Just Call Me The Plant Murderer

For the most part, I am competent in the garden. I can identify plants and plant families and my stuff generally looks good and blah, blah, blah. Some would say I have a "green thumb."

I am here to tell you there is no such thing. Anybody who says there is? LIAR!

Conversely, there is no such thing as a "black thumb." There's the ability to figure out what is making a plant unhappy and knowing how to fix it, perhaps, but it's not like there's some invisible plant mojo that some people have that others don't.

Here, let me prove it, if only so it can make one or two people feel better about the dead stuff in their yards.

I have seventeen identical rose bushes in our front yard. They look absolutely amazing this year.

Photos really don't do them justice. Seriously, they're stunning right now. While I have carefully pruned them, amended the soil around them, and whispered sweet nothings in their . . . uh . . . leaves, I can't take credit for how good they look. If I did, I'd have to take the blame for this:

Rose bush Number 18 is sad. Like, REALLY sad. I'm probably going to have to replace it which WAAAAAH! The roses on either side of it? Happy. Last week it looked fine. A little on the small side, but fine. Then it got its panties in a wad and now I have no idea what it is so cranky about. There is it, mysteriously dying while surrounded by life.

Another mystery is this hydrangea:

I've probably had that thing ten years. It survived two moves, including one that came with a year of living in a kiddy pool. And, yet, it just decided not to come back this spring. Last fall it was huge and covered with blooms. Now? Nada.

Or, how about the Boxwood Dilemma? I have about 40 of them lining our front landscaping. Most of them are really quite healthy, but there are a couple that got bad frostbite this spring and decided to just give up.

There is no logic that can explain how a bush that is here can be fine while another one that is over there, a whopping six inches away, is suicidal. NO LOGIC.

Some other mysterious deaths include my delphinium which just plain vanished over the winter (I'm blaming all of that cold, miserable weather) and the purple variety of these:

There were two purple ones directly in front of that pink one. They were all intermingled last year, but this year the purple is gone. The pink is HUGE and happy, but no purple. WTH?

Lest you think my garden is full of failures, there are plenty of unexplainable successes as well. Like, these daisies:

I planted them from seed last spring with the thought that even if only one survived, the $1 for the seed packet was better than buying a full-grown potted shasta daisy for $10. Instead of just one, though, I have 20 . . . maybe 30? I have a hella lot of daisies is what I have.

And then there is my friend the peonies. I have three varieties of them, but I couldn't tell you which is what because they haven't bloomed in FIFTEEN YEARS. Seriously, I've had them that long. I know that they don't bloom because I move them too much and because I have a bad habit of planting them too deeply. But even when I try crazy hard to fix those two little issues, still no blooms. Until this year.

I literally did a happy dance when I saw that the blooms on that sucker had opened. A real, true, actual happy dance. Our neighbors must find me SO amusing, which I suppose is better than if they thought I was insane. Which they probably do. (They might be right.)

See? The people who you think have a green thumb manage to kill plants, too. Except, I prefer to blame the plant because, seriously, I did NOTHING to piss off that rose bush. Dammit.

Nobody Ever Said I Had Common Sense As A Kid

Ever watch a kid doing something and instantly wish you had a DeLorean so you could travel back in time and punch yourself for doing the same thing when you were a kid? No? Just me?

Oh.

Well, I do it a lot. Every single time Alexis balances on the couch arms and swings her legs all around in the air, I hear my mother yelling at me. "GET DOWN before you break the couch!" I'd still be willing to call her bluff that anything I did would break the couch, but the fact that I could have broken my face acting like a goober is quite the revelation.

Then there's that sassy mouth thing that Alexis has going on. When she starts talking back, I feel the apple falling off of the tree and landing on my foot. On it's way down, I think the apple mutters something about "karma" and "paybacks" and "getting what you deserve." I'm not positive because I'm always too busy thinking about how I should have had my mouth sewn shut when I pulled some of the same crap.

However, perhaps my most face-slapping worthy moment came to me this past weekend as Alexis and several other neighbor kids did this:

I had completely forgotten about The Slip-n-Slide Shenanigans. Or blocked them from my memory. Whichever.

