the mysteries of life

Posted on May 21, 2013 by paridevita

It’s me yet again; Chess the dog, Chess the purebred border collie, Chess the provider of all the excellent posts on this blog, like “Pictures of Me”, and Chess the frightener of large predatory birds.

Here I am on my walk this morning. You can see that the grass was mowed, just like I said it would be. In a couple of months this will be nothing but weeds. It’s a complete mystery to me.

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I think people are slightly crazy. They seem to have a weed mania, and a mowing mania, and these two manias don’t go well together. Almost no weeds on the left side here. They took down the black fence thing because somebody must have thought it was a good idea to take down the black fence thing. Say, for instance, that someone was thinking of doing something in the field here. They could have re-sown the grass seed on the right side of the field, or take down the black fence thing. They decided to take down the black fence thing.

Our house is off to the left, but you can’t see it. That’s the cottonwood that the guy I live with has posted pictures of from time to time. (He wouldn’t like that last sentence but, really, he should be astounded that a dog can post stuff in the first place.)

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Here I am looking at the other side of the field. Nothing but weeds. Of course, the smooth brome I’m standing on is a weed too, but of a different kind.

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Dogs like tall grass.

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There was something here that I thought was really interesting. I never found out what it was. I spent a long time looking for it, though. Kind of like Whitman, you know, Where is what I started for so long ago/ And why is it yet unfound?

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The guy I live with wasn’t in a Whitmanesque mood and eventually tugged me back on to the path. That might in itself have been Whitmanesque, but I think I was the only one who noticed it.

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I scared a hawk in the field. It flew up on the roof of this shed, as you can see. The hawk was almost as big as I am; it would be as big if I were as small. (The guy I live with insists on me using the subjunctive here.)

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I’m supposed to say that I know this blog is mostly about gardening, and not entirely about me (which would make it the most fascinating of all blogs), and so here’s a plant. The guy I live with says the label says Fritillaria caucasica but it sure looks like Ornithogalum nutans to me. There are people who believe that if you plant a bulb it can come up as something else, but I don’t believe that. I think the label is wrong.

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Here’s another plant. The guy I live with stuck some seed of Biarum carduchorum in the ground last winter, and look what happened. This certainly looks like a baby aroid to me.

Not the violet thing, though. There are these little violets all over the rock garden, and it drives the guy I live with crazy. For someone who’s entered his declining years, that’s not saying much.

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So that was our day. The guy I live with moved more rocks, so now the back yard is filled with flat rocks. It looks, well, different. When people come to the garden they’ll look at the back yard and wonder why there are all these flat rocks lying around.

I wonder too.

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big flat rocks

Posted on May 20, 2013 by paridevita

Okay, it’s me, the dog, Chess, the purebred border collie, once again. You may remember me from such superior posts as “Pictures of Me” and “Watering Day”, and other such epitomes of pure excellence. Here I am in a characteristic pose.

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This is my fort. I spend a lot of time in here, lying on my very comfortable rug from Pottery Barn. Not that I’m spoiled or anything; the guy I live with spilled bleach all over the other side of the rug and so he decided I could have it.

Anyway, the reason I’m doing this post, besides ensuring you of providing the continued excellence which you may have come to expect, is that the guy I live with did something weird to his computer and every time he posted and hit the “save draft” button everything disappeared, which is why the last few posts only had pictures. He’d written a bunch of his usual nonsense and it all vanished just like that. Probably just as well, I say. He claims to have fixed the problem.

Oh, here’s an iris. The rest of the post might make you think there aren’t any plants in the garden, but there are a few. This is Iris iberica subsp. elegantissima from Horasan in eastern Turkey. I looked this up. It’s close to Erzurum, which has a climate similar to Denver’s, but even colder in the winter. I didn’t know there was such a place; I’d probably like it. I know I like turkey and remember that my mommy said there was nothing better than the smell of roasting turkey in the house, but I might be getting confused here. I am intelligent, but, as my mommy used to tell the guy I live with all the time, just a dog. Just a dog, indeed.

Now I’m thinking about food, but I should show the iris, I think. You can see it was sprinkling a little.

052002

Where was I? Oh, right, what I started out talking about. The guy I live with, whom I quite frequently refer to as kind of a nut, has been busy moving big flat rocks around the garden. Many years ago he went to a rock store and ordered a pallet of rocks and didn’t realize they were all flat, and when they were delivered, noticed they were flat, and didn’t know what to do with them, except lay them down flat on the ground. What most people would do, I guess. The only thing is, he didn’t like where they lay, so he moved them around. More than once. Now he’s moving them again. The rocks are really heavy and I’m not exactly sure why he thinks moving them is so important. He might be sad, or maybe he’s looking for “the right place”. I don’t think there is such a thing; I think he’ll just move them around until one day he won’t move them any more and he’ll call the place where they are at that time “the right place”.

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I bet one reason why he thinks moving them is so important is because of the lichen on them.

052004

Some of it is still alive. The guy I live with and my mommy used to pronounce the word “lichen” like they do across the Atlantic, sometimes, to rhyme with “kitchen”, and they thought it was really funny. They thought a lot of things were funny and I imagine other people wondered what they were snickering about all the time. I know he misses her a lot, and so do I; this Friday she will have been gone for four years. He’s been moving these big flat rocks around ever since. It isn’t all that he does, but it’s probably the strangest thing he does. Or one of the strangest things.

The guy I live with does say that big flat rocks are good to put over a patch of weeds, or in a place where you can’t think of anything else to put there, but they’re also really, really heavy, like I said, and now the guy I live with says his back hurts, even though he knows to lift with his legs, which I think means something other than how I’m picturing it. I like turkey legs too, but there aren’t any in the fridge, because the guy I live with bought a bunch of microwaveable Indian food which is all vegetarian so he doesn’t have to cook, and now I can see I’m straying from the subject a lot.

Big flat heavy rocks, that was the subject. This is me helping. You can tell by the expression on my face that I’m wondering if the guy I live with hasn’t lost the rest of his mind. I guess we’ll see.

And that’s that, for today.

052005

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