Today was a perfect day for gardening.  What?  You didn’t know I was a Master Gardener?  Well, that’s because I’m not.  I’m a wannabe.  In fact, I’m a pretty poor wannabe gardener at that.  I don’t even study to see what I should be doing with my plants and I don’t really so much ask for help.  Okay, it’s even worse than that, I don’t even know what some of the plants are in my yard.  As gardening goes, I’m pretty pathetic. 

But today, I decided to change all that.  I had a few bucks in my pocket that I’d set aside for the purchase of two Honeysuckle vines and the red tipped Photinia that I’d been wanting all summer.  I know, I know, they should have been put in the ground in late May or June and given all summer to grow, but I didn’t have the money then.  (Remember my car troubles?  See previous posts if you are new to this station.  Hee!Hee!)  So, today, after dropping Number 1 off at her housecleaning/babysitting job, I took Numbers 2,3, and 4 out to donuts and coffee.  Okay, they had the donuts I had the coffee, see? Not the healthiest breakfast, but after scraping the change canister dry it was clear we’d have just enough to make a little bit of a memory.  A breakfast memory that didn’t include my burnt eggs and soggy French toast was a welcome thought to the kids and a much needed break for me.  So, we dropped off Number 1 and headed for our favorite pastry place.

After we received our delicacies and only being $6 poorer, we headed to our (okay, my) favorite plant and garden store.  I let the girls go explore the pond and the frogs, while my son pulled the wagon and lifted the plants in for me.  He’s quite the helper that way.  It didn’t take long for me to make my selections, after all, it’s pretty easy to go through $30 (my limit) at a store like that.  Ahhhh, so many plants, so little money and garden space.  Sigh.  So, after making our purchases, and wishing I was about 5 years ago richer, we headed home. 

This is where the trouble began.  Or the fun, or the comedy, however you choose to veiw it.  My son and I easily decided where to place the new plants.  Heck, there were only three of them and I have massive amounts of chain link fence that I am trying to use as a trellis for flowering evergreen vines.  I also have massive amounts of fencing that I hope to cover with colorful evergreen plants that will quickly grow large enough to provide a screen for me so my neighbors cannot pop their heads over my fence and see me sunbathing topless in my backyard.  Okay, never mind that I don’t really sunbathe topless unless I know everyone in the neighborhood is gone on vacation, but, still I don’t like the idea of anyone, especially the little old geezer next door to me (sweet as he is) popping his head over while I’m in my tanning attire.  And, about the topless thing, I’m in the direct flight path to the airport so, several times a day jets fly over my house so low I can almost make out faces in the windows.  No, sorry, I’m not into providing free entertainment, even if it would border on horror, to all the airline passengers coming into my hometown. 

But, of course, putting plants in the ground is never as simple as just digging a hole and dropping them in.  First, I got distracted.  I have creeping roses that I had to trim back, then, somehow, blackberry bushes from the neighbor’s yard had creeped in and were choking out the wimpy grape vines that the ex moved when he took down the grape arbor…and never replaced it.  That’s a project I’ll tackle one of these summers, but not this summer!  The blackberry thorny things had to go.  They were causing my son grief everytime he mowed the lawn and were only serving to make a mess of that one section of the fence.  Granted, it was a nice, green, mess, but the brambles where not the kind of screen I was thinking of when I was envisioning increased privacy.  I took the forlorn little clippers I have (they are my best gardening friends) and begain whacking away.  Well, as you can imagine, I didn’t stop with just the blackberry bushes, there where roses, and dead daylilly blooms, and, well, I went on a trimming frenzy.  My son, who is usually the one responsible for cleaning up the trimmings said, “See, Mom, this is why I hate it when you start trimming stuff.  You just go crazy!” 

So, I took a break for lunch, checked emails, but I wasn’t done.  I had plants to put in the ground.  I went out and planted the three new plants and then I got to weeding.  Weeding is a job I trust to no one, but myself.  I lost hundreds of dollars worth of plants letting the stepkids weed.  I’ll never do that again. 

So, there I was,  trimming off the last of the rose bushes on the pool side of the chain link fence and weeding the long grass that was creeping into the flower bed on the house side of the same fence.  The grass was getting so tall it was obscuring the new little Star Jasmine vines I’d planted earlier this spring.  But the fun ended when I stood up to take a look at my work, stepped backward and caught my heel on a paver that had been moved (no doubt, Number 4 looking for toads again) and I fell in slow motion backward onto my bottom and jarring my arms into the ground as I fell backward and landed suddenly on my seat.  I sat there momentarily stunned, feeling a great deal of pain in my butt and my arms, and wondering if I broke anything.  After a few seconds, it was clear to me that I’d broken no bones.  I sat there for a moment thinking, “I’ll bet that was hilarious to see!”  I got up slowly and very carefully, see, I’m not 25 anymore, and even though parts of my body were in mild discomfort, I was amused.  I would probably have been laughing hysterically if I’d seen myself fall.  Sigh.  Life is just sometimes like that.  We are busily working along making progress, then out of nowhere we catch our heel on something and the next thing we know we are slammed backward on on our seat wondering what happened.  In the end, all we can do is take stock of the damage, and do our best to get up and keep moving on.  If we can find some humor in the mishap along the way, all the better for us.  It speeds the healing process. 

Now, nearly thirty minutes after my little mishap I am sitting here telling the world about it an none the worse for the wear, though I suspect I’ll feel something in a few hours or maybe tomorrow that won’t be so funny.  I fought the vines, and the vines won…but I lived to tell about it! It’s a good thing none of my kids caught that little fall on video.  I’m certain it would have had YouTube written all over it!