Boo Boos

Yesterday as I was attempting to load the kids into the car for a trip to the Walton Elementary Book Fair and Cookout, I heard a small yelp and turned around to see Marty airborne in the driveway. He crashed to the ground hands first and started to cry, but when I picked him up I didn’t see any scrapes on his palms. He calmed himself down pretty quickly (I’m not sure where he picked that up, being surrounded by his dramatic sisters all the time) and wiped his nose on my shirt (of course). I looked all around the area where he fell, but I couldn’t find anything that could have caused him to stumble, let alone leave the ground completely. I asked him what happened but unfortunately though he is quite a talker, his powers of description are not what one would consider crystal clear. I didn’t see any point in continuing my investigation, so I went to buckle him in and saw that one of his knees looked pretty scraped up. There weren’t many red scrapes, but there were a lot of superficial white ones, and it looked like a bad enough injury to explain the snot on my shoulder, so off we went.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when the kids fall, I should be surprised that they don’t fall more often. At times it seems that one blade of grass leaning the wrong way in the lawn is enough to bring them down. Although they run in and out of their bedroom doors all the time, every once in a while they bang their head on the door knob, and I always ask, “how did that happen?” and they never know. When you buckle them in for a car ride, it seems like they should be safe for a while, provided that they don’t get car sick or choke on something, and yet while riding in the car one afternoon, Aislinn managed to get her lip caught in a barrette. Another afternoon she managed to get her arm caught between two car seats. If you put them in a padded room, they would probably manage to scrape their finger on the stitching. Then again, there are times when they are teetering with one leg in the air and the other foot halfway off the playground and somehow they manage to right themselves.

Since the kids began borrowing the neighbors’ trampoline, they have had the occasional turned ankle or bent knee (although those are nothing given the wide array of injuries that are possible on a trampoline). In the hierarchy of boo boos, these are the injuries that make the kids angriest, since there is no outward sign of them and nowhere to put a band-aid. They also don’t care for bumps and bruises, but at least they can show them off even if they can’t score a band-aid. Everyone’s favorite injury (once the pain has subsided) is a big knee scrape during shorts weather that can have a big Elmo band-aid. This injury can be described at length and shown to playmates, teachers, and neighbors to score some much desired attention and sympathy.

Bandages are another problem. Every kid I know loves band-aids and wants them to cover every teeny scrape that they find. One day I realized that I was wasting huge chunks of my life debating with the kids over which injuries needed covering and which didn’t, so now I just hand over the band-aid as soon as it’s requested. Unfortunately, somehow Aislinn convinced herself (and when I wasn’t looking, her sister and brother) that band-aids should never get wet. When she was little she would attempt to dodge her bath because she didn’t want the band-aid to get wet and bring about whatever horrible consequence that followed (now she only protests for a few seconds, or pulls the band-aid off before she gets in). When we finally got her in the tub, she would insist on keeping her knee (or finger or whatever part was bandaged) out of the water, and would give us nonstop instructions while washing her hair to make sure we didn’t splash the band-aid. I would sing the “I am stuck on Band-Aid brand cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me…” jingle for her, but she didn’t believe me (I’m hoping some sort of Johnson & Johnson anniversary will bring that commercial back, because if the kids see it on TV, maybe they’ll believe me). She would agree to keep her scrapes uncovered if we told her she was having a bath later that day, but once the band-aids were on, there was no taking them off.

I’m happy to say that I haven’t scraped my knees in quite some time. However, I can still remember what it’s like the night after you get a big scrape, when your knee is red and burning and sticking to the sheets so you can’t fall asleep. My two worst scrapes occurred when I was in high school, theoretically years past the time when I should be getting big scrapes. The first occurred when I fell on a gravel track during an ill-advised attempt to join the track team. It left me with a blue scar, caused I believe, by gravel dust that is still in my knee. For years afterward people would look at my knee and say “What happened?” and then look at me as if I had a screw loose when I said “That’s not a bruise, it’s a scar.” The other scrape occurred during an ill-advised attempt to work at an afterschool program with a bunch of punk kids. I was playing freeze tag with them and slipped on some gravel (gravel is not my friend) and gave myself a scrape on the leg that was about six inches long and three inches wide. I took this scrape with me to Beach Week, and although I was in a boozy exhausted haze most of the time, I took care of that scrape with the dedication of Florence Nightengale to ensure that I didn’t get another gross scar to match the gravel one. Later during Beach Week, I fell climbing over a fence and scraped my other knee which needed bandaging. By the last night some super funny drunk guy asked me if I had tripped a land mine.

