I love this. CoolBoss's son asked her what the double-fingered, two-handed quote gesture means. She said it indicates quotation marks but that the gesture usually indicates irony, so he asked what irony is. He is eight, and she floundered a bit before saying something about "unusual development." Her son asked, "So it's like a caterpillar?"
So far he trumps both Troy Dyer (could the name be any more symbolic, O ruined existentialist city?) and Brian Krakow.
Ethan Hawke as Troy in "Reality Bites" says, "It's when the actual meaning is the complete opposite from the literal meaning."
Brian Krakow in "My So-Called Life" defines "ironic" as "Um, when you realize the, like, component of weirdness in a situation."
I like better that it's a caterpillar.
A satisfying evening in the back garden.
The other day on my way to work, cars parked innocently along three blocks worth of curb had yellow paint sprayed low down along their sides, as if the passenger in a car had activated a spraypaint can held idly from a dangling arm. I really need to learn to put Cassidy in the garage. The first step is replacing all the stuff I had moved for the masons, the hanging shovels and racks, the now-unneeded 80-pound bags of cement (which I could lift, tentatively because the bags are mere paper, and carry), the supply of shingles now increased by the stack I found buried along the north side of the house as if they were proper drainage material, charcoal and birdseed and the camping stove and white gas. So I did that first.
In 2001 I ripped out the daisy-like maybe-mums that formed a solid bank of white for two weeks midsummer. In 2002 I rototilled along the south fence where they grew. This year they came back stronger than ever. They bloomed in early July or so, crowding out the spinach, beans, and carrots that I'd planted from seed and the blue-eyed grass and delphinium that I'd planted from seedlings. Now I ripped it all out again, too late, probably, for the cucumber plant that survived the crowding really to come into its own (it has fruit, thoroughly green but stunted in size).
I collected a huge pile of these ex-flowers, but what to do with it? Laced with bindweed, it couldn't go in compost. I barrowed it round the other side of the house and shoved it under a bush where we still need some fill. This is delusional of me, I know: the bindweed will survive. But most of the pile was regular plants, and I can't throw out regular plants. Neither can I maintain a compost heap hot enough to kill bindweed, however.
All the plants along the south fence reach for the sun, leaning over those plants on the lawn side of the two-foot-wide strip. So I've learned: next year, along the fence, I will plant stuff that likes shade and doesn't crowd, and along the grass border, stuff that likes half shade and doesn't crowd. Vegetables get too little sun there, though the spinach did okay in the short period between my realizing it wasn't a weed but then forgetting its existence.
I checked the lasagne mulch. I layered sunflower seeds, coffee grounds, vegetable pulp, and pine needles in a two-foot-square patch, with a plastic tarp folded into four plies on top and the square metal foot of the former patio umbrella on top. Despite that weight and dark, bindweed was growing up through the husk- and needle-mixed dirt, but the dirt is good loam. Next time, less husk and needle and more grounds and pulp.
Whatever kind of plum tomato I planted this year did well, unlike the previous two years, whose plants produced few fruits and those deformed.
I used the swan rake to comb the "grass." All the weeds in the "lawn" are bindweed, and the "lawn" is more bindweed than grass. I combed and combed and collected a large pile comprising almost solely of bindweed. This I dumped in the alley, on the theory that alleys need love too. Somehow. I couldn't quite put it in the dumpster, though I suppose I should have.
I don't remember what kind of squashes I planted under the cherry tree and I didn't mark them. When I saw one fruit setting on one plant, I plucked the other blossoms on the theory I only need one pumpkin and that one would grow large. But maybe this plant was of pie pumpkins? Because that one fruit, while undeniably a pumpkin, is small and orange already, while last year's mystery squash didn't turn orange until it was large. So if it's a pie pumpkin, just the one is not enough for a pie. I could maybe make pumpkin bread though, since I don't like pumpkin pie. Another squash plant didn't survive the trampling the masons gave it, it being apparently way too much trouble to walk around, and the third, by far the largest plant at eight feet or more, has lots of blossoms but only now just the beginning of a fruit way at the end. Whatever: at least I was right that squash plants would vanquish the weeds and the cherry sprouts in that area.
Plus I picked the first of the second crop of raspberries. These are on this year's canes, while the first crop came from last year's, and they are bigger and juicier and sweeter than the first. Mmm.
I worked for almost three hours, from when I got home until it was too dark for sunglasses and I was too dirty to go inside for regular glasses.