Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest scary news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Super Genius”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically frightened pose. The weather here has been ultra-scary.It was so scary yesterday that the guy I live with had me try on a Thundershirt worn by the late Chess. It was a little big, but I think it helped me somewhat.

One thing that happened a couple of days ago is that the huge spring above the garage door snapped in two, with a terrific noise, and so the car was stuck in the garage. Not that either of us go many places, except I go to Day Care and the guy I live with visits his friend and goes to the store, and sometimes the two of them go to rock garden meetings and things like that, but he doesn’t need to leave the house to go to work is what I mean.

So yesterday someone came and fixed the garage door. There was an awful lot of loud banging and it cost a bunch of money, but now we can leave the house and drive somewhere if we have too. It felt pretty weird to the guy I live with.

Besides, he was out of coffee.

I hid in my fort the whole time, wearing the Thundershirt, because before that, a storm came from the south. A really scary movie about gardening here could be called It Came From The South. That’s where the bad weather comes from, though not necessarily the most thunder.

And it is May. You know how when a certain time of year rolls around you tend to remember other things that happened at that same certain time of year? Well, May is when the lady of the house died, and when Slipper died, too, and though things have changed for the guy I live with, he still thinks of May, with those things happening and the terrible weather, as being a frightening month, like it’s left some reverberations from the past. So we were together in this one.

Though it was nice enough to go on my morning walk, it was sort of rainy all day long, and then in the afternoon the guy I live with looked online and saw that there was a severe thunderstorm headed right for us. That’s when I was fitted for the Thundershirt.

And it started to rain.

And then, it wasn’t raining. You can hear the guy I live with’s sigh of relief when it let up. You can maybe understand why the guy I live with says he doesn’t care if it rains at all from May until September. It almost always comes with this.

In places to the north they got really big hail, like bigger than a golf ball. The guy I live with said he knew what that felt like and it was pretty bad. There isn’t much you can say to someone who’s just had their garden completely wrecked; that people don’t really want to hear “It will grow back”, even though it will. It’s just not what they want to hear right at that time.

Today was a whole lot better. Gloomy, but not rainy. Some pictures got taken.

Lithodora oleifolia.

new leaves on Cotinus coggygria.

I’m not sure why things have to be so incredibly scary here so much of the time, especially with all the thunder. The guy I live with says that’s the way it is. I think that’s a pretty annoying response, like couldn’t someone do something about the thunder, though I suspect he’s right. He said we still might not have a bad summer, but that if it was a good one, I would be extra-roastingly hot for days on end.

The thing is, if the temperature is under ninety degrees, which is a little over thirty-two Celsius, then we get thunder, hail, and tornadoes. If it’s hot, then nothing happens. It doesn’t rain here when it’s that hot. So the ideal summer would be unrelentingly roastingly hot and dry, even though we purebred border collies super-prefer cooler weather.

The guy I live with did point out that I have a pool to lounge in if I get too hot.

So that’s how things have been going around here. The guy I live with said tomorrow would probably be okay, too. That suits me just fine. I’ll leave you with a picture of me being pensive. The guy I live with says thinking about the future is rarely fruitful, but that it’s okay to think about tomorrow. At least a little bit. 

Until next time, then.