We never had a dog. When the boys were growing up, we really lived rather hand-to-mouth, and when the boys wanted pets, I said that they really couldn’t have pets that had to go to the vet and get vaccinations, etc, because we had to use the money we had to take them to the pediatrician to get vaccinations and shots and medicine, and we just didn’t have any extra money for pets. We did compromise with smaller, easier pets. Jeremy got a white rabbit one year for Christmas. He named her “Mary” and she lived a nice, quiet life for several years. When Kevin wanted a pet, we got a gerbil, whose name was “Dasher,” who also lived a nice life in Kevin’s bedroom, in a hamster habitat.

My sister says that our Mother was afraid of dogs, and that’s why we never had one as a pet. And so I never really developed the hankering for a dog.

I’ve played with other people’s dogs, and avoided other people’s dogs, and, at this point, I’m not at all interested in having a dog. I am, however consistently annoyed by other dogs. There’s a dog to the right of me. He’s a small, yippy, sort of dog, but he spends most of his time inside. Sometimes he comes outside and sees me and barks, but not for long. One evening, my neighbor was setting out to walk him, and I asked to come along. I enjoyed it, but I think I walked too slowly, and both my neighbor and the dog seemed to wish that I would move a little more quickly.

Then, there are the other dogs who live on the other side of me, which whom I do not have a good relationship. At all.

The neighbors who live there, and who have lived there for quite a while, have suddenly gotten dogs. A brown one and a white one. And those dogs do not like me. Not one tiny bit. They are sleek, good-sized dogs, and they find me unacceptable. Very unacceptable. It’s possible that they feel that way about most folks, but most folks do not live next door to them and come outside. Not into their yard. Just outside. To any outside area that’s within their ability to sense movement, or possibly, some sort of aura or aroma. Or, maybe, some offensive sound, such as the opening of a door, which, horrors of horrors, might lead to someone actually coming outside!!!

Grrrrr. WOOF!! WOOF!!! WOOF!!!

I don’t go outside very much. I’ve finished most of the yard work I’ve been doing, now that the weather’s gotten warmer. But I do have to go outside every few days. I have a container that I put food scraps in, and that fills up after a while. And, I need to take those scraps to the compost bin. That trip entails my opening the back door, stepping out onto our small porch, walking down the two steps, walking across the patio, and then walking to the back corner of the yard, where the compost bins are. And where the back corner of our yard meets the back corner of the yard where the dogs are. The instant I step out of the house, the dogs race over to their side of the fence (which is a wooden fence) and they’ve already started barking. Well, not exactly. They’ve started BARKING! BARKING! BARKING! In dog language, I’m supposing it’s something along the lines of, “Who IS that?!?!? What’s she DOING over there!!?!?!?!? Why isn’t she going back into her OWN house?!?!?!!? How long is she going to stay OUT here?!?!?!? Can’t she understand that WE DON’T LIKE HER!!! When is she going back into HER OWN HOUSE?!?!? WE DON’T LIKE YOU! WE DON’T LIKE YOU! WE DON’T LIKE YOU!!!!!!

I have gotten the message. But I do really need to take the food scraps out to the compost. And I am not going to move the compost bins up to the porch.

JoAnne had an interesting idea. Since I am a senior adult woman and have to go to the bathroom several times during the night, she suggested that after every trip to the bathroom, I should step out onto that back porch. Not walk across the yard, just step onto the porch, and then the dogs would go berserk every couple of hours or so, and help the owners see that the neighbors are irritated by the dogs.

And, seriously, even though I didn’t try it, the dogs began to be rowdier and rowdier.

A couple of days later, as I went out on my own back patio, to water the plants, I heard one of the dogs whining and whining. Not barking, but whining. And, not ever having had a dog, I didn’t really know if there was a problem of some kind. So, I walked next door, listening, all the time, to the whining dog. There seemed to be only one dog. The white one. As I walked around the corner of their house, I saw that there wasn’t a car in the driveway (which there usually is, but, it might have been in the garage, and I didn’t know if they were home.) I rang the doorbell. I waited for a couple of minutes. The teen-aged daughter opened the door, and I said, “Can you help your dog? He seems distressed.”

And from several feet behind her, the mom said, “Oh, we’re eating dinner now. She was bothering us. We’ll get her when we’re done eating.” And I said, “Okay, I just didn’t know what was the matter, and I don’t usually hear the dogs whining. Sorry to bother you.” And I went back to my house.

Before I could get back into my house, the dog was back in their house. And now, and I am not making this up, both the dogs are now gone. The family seems to be there, but there aren’t any dogs.

I walk out of my back door to silence. I take my food scraps to the compost to silence. I sit on my bench on the patio and read. In silence. Well, there are birds. But they are not obnoxious.

Kevin phoned on Thursday and asked if Peter could come on Thursday, instead of Friday, when we’d planned for a visit from him. School’s out, and it seemed a good time for him to spend some time with us.  April was busy with some church work, so Kevin brought Peter and stayed for a couple of days, himself. Kevin’s work allows him to work at home most of the time. Modern life. He works on his computer and communicates with people in all parts of the world. On Friday, when he was here, he talked with folks in Atlanta and folks in the Middle East. And it all happened at our dining table. Occasionally, he has to get dressed up in more “business” type clothes and go into their headquarters for a meeting. But not often.

Kevin brought Peter and then stayed another day. He went back home on Saturday, and Peter’s staying with us for a couple more days. Not all businesses can work on this sort of schedule, of course. Our church staff, for example, are available to our congregation. We do not, of course, phone them every week or so, just to chat. They have lots of responsibilities and do not need to be overwhelmed with situations that many members can work through, on their own, or with other church friends.

