Blooming Stuff

 

Spring is definitely pushing itself on us despite the nippiness of three out of seven days most weeks.  I looked out this morning to see that the apple tree is sporting pink marbles of unopened buds and a couple just beginning to open.

The forsythia is flowering-ish.  We don't have an explosion of yellow blooms like we do some years and I'm not at all sure what makes one year excessively bloom-y and others not but whenever I see the yellow flowers I think of Evansville and I think of Mom.  "For who?"  "For Sythia!"  How many times did we do that simple call and response driving down the hill toward the Parkway past the cemetery because the farmhouse at the bottom of the hill across the highway had big forsythia bushes at each corner of the house?  I have no idea but enough so that it's burned into my brain and we haven't lived in Evansville in 56 years.  Draw your own conclusions about the caliber of crap that sticks to my brain.



The alliums in the front are blooming.  They're not huge like I thought they'd be when I planted them but they're tall-ish and a lovely shade of red violet.  Did you know they're members of the onion family?

Look what I found when I walked around the garden picking up windblown trash--two asparagus spears.  Asparagii?  Anyway, they were kind of thick and woody but we managed to choke them down for supper mixed in with a few store-bought spears.  Yum.  I need to get out there on my knees and uproot all those violas so I can find the asparagus plants.  And I strung the soaker hose through the blueberries this morning, mixed up a couple sprinkling cans full of Miracid fertilizer to drench them with, then piled on the pine bark mulch I found in the shed.  Tomorrow's task is to finish stringing the soaker hose along the rest of the bales, making wire "pins" to hold it in place.  Weather permitting, Durwood and I are planning a jaunt to Stein's on Friday for plants.  Tomatoes, hee hee hee.  I'll look for seed potatoes there but suspect that I'll need to go to a more specialized and local place like a feed store or the nursery that pops up in a gravel lot on the east side every year and is so fleeting that they don't have a published phone number.  When I'm looking for out of the mainstream plants that's where I always find them.  Besides maybe someone there will have experience planting potatoes and can guide me to a variety that will be happy to grow in this oddball climate.


May 15--Odilon Redon, Baroness Rober de Domecy.  She was so thin sitting there in the only chair with nothing but the mildew-spotted wall as a backdrop.  She was pale.  Dead people were usually pale especially when they died sitting up so gravity pulls all the blood into their lower parts.  The first officer on the scene, a near-rookie named Spencer Cody, had bent over her, his fingers trembling as he reached out to check if she had a pulse.  Freddie could see how he tried to keep his hand still and how he swallowed to keep from losing his breakfast.  She wouldn't mind it if he touched her, she just wished she were alive to feel his warm fingers on her neck.

Today's Me Made May entry is the most boringest thing I own, I think.  What could be more nondescript than a gray linen jumper with a white/gray/taupe/gray-blue striped tee shirt over ubiquitous black capris?  I put on bright (non-matching) striped socks but my selfie stick isn't long enough to get my feet into the shot.  I'll try to add some color tomorrow.  Oh, btw, my lovely face fabric dress made the underarms of my white tee shirt turquoise.  Luckily a liberal spray of Shout! took care of most of it--and I washed and dried the fabric before I cut and sewed it.  Really I did.
--Barbara