These tulips are so very spectacular. I wait for them every year and take as many photos as they will allow! They turn from barely pink to glorious pink as they mature. What a gift for my spring garden.
I have a serious condition. I don’t know if it is psychological or physical. Probably a little of both. It occurs throughout the Spring, Summer and Fall each year.
Here are my symptoms: I open the back door and go outside to get a _______. Let’s say I was filling my bird feeder. I see a weed that needs digging up. I go into the garage and retrieve the bucket in which I carry my gardening tools. I carry it out into the yard and use the knife I have marked just for this occasion to dispatch with the offensive weed. Then I see a flower that needs deadheading and I take care of that, including all offending spent blooms within my field of vision. Then I notice that this lily needs staking, and hadn’t I wanted to secure that rose to that trellis, then, then, then…
I have named this practice Accidental Gardening. I don’t have a word for the condition that causes it. It is a dangerous condition. Was I frying an egg when I walked out side? Did I have an appointment? Were there cookies in the oven, potatoes boiling on the stove? When my children were young did they need watching? Might they have been hungry?
I one time overflowed the sink in my bathroom when I walked outside to hug Susie off after one of her visits. When I came inside a ten-foot square patch of lawn was devoid of crabgrass, but the ceiling in my basement was dripping! Oh, for Pete’s sake. After earlier assuring a friend that I was absolutely going to pick her up at 1:00 to take her to an appointment, the cutie pie youngest child of my new neighbors came over to make a hopscotch game with sidewalk chalk on my driveway. We played, she went home for lunch, I started accidental gardening in my back yard and, you guessed it! My friend had to change her appointment.
What is wrong with me? What can be done? Is there a cure?
When I am in the grips of my gardening affliction alternative responsibilities and thoughts simply fly out of my head. I am in a gardening trance. And so far as I know there is no approved drug (with many side effects) to cure me. I am left to my own devices. Do I pause after that first weed and collect my thoughts, scrambled as they are? I do now. At least I try. Last week I saved a yummy vegetable omelet by stopping to think. I do not leave the kitchen when that last batch of cookies is in the oven. I check my ridiculously sparse schedule with a consistency which is borderline manic.
I keep my phone in my pocket, my earbuds engaged. Yet, I am fully aware that nothing can be done. There is no cure. For certainly you can understand that some of those overgrown Lilies-of-the-valley in the front should be transplanted into the back. And the weeds coming up through the bricks by the trash cans need to go away. And the dead branches on the weigela need pruning, and…
I’m hopeless.