A Little Peas and Quiet

We took break from weeding amongst the peas to visit the garden center. Is there anything to top a trip to the garden center in late May? I submit that there may be something to top that incomparable experience. And that would be a trip to the garden center in late May that includes my four goofball children.

Are you guys feeling okay? You haven't moved since I've been here.

Don't let my sisters bother you.

(No statues harmed in the making of this post.)

(No plants either.)


(Except maybe that fuschia.)

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The astute reader may notice a distinct lack of goofiness from Grace recorded here. That would not be due to her suddenly becoming a quiet, reserved child. Nor would it be due to her being absent on the trip to Gray's Garden. Nope. Just one of the small weirdnesses of life that stack on top of one another and make things what we call normal. Grace goofed off plenty, even dunked herself (accidentally) in a display pond. This, for us, is normal. Inexplicably so. But of course there are no photos of that episode.

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Update on something ELSE of which I didn't take pictures! (Strange sentence construction aside, let me say, it was difficult to not snap pics of the weird neighbor incident. SO HARD. War-photog-in-Bosnia-with-no-lens hard. Ansel-in-birch-grove-with-no-film hard. It was hard, people. But I was afraid of their Pit Bull. And them. I imagined myself some sort of anti-papparazzi (sp?) wanting to chronicle the oddities of having a greengrowing homeless camp across the road but worried they'd snatch my Nikon away and smash it when I least expected it.)

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So they're gone. I feel guilty. Which is nothing new. I challenge any of my Catholic and/or Jewish friends to rival me in the guilt gut. Honestly, I can work up a good-sized molehill of guilt over blackened toast. A little thing like begrudging some (probably pot-dealing) homeless people their week of flopping across the road? GUILT MOUNTAIN, y'all.

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When they left on Saturday night, they didn't go far. The church elder who gave them permission to stay a week was very clear they had to be gone by services on Sunday morning. Now this seemed a little backward to me. We want to show our Christian love but we want you gone before anyone shows up to worship God. Crikey. Mind you, I didn't SAY anything about this thought, because, as I mentioned, I couldn't get my sun tea jar off my front porch without getting a whiff of them in all their multi-pet micro-gardening traveling (not so much) glory.

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So they left Saturday night to our other neighbors' property, just five or so driveways away from us.

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Oh, the GUILT, people. The guilt. Now this nice grandma had them in her back yard. She'd already been feeding them a couple of times a day, she told me. And they were using her shower. And since it was just "one night" (actually, that would have been two, but I kept my mouth shut and it turned into five) until they were leaving for [state unknown that changed depending on the questioner's identity] on Monday, it was the "least she could do."

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Oh. I thought the least she could do would be to say "you're welcome for a week of food and showering." You see why I deal with guilt. You see.

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Of course they overstayed their welcome there, but not by much. I don't know how this went down. Maybe another, gutsier neighbor helped out my sweet grandmotherly neighbor and towed them from beside her tomato plot in the dark of night. Or maybe she ran out of food. Or (not as likely) patience. But last night, just before midnight, the Blue Bayou was parked across the road from me again, fixin' to get on the road. Fixin' their headlights and tying down their crates and such. And on the road they are. As far as I know, they are at least a mile away by now.

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Tomorrow I'll be introspective. Tomorrow. Today I'm just breathing a little easier.