But my experience at Beach Week isn’t really that unusual, since injuries for the kids seem to come in groups. One day last week Lauren hyperextended her knee on the trampoline, then banged her head on the door when she was coming back inside, and to round off the day, fell into the bathtub as she was brushing her teeth. Whenever the kids have a run like that, I begin to wonder “Do they need glasses? Do they need bigger shoes? Do they need smaller shoes? Do they need their inner ears examined?” But the next day, their coordination will return, and they’ll be back on their feet, balancing on curbs and jumping over rocks without any problems.

And sometimes the same injury happens over and over again. I suppose that can be a sign of bad parenting, but usually it is a sign that your kids aren’t heeding your sensible advice. One morning in Kentucky as I was standing in the kitchen, Lauren came running down the hallway in her socks and then attempted to make the turn into the kitchen. Her feet flailed under her like a cartoon character as she attempted to stop her momentum, but in the end it was just too slippery and she crashed into the door frame, producing a huge walnut-sized lump on her forehead. About a week later, Marty did the exact same thing, and ran his big dome into the exact same spot in the door frame to produce a matching lump on his forehead. We were surprised that none of the neighbors took us aside to suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t discipline the children my smacking them on the side of the head.

For all the bumps and bruises and falls, we have not had to take a child to the emergency room for stitches or broken bones. We’ve had several ear infections, one bug bite on the eye, and one “nursemaid’s elbow” that sent us to the hospital, but compared to some parents, we’ve definitely gotten off easy. While I was working at the book fair earlier this week, one kid came in with a walker and said he’d been in a motorcycle accident. Granted he was a punk fourth-grader and was probably sitting in his driveway when the motorcycle fell on him, but at least we are parenting well enough that our kids aren’t telling stories like that. Marty's leg looked much better this morning. In fact, the whole mess was reduced to one tiny scratch on his knee. He said it was painful, "This skyscraper is hurting my leg," but he never even asked for a band-aid.

I've Got A Secret

Anyone who has ever asked me to keep a secret will probably agree that I am pretty good at it. If you have a secret that you would like to leak, I am not the person to tell, because most of the time it will not get any farther than me. I’m no Scooter. In my world there are three secret rules:

1. Don’t tell the secret.

2. If you do tell the secret, admit it.

3. If you do tell the secret and do not admit it, you must take your denial with you to your grave.

Similarly, in my world secrets have certain parameters that prevent them from being outright lies:

They must be for a specified length of time – there must be an end date when the secret becomes common knowledge

They must not involve lying or crime (unless it is a lie that will stop when the secret does like denying being pregnant until the three months are up)

They must be told to fewer than three people to be considered “secret.”

Sometimes people tell secrets (like “I think I accidentally kissed my best friend’s boyfriend when I was drunk”) hoping that I will take that information and do a little judicious investigating (like “So, did anything strange happen at the party last night?”) and then report the results back (like “ she said ‘I have no idea, I was so drunk’”). But I’ve never been much of an investigator because I’m always afraid I’ll blow the secret, and when it comes to other people’s dramas, I like to stay on the sidelines. Plus, as long as you don’t do any investigating, you don’t become part of the situation and you can sit back and watch it play out (like when the boyfriend finally remembers what happened and trots it out mid argument with his girlfriend who then comes by to drop the hammer on her former best friend).

The first real secret I asked the HP to keep, he blew. We got engaged on a Sunday night right before I left on a business trip. We agreed that we would tell our parents in person the next weekend. We went down to my parents’ house on Friday night and told everybody, and then the next day we went to his parents’ house to tell them. Little did I know, he had already spilled the beans to them, but instead of telling me, our little secret became their little secret (and it did not conform to my secret parameters as described above). When I found out months later that the whole “engagement announcement” had been a charade designed to keep me from getting angry, I was angry. I would say that I was five times angrier than I would have been if he’d told me the truth, but if he had told me the truth in the first place, I probably wouldn’t have been angry at all, because I knew he told out of overwhelming happiness not sneakiness. Clearly, if he had told his family and they all had agreed not to tell me, they should have at least followed Rule #3. (If you were able to follow the preceding paragraph, I commend you. If you were not, I apologize to you. At least it is a demonstration of what tricky business secrets can be.)