As Alexis and her friends took turns running across the yard and launching themselves down the plastic, I remembered doing the exact same thing with friends as a kid. So many things were the same. Our current neighborhood is somehow reminiscent of the neighborhood where I lived from 4th grade on. You know, if you swap out the run-down mobile homes with new 3000 square foot McMansions, but who cares about details like that? We've got the same middle-of-nowhere-yet-close-to-town thing going on, and that's what counts.

Some of Alexis' neighborhood friends are a bit older than her and some are younger. There are boys and girls, sisters and brothers, and generally just a great mix of completely dissimilar kids who manage to share a common love of fun. The same can easily be said for the kids I hung out with back in the day.

One thing that is different, however, is that we never really had a good yard for a Slip-n-Slide. They pretty much require grass, and that's something that was mostly lacking in my neighborhood. There was lots of dirt and mud and weeds, but nobody had a great lawn. And, really, you HAVE to have a decent lawn for a Slip-n-Slide.

So we improvised.

And used the Slip-n-Slide indoors.

IN. A. HOUSE. (Technically a double-wide trailer, but whatever.)

It wasn't an adult-supervised activity, obviously. It was a little something that sort of maybe kind of happened when Rhonda's parents were at work. We would roll out the Slip-n-Slide in their living room, use pitchers and cups to haul water over to it, and slide. In the living room.

I really need to go find 12-year old me and slap her for that crap.

You Are My Witness

Jasmine, Cassie, Ella, Ashley, Jenna, and Lily have been the subject of far too many conversations lately. The six hypothetical future daughters that Alexis has scripted into her hypothetical life story have not-so-hypothetically become a pain in my ass. The fact that Alexis is more than willing to proclaim that she's going to allow them to do anything they want isn't exactly a subtle indicator that she has become fed up with rules and restrictions and with me saying, "No."

I grew tired of hearing about their hypothetically perfect lives over the long weekend, so I went to war. Yes, I went to war with my hypothetical grandchildren. SHOOSH. I know it's insane.

Every time Alexis brought up Jasmine, Cassie, Ella, Ashley, Jenna, and Lily, I made it a point to say that NO WAY would I ever be babysitting. Of course, Alexis responded by telling me that was fine because she wanted to spend all of her time with them. Always one to throw the kid's logic in the toilet, I boldly told her that there was NO WAY she would want to be around them because kids who always get what they want turn out to be evil, snot-nosed brats.

Alexis was befuddled by this news.

She pondered it for an entire day, occasionally asking questions and trying to find holes in my logic. When she couldn't find a way to debunk my theory, she grew annoyed. REAL ANNOYED.

"But I don't want my daughters to be bad," she said over and over again.

"Well, that's part of why rules exist," I told her. "Rules are there to keep people safe and so that they don't get too spoiled."

Alexis was far from amused, but it didn't stop her from telling me how she was going to buy Jasmine, Cassie, Ella, Ashley, Jenna, and Lily as many Barbies as they want.

"You aren't going to have any money to buy anything for yourself," I told her.

"I don't care. I want my daughters to be happy," she responded.

If there had been a wall in the vicinity when she said that, it would now have a hole in it exactly the same shape and size as my head.

Back and forth we went, all weekend long. At some point, Alexis got the bright idea that she could use her Brat Voice with me as she argued with me over whether or not she had to clean up all of the books in her bedroom right that minute. As she predictably told me that she will never make her daughters pick up their books, I noted that I didn't appreciate her tone of voice. "I don't let you do everything you want and listen to how you talk to me. Can you imagine how mean your daughters are going to be to you?"

THAT was the poison that got her. Alexis looked absolutely crushed as she pondered being on the receiving end of sass and attitude.

Not long after, Alexis sat poking at some mulch in the garden. She had planted some sunflower seeds and was looking to see if they had started to grow yet. She seemed awfully sulky, so I asked her what was going on.

"Momma," she said. "I don't want my daughters to be bad."

"Well," I said, "What are you going to do about it?"

"I'm going to do everything the same as you do," she told me. "You're a good momma."

HEAR YE, HEAR YE! Let it be known that on the 29th day of May at approximately 3:00 pm, Alexis declared that I was, "a good momma." And now that I have it written in a place where the world can witness her proclamation, I will ABSOLUTELY be printing this out and shoving it in her face when she decides to tell me I'm a terrible person in about ten years.

BOOYAH!