Same Plants, But Always a Different Garden

So! I spent the last month being saintly and virtuous, and I am fucking sick of it and would like to be a complete bitch for a couple of weeks. Make caustic remarks! Reduce people to tears! Send a few people scurrying to therapists! Slash and burn!

This is more difficult to accomplish than you might imagine since I am surrounded by people who view me with great affection. Even my more outrageous outbursts are met with gentle amusement.

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The garden is in its last gasp for the season. Maybe one more tomato harvest. Several pepper harvests since the pepper plants are (ulp!) still blooming. And the Swiss chard is still magnificent.

But when I got back from Ithaca, all my vines had withered and died. The cucumbers and the cantaloupes. And the beet greens are dying. And the basil—which never stopped flowering all summer long no matter how often I cut it back—is finally going to seed.

The marigolds are running riot, though. My garden looks like Semana Santa in Antigua! I plant marigolds because bees like them but other insects don’t, so they’re a natural pesticide. Last summer, they grew decorously in a border around the garden, but this summer, they’ve erupted into thick bushes.

It’s so odd how it’s the same plants. But always a different garden.

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I’m babying myself.

I should be working. Turns out being saintly and virtuous requires serious bank. The coffers are not quite to the red alert point, but they are low.

But I don’t want to work.

I don’t want to do anything.

I want to lie on my bed and read Gone With the Wind—which it turns out, I may not have read before, at least not the unabridged version, and which despite its ridiculous portrayals of happy house darkies and defense of the KKK, is a brilliant novel with Atlanta siege scenes that rival any fall of Moscow in War and Peace.

And when my eyes get tired of deciphering print, I want to scan endless episodes of Outlander ‘cause, you know, hot soft porn! Gorgeous young white guys in kilts!

All this lolling about is a luxury I really cannot afford.

But it’s a luxury I’m going to give myself anyway.

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I do have to do some serious cooking today, though. Those 50 pounds of tomatoes in my fridge are not gonna turn themselves into tomato sauce on their own.