That was my first introduction to my husband’s family and their trouble with secrets. Like many people, they don’t tell secrets for gossip’s sake, they tell secrets because they are either overwhelmed with enthusiasm for what is going to happen or overwhelmed by the need to plan for what is going to happen. When they buy someone a gift, they are bursting to tell about it from the moment they leave the store, because they can hardly wait for the happiness that it is going to bring. When a surprise visitor or party or outing is in the works, they often absentmindedly reveal the surprise because they love to discuss plans for future things they are going to do. However, when seriously asked to keep a secret, they will make a concerted effort (usually successful) to resist these impulses. Once released from their promise they will describe the stress they were under, and the energy they needed to suppress the urge to talk, and all the times that they almost blew it but didn’t. So to be kind, we usually only tell them secrets of very short duration.

The next three secrets that my husband and I agreed to keep, he had to keep or risk an atomic argument. Having started out our marriage with the Engagement Secret Incident, I found it very hard to believe that he could keep any secret, but when I became pregnant with each of our kids, he did (as far as I know - his family may have learned rule #3). In fact, the lengthy explanations that I subjected him to time and time again about why he must not spill the secret were probably more than adequate payback for the Engagement Secret Incident.

Of course once the kids arrived, I remembered that kids like secrets more than anyone, and our kids are no exceptions. Aislinn doesn’t so much tell me secrets as tell me things quietly (like “I’m still hungry” five minutes after dinner or “Can I have another treat?” while the candy is still stuck in her teeth) in hopes she’ll get a different reaction than she would if she said them out loud. Lauren secrets are usually things that everybody knows, but that she thinks are so special that they should be said in a special way (today it was “Diego and Alicia don’t just save animals that are in trouble, they help them find their mommies,” pausing to put a hand on my arm and smile angelically “and daddies”). Marty’s secrets are my favorite of all. In the manner of many small children, he takes my head in his hands to turn my ear toward him, then uses his palm to push my hair out of the way, then leans in close and breathes heavily two or three times while trying to think of something to say (today it was “Is this song going to be over?”). Really, they could all tell me secrets all day and I wouldn’t mind; I like being the person they chose to confide in, even when they’ve got nothing to confide.

These days, as far as I can think of, all of my secrets are the ones I am keeping from my kids (Santa, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy – and technically, if Aislinn and Lauren find out before Marty, four of us will know the secret, in violation of my secret parameters). My parents never had to worry about spilling those secrets to me, since my best friend’s parents decided when we were in kindergarten that they were sick of pretending, so they told her about Santa Claus and she told me. I think my kids will probably be relieved to find out that these jokers aren’t real since they are completely afraid of them (in our version of Christmas we meet Santa out on the lawn and bring the presents in). The main thing that keeps me from telling them is that right now I can blame Santa if they don’t get what they ask for at Christmas.

So my dear friends and family, in conjunction with the secret rules and parameters described above, I have decided now to let you in on what I have been doing for the past month or so. If you read The Beginning you will find out why I started writing this stuff, and now that you know, please do not feel I am expecting you to read all of this. It started off as a secret endeavor because I didn’t know how it would turn out. If I only had 10 days worth of essays in me before writer’s block took me by the arm and sat me on the couch in front of the TV, well I really didn’t need everyone I knew to be a witness to that. I guess I could have written them all and kept them on my hard drive, but by posting them, I could challenge myself to keep up with the writing. This little blog is the reason I never know about the news, never know what’s on TV, never send prompt e-mails (I’m talking to you Mrs. Berlin), and never get to bed before midnight.

On the few occasions that I write about people other than myself, the HP, and the kids (excluding the producers of ER), I am not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings (and obviously, I am not trying to hurt the feelings of the HP or the kids either, but they are stuck with me). If anything you read here makes you feel that I am being rude or disrespectful to you, please don’t keep it a secret. Ask me for an explanation or to reword something that you think is making you look bad (and bear in mind that the people who read this either don’t know you, or know you and like you already). I am the only one who should be looking bad on these pages.

So that’s my secret. I hope you can find something entertaining to read here. Some of it is crappy, and some of it is funny if I do say so myself. None of it has been edited or even really reread very thoroughly so please forgive the rough edges. Maybe next year I’ll start a new blog called “A Year In Editing,” featuring cliche removal and tense matching. But for now this will be as ambitious as I get. Thanks.

