Blooming Lilacs and a Runny Nose

Blooming Lilacs and a Runny Nose

Blooming Lilacs and a Runny Nose

I have fifteen-foot-tall lilac bushes running down one side of my property line, and they’re gloriously in bloom this morning. It’s not eight yet, and the temperature is a balmy, sitting-on-the-porch-in-shirtsleeves sixty degrees. The sun is shining. The grackles are searching for bugs in the grass by the street. The puppy is lounging on the wicker sofa next to me.

I love my life.

Yesterday, I put the garden in. Such an old-fashioned phrase. I planted five varieties of tomatoes, and put their protective green wall-o-water hats on them. Since I started them indoors way back in March, they’re pretty tall, so I buried them deep where those early leaves can become nice sturdy roots. I also planted a couple of Italian melon plants, and an Italian eggplant, also in the wall-o-water hats. I can’t say enough good things about Seeds from Italy where I bought the melon and eggplant seeds, as well as arugula and basil seeds — the basil and arugula are coming up great guns, and this morning I had a little toast with goat cheese and fresh arugula out of my garden for breakfast. (Just writing that gives me a squidgy feeling, how precious, but on the other hand, something cool is happening in America when the goat cheese is local here in Montana).

I also built pea trellises out of copper plumbing pipe — they look really nice, and I’m looking forward to them turning nice and green. The soldering iron the hardware store guy sold me didn’t work, so I just threw in the towel and put them together with some nice thin strips of duct tape — it looks just like a weld from afar, and it’s not like I’m running water through them. So, I’ve got two kinds of peas planted, some haricots verts and some French flageolet beans. Its starting to look like a real garden out there, not just a bunch of big wooden boxes filled with dirt.

And my nose is running. I don’t know if it’s the lilacs, or the trees leafing out, or perhaps the drifts of hair my two dogs and one cat are shedding all over the house, but since I really hate the drugs they give you for this stuff — they either make me sleepy and stupid or so wired I can’t see straight — so I’m just wandering around my lovely yard with a box of kleenex. It’s not that big a deal, really. Who cares about a runny nose when you’ve got forty feet of blooming lilacs?

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