How Does Your Garden Grow?

I hope it grows green and bright and pretty....... Our gardeners finished the front garden late this afternoon, after a full day's work. They were here early, and the weather was kind-- it didn't start to really rain till they were nearly done, and they just kept going. We had bouts of thunder during the afternoon, and dark clouds all day long, but no major rain till the job was done.

Boxwoods are now lined up in front of the house, with a second row of Indian Hawthorns. The other rows are impatiens and begonias, and the topsoil is covered with cypress mulch. With all the high red-tipped shrubs gone, the yard and the garden look so much bigger. Not that it was small to begin with, but those thirty-year-old bushes were long past their prime and really took up more space in the garden than need be.

The Quackernackle Choir (my four little ceramic ducks) now have a new spot..... I took the wrought-iron staircase-shaped planter out of the garden, since it looked ridiculous without the larger shrubs behind it. The Choir is now singing around a concrete urn that's filled with pink impatiens. The tiniest member of the Choir is sitting right up in the urn under his umbrella of pink flowers. Very cute, if I do say so myself.

Three days from start to finish with the garden...... so glad to have it all done.... they all worked very hard. Stringing holiday lights should be interesting come December.... the shrubs won't have grown much by then, I'm sure. They're about two-feet tall now, and their maximum height is five feet, but I don't know how fast they'll be growing.


The phone rang this afternoon and it was our young friend C, with a question for me. First, she asked me if I remembered "way back when" she was in second and third grade and we would read together. I told her that of course I remembered.... how could I forget? That's how I first met C--- when I was a reading tutor at the local elementary school and she was one of my second-graders.

C's request was for "more reading time." She wanted to know if she could come over here after school so we could read together. "And we're reading 'Romeo and Juliette' soon.... don't you think that would be fun to read?" I told her it would indeed be fun to read, and of course she could come over here after school. I suggested that she call first, to make sure I'm home on any given day, being that I'm in and out a lot of the time. (When four gardeners aren't in the front garden, that is.)

C also told me that she'll be going for a part-time job interview -- as a summer lifeguard in the subdivision-park's swimming pool. C just loves the water, swims like a fish, and has already taken a CPR course, so I'm sure they'll think she's perfect for that job.

I can see that the special little spark is back with C, now that she knows they don't have to move to Vegas. She's already making plans for the summer, and even told me that she'll be getting her learner's permit when school ends and she intends to hold me to my promise of teaching her to drive. (That wasn't a promise that I had any intention of breaking, I assured her.)

Nice to know that all is once again well in C's fifteen-year-old life.