Lame Reviews of Great Books That Taught Me Things I Never Knew

Of all the many, many changes in my life that came with the arrival of my kids, the one that surprised me most was that I lost the impulse to read. For me, in the foggy exhaustion that comes with a baby in the house, sleep won out over almost everything. However, when Aislinn was almost two and we moved to Kentucky and I stopped working, I could actually hear my brain beginning to shrivel up from lack of use. I knew that if I ever wanted to be able to relate to my friends and family back in the east coast hotbed of breaking news, political intrigue, and social commentary, I was going to have to make some effort to keep from becoming a hillbilly (I let my kids become hillbillies because young hillbillies are cute, it’s the old late blooming hillbillies that creep people out). Since my reading time is limited and since for a long time I have not lived anywhere that had a paper with a reliable book review, I decided on a foolproof strategy for reading the right books: I only read books that have won awards or have at least been nominated for awards.

This strategy has led me to read a number of books that never would have found their way into my basket if I had been given all of the time in the world in a bookstore with every book in the world. It also started me on nonfiction, which I never read much of in the past. Sure, I read The Perfect Storm and Into Thin Air like everyone else, but in the past six years I have read and loved a number of biographies and histories (books about things that happened in the past, I don’t know if there is a technical word for them but if there is I didn’t learn it while studying chemistry in college). Every book has included things that came as an absolute shock to me. Considering I went to college and graduate school, I wish I was better informed about people and incidents in our country’s past, but I guess no one knows everything. I took some English classes in college, but I guess I should have taken more history. Here are some examples of things I didn’t know.

Arc of Justice by Kevin Boyle (winner of the National Book Award) is an account of a black family that moved into a white neighborhood in Detroit in the 1920s, and the horrible situations that arose from the seemingly innocuous fact that a successful black doctor wanted to raise his family in a nice house in a good neighborhood. I can’t possibly describe the whole plot in 1500 words, but take it from me, if you read this book you will be fascinated and unable to put it down. As if the story of Doctor Ossian Sweet and his family is not enough, this book is full of facts from the time that I didn’t know and I imagine many other people don’t either. From this book I learned that the Ku Klux Klan almost took over Detroit in the 1920s. I had always thought that the KKK was a southern institution that stayed in the south, but in Detroit in 1924, it had 35,000 members. In 1925, KKK candidates almost claimed the entire Detroit city government. I also never realized that people could put covenants in their deeds that stated that their homes could never be sold to black people (or other immigrants or religions depending on how prejudiced they were). I remember taking sociology in college and learning about the segregated neighborhoods in Chicago, but I thought they were formed by intimidation and economic pressures. I don’t remember learning that it was encoded in language in the deeds.

Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea (finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction) is the story of twenty-six men from Mexico who attempted to enter the US through the desert in Arizona. Since their guides were inexperienced and lost, fourteen of the illegal immigrants ended up dead before their trip was over. In addition to not remembering this incident, if it got any nationwide press, I did not know much about what goes on at the border in Mexico, on either side of the line. A lot of what this book taught me I would rather not know, such as the details of how your body eventually cooks itself when you are out in the sun and heat for days on end. It also provides a humanizing description of the immigrants and the border patrol which are two groups that are easy to caricature or at least stereotype. I had no idea what happens to illegal immigrants when they are caught, or what type of people the “coyotes” are. Considering the current hullabaloo about immigration, I’m glad I read it.

Master of the Senate by Robert Caro (2003 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction) is part three of a four part biography on Lyndon Johnson. Never, under any circumstances, would I have sought out information about Lyndon Johnson. Before I read this book, the only things I knew about him were that he was the godfather of a boy I went to grade school with, and that the tapes of his conversations with Jackie Kennedy after the assassination gave me the creeps. But this book provides so much more information besides the life and times of Lyndon Johnson (who was a little on the crazy side if you ask me – I’d like to think he could never be elected these days using his tactics, but he was very adaptable and probably would have found a way to win). Caro could have written a book just based on his descriptions of the lives of women in rural Texas before electricity. The backbreaking labor and unrelenting hardness of their lives makes me wonder how long I would have lasted if I had been born in those times (and also makes me cringe regarding a future biography of George W. Bush that will be written in the future detailing the hardships of the poor that were ignored by the country during his presidency). This book is also a primer on the US Senate and how it operates, and as such should be read by every red-blooded American (in the words of Sister Michaela who used that logic to force us to read Moby Dick and to memorize the Gettysburg Address and Patrick Henry’s “Give me Liberty or give me death…” speech).” This book is so well written and fascinating, it prompted me to read the other two volumes of the biography, and I eagerly await the fourth – in fact I want to e-mail Robert Caro to make sure he is taking care of himself so that nothing happens to him before the book is finished.

