Gardenias

/ wvfurandroot / 6 Comments

Shortly after Mother’s Day, I bought a gardenia bush bearing a label that promised it not only easy to care for, but winter hardy. 

I was dubious.

I don’t know about the winter hardiness yet, but I plopped the bush in the ground and we were promptly hit with hazy, hot and humid weather.  Humid though it was, we missed all the pop-up thunderstorms.  The poor thing roasted.  It turned yellow and I was sure it was dying a gruesome death.

Eventually the rain arrived and outdid itself.  When I walk in the garden there is a clearly audible squishing and sucking sound.

While surveying what is slowly turning into an unplanned pond, I was surprised to find the yellow bits were buds forming.

The gardenia is blooming.  So far, just one perfect flower.  Thus far the gardenia has survived scorching and drowning.

I picked that one perfect flower and the fragrance has scented this entire room to the point that it’s almost overwhelming.

The bush looks ready to burst with multiple blooms. There are at least 30 buds, some still tightly closed and other beginning to unfurl. 

If the gods favor me, it will stop raining soon, my yard will cease to be a mud bog, the heatwave will break and I’ll be able to sit outside and enjoy the blooming. 

I have high hopes of spending an evening in the garden drunk on one of nature’s most glorious scents.

Locking Great Aunt Bertha in the Attic

/ wvfurandroot / 6 Comments

I’ve noticed the more extreme the situation, the more apt I am to use clichés.

All I can say is it is hotter’n’hell and there’s a reason Great Aunt Bertha went insane and had to be locked in the attic.

I am near tears with the misery of this heat and the indignities of menopause.

The lack of air conditioning in my life means I’m focusing on one minute at a time – what I can do to get through the next 60 seconds.

When I left the house this morning, it was 80 degrees at 8:45 a.m. It was 94 when I left work. Besides hot, the area around me is water logged and continues to be under threat of violent thunderstorms. These storms rundle through with great crashes of thunder and lightening. The temperature drops 10 to 15 degrees and then ratchets right back up, more humid than ever. The weather people mutter about stalled fronts and whatnot.

Gills would come in handy about now. I don’t know the biomechanics of such, but I’m certain the body’s processing of a cup of water or so to every breath must entail some wear and tear on the lungs. More than likely, it increases body temperature.

It is only June. This sort of meteorological nightmare shouldn’t emerge until late July or August. If I try to imagine a whole summer of this, I may start screaming and never stop. 60 seconds of life at a time in this heat is all I can manage.

According to all manner of happiness experts, one moment at a time is the best way to live life under any circumstance. I am whining one moment at a time. This is probably not what they meant.

Periodically, I stop to cogitate on how for most of history folks lived without air conditioning and how for a good couple hundred years they did so while wearing a lot of clothes. I keep telling myself I should be thankful that I can strip down to bare skin while refreshing the Weather Channel website in hopes that an updated forecast promising unseasonably cool temperatures will appear.

When my grandmother went through menopause, air conditioning was unheard of and she was forced by societal norms to wear a heap of clothes – bras and girdles and hosiery and slips and gloves and all manner of layers of fabric. In the era before hers, long sleeves and long skirts were de rigueur.

Novels and stories abound about women locked in attics because they went insane and their people had to do something with them. While I don’t know for certain that menopausal women wearing a lot of clothes went crazy and had to be locked in the attic lest they run through town naked and raving was ever a norm, the idea doesn’t seem too far fetched. I do wonder where they got the energy to run.

The big white floor fan and the ceiling fans are the only reason I haven’t been locked in an attic. Well, that and the fact that I don’t have an attic and there’s nobody here to witness my madness.

Thunder has moved into the neighborhood while I wrote this. The temperature inside the house has decreased by a degree or so. I can feel the air freshening. Perhaps, I won’t wake in a pool of sweat later in the night and, even better, maybe I’ll sleep through the night. Maybe, just maybe, this will be the storm that drives the stalled front out of here.

For the next 60 seconds, I will hope and focus on the maybes.

Birthday Balloons

/ wvfurandroot / 2 Comments

It’s Chef Boy “R Mine’s 25th birthday today. 

Until he was 19, I hung balloons over his crib or bed in the middle of the night so he could wake to a visible reminder that the new day was his birthday.

Once he moved out-of-state this birthday ritual proved more challenging.  Most years I managed in one way or another though not always over his bed.  This year I’m relying on a florist to at least get to his porch.  Twenty-five balloons weighted by chocolate chip cookies are supposed to be delivered before noon today.

