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.
the miserable gardener 