the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about more changes.  You may remember me from such posts as “A Windy Interlude”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I was busy chasing a rabbit out of the garden. I got an extra treat for being so efficient and yet nonviolent. Here I am eating my Ark Natural toothbrush deal. I really like these a lot.

In the last week, things were one way, and now they’re another way. The guy I live with said this is how things are. I do notice the changes, even though I rarely have an opinion, unless it’s something super different, like when I went to camp.

Some of the grass in the field was still green a couple of days ago.  Those are my feet at the top of the picture.
This is right behind my back yard.
The grass is usually brown at this time of year.

We have geese now.
The sky is full of constant honking. The guy I live with said there are more Canada geese than people along the Front Range in winter.

I also saw two pairs of glowing eyes on my walk a few evenings ago. I could see them even before the eyes glowed in the guy I live with’s headlamp.
He said they were “trash pandas”. Maybe a not nice, but funny name for raccoons.

Something pretty unexpected happened a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been a little hard for me to accept.
The guy I live with said he was “suddenly Italian”, and so he’s been cooking Italian food, watching cooking videos in Italian, and even talking in the language (some, anyway) since he studied it in college.
This is baked rigatoni from Marcella Hazan’s cookbook. Not swimming in sauce like it might be in this country. He used Rummo mezzi rigatoni with a bechamel sauce and homemade ragù.
He said it was good. He’s also eaten more broccoli rabe in the last couple of weeks than all the other vegetables he’s eaten in the last year. I’m afraid he might turn into broccoli rabe, but his said his eye doctor told him to eat more green vegetables.

And I have to hear things like this, from time to time:
Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria.
This is a very famous quotation from Dante’s Inferno, lines from which, believe it or not, the guy I live with can recite in the original Italian.
The quote means “No greater grief, than to remember happy times, in misery.”
Well, this is like an obvious motto for people who are grieving.

Which kind of elegantly leads me into other events of the past week. I already talked about the Christmas box.
Maybe a day later the guy I live with was rummaging around in another, fancier box, and found some things he thought might create some “holiday cheer”.
He found the sleighbells, which he had forgotten about; they were tucked into the lowest drawer in the box.
His wife used to hang them on the doorknob, like this.
The guy I live with said the sleighbells would be our holiday decoration. Very minimalist, don’t you think?

This didn’t last very long at all; maybe a day. The guy I live with said this seemed too forced or something, and I didn’t like the sleighbells at all.  Not even slightly. They were really loud, and scary when they jingled.
His friend came over last week and he gave the sleighbells to her.

And now, just like that, everything seems much better.
No more trying to recapture the past with hollow gestures like this. Instead, we’ll just have Opera Day every weekend.

The final change this week is an even bigger deal, and a very welcome change it is.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me noticing this change, this morning.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you kind of a difficult post. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “Snow Upon Snow”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I was really waiting super-patiently to go on my walk. I got to go, of course.

So, anyway, the guy I live with has been talking about getting rid of some things for quite a while. The new recycling container started him on this adventure, I guess.

A few days ago he offered some of his wife’s Christmas ornaments to one of our neighbors, and he brought two boxes to their house. One box was a fancy heavy-duty cardboard box that used to have telephone equipment in it, and back in those days they would just throw away those boxes, so he took one home, and his wife made it into an ornament box, complete with handles and compartments and stuff.
He told his neighbors they could have the box, but yesterday, their kids returned both boxes, and the guy I live with was suddenly very glad they didn’t take the box.
“It is just a box”, he said, “but still…”

He’s going to offer the rest of the ornaments to some other neighbors, who said they were interested. (The guy I live with did save the first ornaments his wife bought, from Smith and Hawken, and these are in an even fancier box she made.)

And he decided to get rid of a bunch of old photographs that were downstairs in a shoebox. He had never looked at these before.
He shredded most of them, but saved a few.

He posted pictures of the two marionettes his wife made, on Facebook, but I’m going to show them here, too.
She carved all the wood and made all the costumes.
Then there were pictures of dogs and cats.

This is Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here. This was taken when he was little.
And this is Pooka, the second purebred border collie who lived here. The guy I live with said Pooka always had a worried look on his face. Like he was thinking of something far away and very sad.

When the guy I live with met his wife (she wasn’t his wife yet, but they got married four months after they met), he had cats. I know this is hard to believe, especially for me.
This is Mister Pipo. He always had something to say, according to the guy I live with. His name was pronounced peepo.
This is New Kitty. The guy I live with said that was a very original name.
And here are two cats in a basket.

You know how people always say, like with the pictures, “You might want to look at those some day”; the guy I live with is so not one of those people. He doesn’t save wood and bricks and stuff just because he “might use them some day”, though there are lots of people like that, and they’re usually the ones who say silly stuff like this. Or “they might be worth something some day”.
He gave away most of his library after his wife died, and doesn’t miss them. He gave away about two thousand LPs, and doesn’t miss those either. (He sold the valuable ones, first.) And he gave away almost all of his books on gardening and botany. And all the old maps.

But then he came upon this, which he had never seen before. (Except in real life, forty-one years ago.) I could tell how this made him feel just by his reaction to it.
He is definitely going to keep this picture, and find a nice frame for it.

That’s the news for today. We haven’t done much gardening, because it’s kind of cold, though if you count filling bird feeders, then, yes, there has been some work in the garden.
I’ll leave you with a very atmospheric picture of me on my evening walk.

Until next time, then.