I’ve said it before – the day he was born was the best day of my life.

Monday Morning Gift

/ wvfurandroot / 3 Comments

The elegant black of fresh paving.

It’s like Christmas!

Actually, this good news is going to make Christmas less stressful.

I’m so excited I could tap dance if I knew how.

The post office has repaved the parking lot.

Yes, indeedy, yee-haw and Snoopy dancing.

Getting into and out of the post office parking lot is a feat of derring-do that is responsible for my forehead crease becoming permanently deep. My derring-do isn’t daring enough as the adrenalin rush of surviving that parking lot is not the adrenalin rush of victory but that of a near-death experience.

I collect the mail for my place of employment. Five days a week I brave the demolition derby of the Veteran’s Boulevard Post Office. Contrary to stereotype, the folks that work there are downright nice and helpful, but before I can get to them, I have to brave the onslaught of the confused trying to negotiate what seems to me pretty straightforward travel lanes and parking lines.

There’s one old woman who I forgive most of her transgressions while simultaneously appalled that her driver’s license hasn’t been revoked. She’s not particularly short, but she’s so stooped she can’t sit up straight. Consequently, she appears to be one of those little old ladies who can’t see over the steering wheel. Come to think of it, she probably can’t see as she wears coke-bottle thick glasses and strains to read the printing on her mail.

She and I arrive about the same time of the morning. The days I’m behind her when she negotiates the right-hand turn into the parking lot closely followed by another right-hand turn into the handicapped accessible parking space are the days I want to bang my head on the dashboard. I want to do so not because I have no patience with her, but because sure as iceberg lettuce at a ladies luncheon, the person behind me will develop road rage.

Road Rager will, as soon as even an inch or so space opens up, drive around me only to slam on the brakes when learning, suddenly, that Daisy-in-need-of-a-Driver must back up and pull forward a half dozen times before she concludes she has the car properly parked.

While Daisy is negotiating the well-faded lines demarking the parking space, the demolition derby continues unabated in the remainder of the lot. Let me just a draw a picture so y’all can understand the problem.

OK, so I can't draw. Get over it.

If you study the photograph closely, you’ll see that lines, faded though they may be, demarcate a flippin’ nightmare of a traffic pattern. Under the best of circumstances, the parking lot is fraught with potential mayhem. Factor in lines that have faded to almost nothing, the impatience of the average American, and Miss Daisy trying to navigate around the jerks who are so special they needn’t park in an actual spot. (I always wonder if Miss Daisy glares at the jerks while the Road Rager is glaring at her.)

Further, after last winter, the lot had a fair number of potholes and crumbling macadam which provoke swerving and, otherwise, driving where it was not intended for folks to drive.

The drop boxes also provoke confusion. Folks don’t see, don’t read, or don’t care about the One-Way and Do-Not-Enter signs helpfully, but fruitlessly, provided at the entrance and exit to the Parking Lot from Hell. Daily, someone will pull in the out, pull up to the drop box, do all sorts of contortions to drop the mail into the box from the wrong side of the car, and then attempt to go out the in. If Miss Daisy is still trying to get her car into her parking space it can get ugly.

During the peak mailing days of the Christmas Season, all my Fa La La begins to channel The Grinch. April 15th is really a headache, because folk are well irritated before they even get to the post office. And for some reason, the back-to-school period of late August and early September is a busy time.

I always park as far away as I can thus protecting the car, but endangering my body as I try to traverse the distance without acquiring a need for traction.

My car has been hit 6 times in this parking lot – 5 of them while I was correctly parked and in the post office fraternizing with the hired help. I have been nearly run over more times than I can count as I tried to negotiate the derby while walking across the lot.

When I drove in this morning (two cars in front of Miss Daisy), the beauty of fresh black paving lit my soul from within and I fairly skipped to our post office box where I found Daisy working assiduously to get her key into her box. ‘Mornin’,” I said. She didn’t hear me, but I swear her back was a bit straighter and I’m convinced it was due to her happiness about the paving.

I went and talked to the clerks. I need to point out here that lines have not yet been painted on the new paving. I told them I wanted flashing red, LED lit lines, speed bumps, and concrete barriers. They told me that probably wasn’t going to happen. Still, I’m tickled at the mere possibility that a new traffic pattern could be in the works. Contrary to popular belief, it takes so little to make me happy.