I read Personal History by Katharine Graham (1998 Pulitzer Prize for Biography) while I was pregnant with, and for a while, in labor with my second daughter. I probably would have read it eventually anyway, since All the President’s Men is one of my favorite books of all time, but even with my pledge to read award winners, it took me three years to get to it. Although it probably appeals to Washingtonians and readers of the Washington Post more than it appeals to the average person, it is still a great read. Katharine Graham is easy to dismiss as a person with money and advantages who fell into a family job at the right time. However, when you read how things happened in her own words, she comes across like any other person, unsure of exactly what she should do but determined to do the best job she can. Her husband was a bit crazy and abusive, and still she stood by him, driving me to distraction with her explanations and excuses of his behavior. When he came to his tragic end, as awful as it is to say, I was relieved for her, because she could never have achieved what she did if he had stayed around. Shortly after I read Personal History, I read Ben Bradlee’s autobiography (which understandably did not win any awards – it is a piece of crap- but my brother had a copy so I read it). His self congratulatory drivel makes Personal History stand out even more as a great autobiography.

So there you have it folks, my first attempt at book reviewing, and I must admit, a pretty crappy one at that. I have lent some of these books to other people, so I don’t have them at my fingertips to reread and revisit. I suppose reviewing books that have already received the highest awards in the country is a bit ridiculous, but my main motivation is to encourage you to take a look at them especially if, like me, you never would have thought to. These books are full of information and entertaining too. If you don’t have time to read 3000 pages of biography on Lyndon Johnson, at least read Arc of Justice or Personal History. You won’t be sorry.

Stumped

Today is Spring Clean Up day on post, and it is one of those days when you have to determine just how much effort you are going to expend on a house that is not your own. I want the house to look presentable, but some people throw themselves into the competition for the coveted “Yard of the Month” (and 2nd and 3rd place) sign. Either approach eventually brings you face to face with the beautification efforts of the previous inhabitants. If you are lucky, like my neighbors across the street, you will find that the previous occupant has planted beautiful perennials all around the house, so that all you need to do is watch them come up and then admire them. If you are unlucky, you will find that the previous occupant had a screw loose. I am unlucky.

Along the front of our house is a white railing that stretches along the front walk, from the carport to the front door. This railing is rather nice looking, and was a handy place to hang some Christmas lights last December. Along the front of the railing is a narrow “flower bed” containing a row of “bushes.” When we moved into the house, the “bushes” were the most pathetic plant life I had ever seen, and were completely surrounded by weeds. Each “bush” was about 8 inches tall, with random sprigs shooting up 12 to 18 inches higher. The “bushes” were not arranged in any sort of symmetrical pattern or evenly spaced. They were so ridiculous looking that I cringed every time we drove up to our house. So I did what every enterprising American would do, I loaded up the kids and headed out to Home Depot for a pair of clippers and some mulch.

My entire bank of knowledge regarding cutting back plants comes from a Martha Stewart episode I saw once. She said not to cut of the tips of the plant, but to remove the offending branches by cutting them further down, closer to the trunk so that they will grow back better. Armed with this knowledge and my new clippers, I decided to attack the “bushes” to see if I could improve the eyesore in front of the house. But first, I decided I’d weed, since weeding is an activity that can be performed with the children close at hand. I knew that they would want to help, but they wouldn’t really like weeding, so they would go back to the playground when it was time for me to brandish the hardware.

