Alarm clocks are no longer a big thing in this house. There was time when every day — minus (maybe) Sunday was an alarm day. Garry didn’t need a clock. His head knew when he should get up, but I needed to at least set the clock, even if I woke up before it went off.
We got up. We didn’t whine about it either. It was one of Garry’s more lovable traits that if he had to get up, he just did it. He didn’t go into the rolling over and crying for mercy from on high because it was too early. He knew that when you had to get up, do it. No amount of begging would help.
For the last week, there have been “things to do” in the morning. People to see and call. Wait for so when they don’t show up, you can start trying to figure out what happened, then do it again.
The last time I had to do this — to meet the guy who is supposed to fix our front door — he neglected to arrive. It was also the day of James Comey’s Senate testimony. When the guy didn’t show up, I — at least — had another reason for getting myself moving. We rescheduled for today … and here I am.
Triumph is the day’s theme. It’s hard to find anything about which to feel genuinely triumphant, except maybe that this is the second day of bright sunshine in a region that has been starving for sun. I would have preferred a period of cooler weather before the real heat of summer hit, but you don’t get choices with weather. It does what it does and you are glad if it isn’t dropping a few feet of snow, blowing a gale, or doing a whole “torrential rain” thing.
It’s going to be a hot one today, probably mid nineties. I’m trying to decide if I should turn on the air conditioning now, or wait until it gets truly unpleasant. There’s always the “save money on electricity and wait until you have no choice” versus the “do it now and keep the house cool from the start” option. I’m tempted to cool it down n the hopes of eliminating some of the ragweed that’s drifting through the air.
While I was out yesterday, contemplating our lack of flowers, we got ourselves in gear in the latter part of the afternoon and went to the local nursery in Mendon for some flowers. No one had flowers in their garden, but the ragweed is in full bloom. Swell.
Usually, I can buy flowers in town. There’s a small flower shop. Not a nursery, but it sells beautiful plants on racks and on tables for a few months in the spring and later in the fall. I think they have a nursery outside of town. Not this year, though. Too cold, too rainy. And the stuff the grocery store is selling looks depressed and raggedy.
To be fair, the stuff at the nursery only looked a bit better. It hasn’t been a good year for the flowers. The complete lack of lilies and roses in my yard is a clear indicator of that. Maybe the flowers are politically depressed, too. I spent a good couple of hours yesterday taking some pictures and hoping to find some buds at least. A few lily buds, nothing noteworthy on the roses. And these are hedge roses. They always bloom. Always. It’s their thing. Blooming and growing the ugliest, sharpest, barbed-wire thorns on earth.
Triumph is not the word of the day or the week or the year. There’s been nothing triumphant about 2017 in the U.S. It’s been a depressing grind, with ugly politics and ugly politicians. Too much rain, too much heat. Too much or too little of just about everything from the turning of the year to today.
I’m counting on the warm weather to somehow make it better. Owen is cutting the grass and I can smell it from here, that wonderful scent of green in the air. I’ve got two orange, hanging begonias out back. I wanted fuchsias, but they really wanted to offload these begonias — I must have looked like someone who could nurse an ailing plant back to life. They had caterpillars on them and I spent a miserable few minutes removing caterpillars, spraying poison, adding fertilizer, watering, and trying to make these sad plants perk up. They’re out on my back porch hooks. I may go back for at least one real fuchsia. A summer without them is like … well … a summer without fuchsias!
