mostly surrounded by GREEN. Our barn is green, the shop is green, my cabin is green, we have dozens of various shades of green trees - all on a sea of 70 acres of Green, Green, Green.
Not that I don't like GREEN, but I have been hungry for Colour for our entire 21 years on this farm. OUTDOOR COLOUR that is ... heaven knows that I've got oodles & oodles of colourful Characters that fill my life inside my house and inside my head.
I have attempt to colour my outdoor world, time and time again - always to be sabotaged by the menagerie of critters that we've shared our space with. Rabbits & chickens & geese & ducks & goats ... ESPECIALLY the goats, believed that any colour that I added to the property was entirely for their palates, not my eyeballs. And then throw in a dozen or more black walnut trees who like to ensure that they and their nuts are the King of the forest & the lawn & the flower beds ... no colour for me.
For years, I have hungered for colour to the point of covetting my neighbours beds. Flower beds. I gaze longingly into my goatless, rabbitless, walnut-less, wonderfully colourful neighbour's properties , imagining how delicious it would be to go to the garden and pick a beautiful, bountiful bouquet of ... anything. Sure, I've had pots of stuff, but any given night, I'd forget to hang them all on the clothesline & by morning I'd have only a pot of sad stems... which by the way, do NOT recover - apparently goat lips are a tad too aggressive to be an appropriate pruner.
I especially have desperately wanted a splash of colour in the springtime - a balm for the soul after the long, stark winter. The animals technically aren't the problem there - it's the fact that I am so busy every fall, that I completely forget to plant bulbs. It doesn't cross my mind til spring, when I swear that I will, ABSOLUTELY will plant bulbs THIS fall. Twenty one years and its never happened.... not once.
So you can well imagine my delight this year, to have tulips magically sprout here and there in my would-like-to-be flower beds. I know I'm slipping, I thought - but I really can't recall that I actually did, FINALLY get my act together and plant bulbs last year. I know I've bought bulbs - year after year - but did I actually plant them? If I did ... good for me! But, alas - I think not.
Mystery solved ... my dear sweet daughters thought ahead and decided to surprise me - it was THEY who snuck over and buried that little treasure, to delight their colour-starved Mother. I am just tickled pink. And red. And another shade of pink. In fact, I'm SO happy about it that I actually intend to plant a whole bunch myself this fall. IF I remember.
No comments:
Post a Comment