On Friday, Peter and I went to the library. As we were getting out of the car, a man, who was turning away from the library door, called to us (in the parking lot), “Can’t go in yet! Closed until one!”

I’d forgotten. The libraries have training on the first Friday of each month. And, yes. “Closed until one.”

Peter and I got back into the car and went to Target. We did as much household shopping as I could remember to get (and not have any items that needed to be kept cold). By time we finished that shopping trip, it was just about time to get back to the library! Peter played some video games on the kids’ computers. I found some books I was interested in reading. And we had a nice, reasonably quiet afternoon.

Saturdays belong to David and Peter. They go to breakfast. They went to the Mayborn Museum (and Kevin, still at our house, joined them there). There were interesting new things to work on and work with.

Then, Kevin returned and got to work on some limbs, from the house next door, that were scraping (gently) on our roof. We pulled out the large folding ladder, and Kevin trimmed lots of small limbs from the tree, which is dying, most likely from the bitter winter we had a couple of years ago. The tree has put out a few weak leaves. It is obviously dying/near dead. It is a large (albeit dead) tree that should never have been planted there, between our house and the one next to us. We live in my childhood home, and my parents did not plant the tree. The next door neighbors did. And it’s not the neighbor who lives there now. And not the one who lived there before her. She’s had to have tree trimmers come and remove limbs that are damaging her roof. She’s recently had a large ash tree removed from her front yard. A tree that gave great shade all throughout the spring and summer. The Great February Winter took out her tree in the front yard as well as the one between our houses. And I’m very certain that the tree is her tree and not ours. My parents wouldn’t have planted a tree so very close to either house. There’s just not enough space. And, when you’re planting a new sapling of a tree, it just seems so small. The trees that my parents did plant, include a now enormous pecan tree, easily many feet in from any of the boundaries around the house. There’s a lovely, large crepe myrtle, again, many feet inside the lot’s edges. In the front, there’s a red oak and a pin oak, both having plenty of space around them. Lots of room for growing. I like to think that I’m almost as good at husbanding small and large and really large plants.

The sprinkler guy is coming next week to check on the sprinkler system. It’s rained rather regularly. But it seems like that’s coming to an end. Alas.

Here’s the log I ran over a couple of weeks ago. A friend of mine has a husband whose hobby is creating lovely wooden items. When she saw that blog post (and saw the log), she said that maybe her husband could make something. I said, “It’s hackberry,” and she said, “He likes working with hackberry!” Here it is, sitting on their porch. After it dries out and he has a look at it, I might be getting an attractive reminder of the incident.

The miracle plants. Last week, there was one tiny Caladium plant, doing its best to sprout and grow. That’s it at the top of the photo. Just below that plant, are three more Caladiums. You can clearly see that they are two different varieties. And, yes, those three shouldn’t be so close together, but let’s just think of them as being supportive of each other, in these trying times of a gardener who didn’t make particularly good choices about arranging things. AND, down at the bottom, next to the rock that I put in place so you might actually be able to see the thing, is another one, sprouting, too. I have hope. Who knows what might happen, now that the temperature’s warming. There might only be these five, but there might be fifteen. Or somewhere in between.

This is an amazing plant, and I don’t even know what it’s name is. Several years ago, I got a piece of it from David’s Aunt Frances. She said it was easy to care for and sturdy. I put it in this pot and it grew well all spring and summer and into the fall. With the first freeze, it was gone. It was in this large container and really heavy because of the weight of the container plus all the soil that was there. In the spring, we made another trip to visit David’s parents, stopping mid-way to spend the night again with Frances (in Memphis) and to take her with us on to Tennessee. I asked if I could please have another cutting of this nice plant, because it had frozen away in the winter. She looked perplexed. She said that, yes, it died back in the winter, but it always came back. I had emptied and cleaned out the pot, getting it ready, I’d hoped, for some nice, new, sturdy cuttings. She did, graciously, give me some more, but assured me that it would come back, after the cold winter. And, indeed, it did. And has, all these years later.

And, yeah, I need to decide what to put in those cone-shaped things. Something trailing.

Early in April, this year’s crop of sunflowers

May 7–The first sunflower

Around the corner from us, on the path I always take to get from the neighborhood to the shopping areas, I see these plants. I don’t know if someone, years ago, purposely sowed these plants, or if folks were sitting around on the ground, enjoying munching on sunflower seeds, and some of them landed, unshelled, in the grass. However it happened, sunflowers grew. And, over time, they kept on reseeding and growing. Now, it’s one of the first signs of springtime, when the sunflowers begin to grow. Last summer, when Peter came to visit, he’d just been to a nature camp, and he was telling us what he’d learned about sunflowers. We took a walk around the corner, to see the wall of sunflowers. He explained all the parts of the sunflowers and how they grew and about their leaves and about their petals. As soon as they began to sprout this year, I took photos of them. Then, later, the growing plants.

Just today, May 7, as I rounded the corner, I saw the very first sunflower. Of course, I took a picture. As I was driving away, I saw a woman standing at the side door. I stopped and gestured for her to come. As she walked toward me, I called out for her to not come too close, but I explained how my grandson and I enjoyed seeing their flowers and how I was excited for the first one and I had taken a picture to show him. “Your first sunflower this year,” I said. And she shook her head and shrugged. Ah. Not an English speaker. Then, a younger woman came out and I said the same things to her, and I’m finally understanding that she didn’t have much English herself. But, I gestured, pointed, smiled and said, “first sunflower” several times. And then they pointed and smiled. And we all three enjoyed the moment.