The weeding episode was a bit of a revelation. Apparently, I did not have bushes in front of my house; I had the ghosts of bushes past. Some prior resident had apparently decided that he did not want to spend time trimming bushes, so instead he cut them all back to stumps in an attempt to kill them. He didn’t realize, however, that plants (outdoor perennials anyway) have had millions of years to evolve. If you leave them some roots and a little stem, and if they get lucky with a little rain and a little sunshine, chances are they can get themselves going again. He had successfully killed two out of ten of them (which explained why the others were so oddly spaced), but the rest made a comeback. Unfortunately, desperate for survival and robbed of their structure, they sent up little branches from all the sides of the stump in all different directions. Nothing grew from the top of the stump so each “bush” was similar to the top of a monk’s head, with leaves all around but none really on top. The “bushes” had attempted a comb over of sorts, with branches crossing over the bald spot, but it was still rather obvious that things were thin there in the middle.

I did the best I could last fall, trimming each little “bush” into a low, ground cover looking plant, until they were all basically the same size. I put cedar mulch all around them so that at least the whole row would smell pretty good and look neat. When I had done all I could do, I was pretty happy with the result. It was a weird little “flower bed” but it looked as if some one had tended to it. I suppose what that “flower bed” needs is an extreme makeover, but I am not going to stop by the Home Depot for a stump remover, particularly for someone else’s house. But this weekend, I weeded it again, and bought some ornamental grasses and day lilies and planted them as close as I could to the dead stumps (as you might imagine, it is quite hard to dig a hole next to a stump) to fill in the blanks and make the “flower bed” look more complete. I trimmed the “bushes” again and remulched the whole thing, and it really doesn’t look too bad anymore. Thinking about it, I am kind of glad that some crack pot gardener maimed those plants, because judging from the size of the stumps, they must have been quite substantial, and I am not a girl who loves a hedge. I have seen some of the other houses in the neighborhood that obviously got the same ten bushes when they were built, and the hedge completely obscures the railing, which makes me wonder what purpose the decorative white railing now serves.

We have other “bushes,” placed at the four corners of the house for reasons known only to the original planters, and no doubt baffling to any sort of gardening professional or person who has ever seen landscaping before. The “bushes” have no shape at all and sit so close to the ground that they look more like bean bags than plants, so this spring I decided to give them a good trim. After I had trimmed all of the crazy long branches that were shooting up from the top, they still didn’t look any better, so I decided to try to make a little room between the ground and the bottom of the “bush.” What I found under the worst “bush,” beneath the branches and dead leaves, was a huge stump – another victim of the plant slayer. Of course, I discovered that all of the “bushes” had suffered at the hands of the hedge hater, and I knew that although I had done my best to rehabilitate them, they would never truly be the same. Then this evening, as I sat in my neighbor’s yard while the kids were on the trampoline, I realized that the tree in their backyard looked very familiar. Suddenly, I realized where I had seen those leaves before - the worst “bush” in our yard was not a bush at all, but the remnants of a tree. How embarrassing for the poor little guy, starting out life as a tree, and ending up a bean bag bush.

This prompted me to turn my attention to another group of plants on the estate that need attention - the crape myrtles in the tree belt. I know two things about crape myrtles: they are pretty and they send up little shoots from the bottom of the trunk every year that you are supposed to cut off. Crape myrtles are supposed to be trees, but all over post they look like bushes, because no one ever cuts them back. I am not afraid to cut them back, so I took my trusty clippers to them and went to work. Each tree had so much crape growing up from the bottom, and so much crap and dead leaves trapped in it, I was afraid some sort of woodland creature was going to jump out and attack me for disturbing its home. Once I had them trimmed and raked out, they looked rather tree like. Hopefully they will still flower.

The saddest foliage in our neighborhood is not in our yard. Once spring had finally sprung, I could see that lots of the houses around here have azaleas, the prettiest bush in all the land. However, many of the people who are lucky enough to have azaleas must not have realized what they were, because they have been trimmed into hedge shapes (I blame the Army for this, because unlike me, a topiary hater, they seem to be opposed to natural looking plant life). There is nothing sadder than a box shaped azalea.

When you move into an Army house, you never know what is going to come up in the springtime. Twice we have been happily surprised when daffodils, hyacinths, and irises emerged from our flower beds in the spring, planted by some thoughtful person who didn’t mind that they would be moving before the flowers came up. Just as often, I’m sure, people find themselves with bushy trees or stumpy “bushes” on their hands. I will do my best to keep the “gardens” in order while we’re here, but when we’re gone, it could be months before some one else moves in. The “bushes” may be overgrown by then, and some one new will have to discover a way to compensate for the actions of the garden slasher.

Me and The Washington Post

Look at me, ahead of my time. Maybe I could get a job in The Washington Post editorial room.