of her favorite flowers and they pretty much take care of themselves.  What's not to love?  I got a big plastic pot out of the shed thinking I'd never fill it.  Ha!  I filled it, overfilled it, and had to put the excess in an ice cream pail bucket, and they were both stuffed to the brim.  Usually I'm a pretty good judge of capacity but not yesterday.  There's a pair of chickadees living in the birdhouse that's stuck in that planting bed and they were not happy with me sitting there.  One of them would chitter and chirp at me, scolding me for being too close to their house and nest, and then I'd hear tiny wings flutter over my head one way or another.  (I wish birdies would move into the other 2 birdhouses we've got out there.  I wonder why they don't.)  I also took my cutters and removed most of the dead stalks from last year, piling them on the lawn.  I didn't get them to the curb and it rained overnight.  Now I've got soggy dead stuff to move.  Great.  I did go to Stein's to redeem my coupon for rosemary (limit 2) and violas (also limit 2).  I couldn't resist some leaf lettuce and spinach seeds, and some basil seeds.  Then I needed a big bag of soil for the planters I unearthed for this year's salad growing.  That meant I scared the crap out of a pair of squirrels by driving into the backyard to offload the bag of dirt.  Durwood didn't even notice because he made me move a couple birdfeeders out into the middle of the yard so that his hummingbirds don't have to deal with other birds.  Prima donnas.  That means I get to play with dirt and seeds tomorrow when I'm off work.  Yippee!  I need to get the tomato stakes out of the garden so I can use my little pitchfork to lever up all the volunteer weeds that are happily making themselves at home in there, and I need to find some pine bark mulch, not cedar, to mound around my blueberries.  They need a more acid soil and pine back helps.  They need to be happy to make blueberries for me, ya know.  Soon the battle of the tomato plants will commence.  Durwood thinks he needs about a dozen of them, for one little old guy, and I think 3 would be perfect so we could have space to grow something besides tomatoes.  Usually there are 7-9 tomato plants, a couple peppers in a pot and some viney thing that we train to grow on the wire fencing at the back of the garden.  It's enough, my eyes are always bigger than my willingness to work out there, and we get fresh food to eat and a bit to share.

April 29--Samuel Colt, Revolver.

Black hole of
cyclopean eye
bigger than life.

Forged steel
carved & gilded,
smooth warm walnut.

Art and death in a
simple machine
loaded with brass
saltpeter & lead.

Death weighs
half an ounce,
lives six inches
away.
                       --bam
~~~~~

 Okay.  Here we are starting another week and (almost) another month.  I look out the window to see all shades of green and dark pink crowding in where they used to be gray and brown.  I'm ready to pay more attention to my life but it whizzes by so quickly I can't grasp it before it slips away.  Do you have a cave I can hide in?  Maybe in a cave I can slow things down, give each part of my life the attention it deserves.  But, cheer up, Barbara, it's payday and the moths in your wallet are lonely.  Yay, payday!  I know it's shallow but it's what I've got today.  No, it's not.  I hung my "menopausal goddess" back outside yesterday so she can dance in the breeze and make me smile when I see her.  Best Artstreet buy ever.
--Barbara