04.20.06 - 1:54 p.m.

Yesterday, I finally mowed the grass. The grass has been growing for a month, now - and has been shaggy for at least three weeks. My parents have already mowed their grass twice. It wasn't bad in the front yard - the grass on the steep slope of the little gnoll on which my little home sits doesn't grow quickly. It's heavily thatched and it takes its sweet, slow time. I think that it's - insufficiently aerated, or something, but I'm not inclined to try walking it in those aerator sandals I see in the garden store. For the most part, I care little for grass.

It's not a bad time of year to let it go-go-grow, either. All the little weeds in the yard are in flower - and they're quite pretty, at least until they start overtaking my garden beds. The back yard, however, and the side yard - both were nightmares of near-epic proportions. I quite felt like I was wading through the surf whenever I dared venture out into the back yard, to take out the trash, for example, or to examine the regrading of the gravel alley behind the house. (Thanks for kicking up all the gravel into my yard, guys! Appreciate it!) I wanted to get a good shot of the yard half-mowed, half-wild, to show just how bad it was, but, as ever, I am a procrastinator even when I finally get around to doing things, and I was racing against the fast-falling darkness just to finish, in fair part because - after putting it off and putting it off - I didn't have enough gas in the gas can to get the mower started, and had to run out to the gas station for more. It was already 7 p.m.

And the gas station! I had a moment's indecision at the end of the street - turn left and go to the Pee-Wee shop out on Route 60, or turn right and go to the Sunoco at the bottom of 20th Street hill? I decided (rightly, I think) that the Sunoco was closer.

The Sunoco - the Sunoco! I had a friend who worked there years ago. I remember - quite distinctly - going to visit him one morning, tripping. Everyone else had finally fallen asleep, but I was still awake and still vaguely altered. It was just after dawn, a Sunday morning - in summer? I can't remember the season, but summer it must have been, maybe July, the Sunday after the White Trash Bash. God - what a gorgeous morning. The alleys seemed a revelation - the darkness of the viaduct, the bright blaring sun, the abandoned streets, the slumping houses, the detritus of the parties of the night before littering the meager yards - a coal train rattling overhead, the filth washing down from the tracks, the striations of light across the pavement, I walked and walked and walked and then came back and sat down and studied the chaos and thought and thought and thought - oh, nothing profound, nothing [i]new[/i] - just the things we all think and feel in immediate ways, when the universe switches something on inside of us and we're (briefly) living in the vivid moment, aware of our slightness in the scheme of things, grateful for the beauty with which we've been presented, capable of finding it in even the most dingy circumstances - it was morning, and bright, bright - but in memory, sepia-tinged.

So - to-wit, I have been there, and the place was fine then, a normal convenience store, with normal gas pumps. I don't shop there now because the gas is overpriced and the pumps don't take credit cards - but I had enough cash for a couple of ($3.00) gallons to get the mower going. What a place!

It was cramped and crowded, with a weird jumble of grocery goods in the cooler. The freezer at the front of the store was a mismatched chaos of frozen food and meat - still with the labels from Krogers! - and the aisles were stuffed full of goods and I could hardly walk through the place. They had banks and banks of booze, and - well, they had wine coolers for labeled for individual sale, in the back, stocked just like sodas. It was such a weird, strange little store, full of chaos and bags of potatoes and groceries from Kroger's repackaged for sale, there. Sigh. It's depressing - I'm sure it's convenient for people in the neighborhood, especially since the grocery store behind the hospital closed - but people who cannot afford cars or - better yet - the $1.50 round trip it'll take them to get to and from Super Sprawl-Mart cannot afford whatever mark-up creepy Sunoco owner-guy adds to the cheap marked-down meats from Kroger's that he resells.

With more gas, though, the mower started right up, and I wandered behind it, attacking the backyard first, then the front yard. And - and and - oh! Everything is growing. I'm ready to get my hands back in the dirt. My pansies and spring bulbs, of course, have been growing and blooming and looking absolutely magnificently [i]gorgeous[/i] for some time now, but I didn't have to do anything with them after planting them last fall. Now, however, everything else is leafing out. My daylilies are already bigger than the ever got last summer, and those purple spikey flowers I planted with them - the iris that C gave me last summer, which inspired me to begin gardening - are spreading, as iris should. The peonies I dug up and replanted (they were too deeply rooted) are up and have buds. (So is the thorny blackberry bush behind them. I have to get that out this year. I cannot let it go.)

I planted shrub roses last summer, which I found on clearance at K-Mart and Super Sprawl-Mart (before I started my boycott - can the boycatt last through gardening season? Super Sprawl-Mart is SO convenient and sunlight is precious...), and neither did much more than shrub-schlub its way through the summer. Neither one had a bloom. Now, although I failed to cut either rose back, they are both green and growing and one already has a delicate red bud on it. The artemisia I planted (which should have been cut back, and wasn't) is lively and delicate. The columbine is blooming: lovely, lovely, I love the structure of the flowers - so delicate and alien. I have volunteer snapdragons on returning duty in the back bed along the deck and in the pot on my front steps. All the perennials I planted in the front of the house are coming up. I'm astonished, although I shouldn't be, to see the Russian sage coming back - releafing the dry sticks I should have cut back last fall, and the coneflower - on please be lovely! - and the pink buttercups, like weeds, and the liriope and the - the expensive deciduous shrub, whose name I cannot remember, and the grasses, and the - oh, the verbena. What else did I plant there? Bee balm - and there's a rose, there, although I'm certain I took all the roses out...

...the dahlies I left in the ground are already sprouting. The roses we transplated from Susie's yard survived their unkind move (they were not yet dormant when transplanted...) and are leafing out beautifully. The stupid empress tree I finally got in the ground at the end of the summer is a little stick with three or four leaves, but it's a visible stick and I managed to avoid mowing it down. The hosta is already out - I should have divided it last fall - but it looks great.

I wish I were a smarter gardener or a better gardener - I would love to have banks and banks of perennials, great walls of color - but I think I'll always be, at best, an enthusiastic procrastinating amateur. This weekend, though, I'm planning to head over to Hatcher's. I wonder if they have any osteospermums, yet? I'm not ready to buy more perennials. I know I want to expand some of the beds in the back yard and find a few evergreen shrubs (azaleas! - and, oh, god, one of those pencil holleys. I LOVE the pencil holleys. I wish I'd purchased one last fall.) for the foundation beds, and I'll need annuals to replace the pansies once it gets too warm for them and kills them off. Hmm. And the vegetable bed needs tons of work. It's already full of weeds, but this time, I'm going to put down newspaper under mulch to help control them.