making a list …

Hi, it’s me again, the dog, Chess. You may remember me from posts like “dogs” and “still no lightbulb”. I like it a lot better when posts are about me, but this is really embarrassing. You can tell how I feel about this just by looking.

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Here I am trying to accept my situation.

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This is his way of “feeling seasonal”. To make me look like an idiot, I guess.

My mommy made things really seasonal around here, and if you want to see was she was like, there’s a blog called Nordic Thoughts which is so much like my mommy that it makes the guy I live with really sad, though he says the person who makes the blog is a “kindred spirit”. It’s really beautiful, too.

The guy I live with has an affliction. He told me what it was, and if you wait a minute I’ll have him spell it for me again. Okay, it’s “hyperacquisitivosus plantorum“. He says to put that in italics, so I will, but just between you and me, I think he’s making this all up. I said before that he was kind of a nut, and if the pictures I just showed don’t prove it, well, then this thing he says he has surely does.

This is what he says this is. I see him writing and writing on pieces of paper, and looking at the computer, and writing more, and then taking the eraser and rubbing the paper, then getting out the calculator and pressing buttons, then erasing more, then tearing up the paper and starting again. I know what he’s doing. He’s ordering seeds. I just know it. And he says that’s what the affliction is, and that there’s no cure.

This is his stash of what he says are “B.E.F. Grower’s Pots”, for the seeds.  He says they cost twenty five cents apiece about twenty five years ago. That would buy a lot of toys for me.

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I keep telling him that I have to move around in the garden, but he keeps ordering seeds. Maybe they won’t come up and I’ll be able to move from here to there, more. And anyway his seed frames are already full from last year. He explained that some of the seeds don’t always come up the first year so the seeds stay out in the frames for another winter. Why not just order the seeds in the second year, then? I think this is totally weird but there are a lot of plants in the garden so he must know something. Maybe.

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One other thing I keep telling him is that it’s kind of dumb to put out seeds for the birds and put out other seeds that he thinks they won’t eat too. Isn’t that really dumb? We have lots of birds here and this one (I made him take this picture just to jog his memory) is really pretty but it digs in the garden a lot. He’s says that’s okay but somehow I don’t really think he thinks that.

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He says I told him to take these next two pictures. His sense of humor is really refined, isn’t it?

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bark of cercocarpus ledifolius

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bark of arctostaphylos patula

I made him feel so bad about making me look like a complete idiot that here I am again in my regular clothes. The guy I live with said I better not keep him awake all night, listening for Santa, but I might do it anyway.

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first day of winter

I woke up this morning and discovered I was still here. The dog, too. He had his breakfast, we went on our walk, saw no one, and I began to wonder….So I went to the bank, and there were people there. What a relief. I could go back home, and do some gardening.

The gardening I was planning to do took the form of sawing, and I still couldn’t help wondering what kind of mindless weirdo believes in this end-of-the-world stuff, when that little, teeny tiny rational part of my brain, that part not much larger than a pinhead, said to the rest of me “What kind of mindless weirdo grows dead plants?”

This is, or was, an Amur maple, Acer ginnala. All of the main trunks are completely dead. As is evident, it takes up a considerable amount of space in the little shade garden on the north side of the house. It’s been dead for several years. Why is it still here?

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I suspect it was struck by lightning; the spiral gash is, as they say, a sign.

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Then, moving to the northeast corner of the yard, a disgraceful mess of dead chokecherries. Live chokecherries are bad enough–the birds eat the berries and leave bright purple poops all over the flagstone–but are dead ones an improvement?

(The little tree that’s wrapped is Crataegus coccinioides, destined to replace this mess.)

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Now over in the other corner, the southwest one, is a large tree-like shrub, the New Mexican locust, Robinia neomexicana. This has been dead for over ten years. New locusts have sprung up near it, but the dead one is extremely noticeable, especially in the summer when everything else around it has leaves.

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I sometimes pretend it’s not in my yard, since it’s an effort to get back to the area in which it’s growing. I have all my extra wood organized there. I have a collection of old pallets that “might be worth something someday”.

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