Watering the garden
We’ve been having day after gorgeous, glittering day of beautiful weather; cool enough to be perfect hurtling weather, warm enough that (hurtling being the demanding enterprise that it is) you get back to the car* with all extraneous layers peeled off and tied around your waist.**
It’s also perfect pott(er)ing in the garden weather: I’m almost caught up in the planting-out-potting-up-and-potting-on department.*** But there’s always a serpent hanging around in a garden. Day after day of clear blue weather means your garden is drying out. Who ever heard of having to water in April in England? †
I hate watering!†† Watering isn’t proper gardening! Proper gardening is planting and weeding and deadheading and pruning and tying up and feeding and fussing!††† I spent over an hour of this precious golden afternoon dragging a frelling hosepipe around, getting the wretched thing snarled up in the plants, to the plants’ considerable detriment, and wrestling with the on-off switch, which is to say twist, whereby it either squirts out the nozzle backwards and soaks you, or it rockets out frontwards like a cannonball and splinters anything it comes in contact with. I have a Jackson Pollock mud mural round my garden now, thanks to the gouging strength of my excellent water pressure. I hate watering. I relearn every year–although not usually quite this early–how much I hate watering. And, of course, I have a Pot Fetish, which means more watering. Mostly I use the sprinkler–which has its own problems, given the multi-levelled configuration of this garden–but every now and then I feel I should, you know, do it myself, like changing your own oil instead of having the garage do it.‡
The garden is now wet.‡‡ It will rain tonight. It’s not supposed to‡‡‡. But it will now.§
* * *
* Today I can finally stop lifting Darkness in and out of the car. At first he had been rather nonplussed and not at all sure he was in favour of the new system. And then he got kind of used to it.^ Yesterday there was a certain ‘raise me, slave’ air about him as we approached Wolfgang. Today he suspects he’s lost status. He looks at me measuringly before he deigns to jump in. I am reminded of the protracted effort to convince the little ratbags, as half-grown puppies on springs, who routinely leaped over hip-high–my hip–logs and hummocks and piles of builders’ bric-a-brac that we met out hurtling, that they could jump in the car themselves. They were tiny little handfuls of malfeasance when I brought them home, of course, and I spent the first five endless weeks of our lives together, till they’d had all their jabs, carrying them from front door to car–which is a fair stretch at the cottage, especially with Chaos under one arm–and tossing them in the travelling crate in the back seat. Once they outgrew the crate and went into the old three-whippet box behind the driver’s seat (which the two of them origami themselves into) I started trying to explain to them that they could jump in. I’d put someone’s front feet on the seat, and then boost him in. They got really good at putting their front feet on the seat . . . and looking around for their boost. Arrrrrgh. Patting their butts made no impression; neither did half-lifts. I finally got my point across by threading the long leads through Wolfgang’s back seat and out the other side, leaving them on the normal leaping-in side, going round myself and then calling them from the far side. They piled in at once, all smiles and tails going like sixty, ooh, is the hellgoddess going to join us in our box?^^ It still took another fortnight or so before they really got it–okay, before Chaos really got it–that yes, I wanted them to jump in themselves. The boosting was obviously a part of the Car Ritual and they were distressed that it was being discarded. But– But– Won’t the Boosting God feel slighted?
^ My technique may also have improved. Although I always find the handful of testicles disconcerting.
^^ Not unless origami is four-dimensional and I can kind of bulge into yesterday.
** The better to entangle bits of flapping sleeves and those utterly useless tabs with the t-shaped metal buttons that jeans jackets seem required by law to have around their bottom edges, with long racing leads. Hellhounds and I tend to proceed rather leap frog fashion: I stump along muttering to myself^ at a relatively consistent plod^^ and hellhounds swim around the countryside in six or seven dimensions and eleven or forty-seven directions, which means that they and their leads snap in and out and back and forth kind of a lot, and frequently at odd angles.
^ Oh, she/he/they wouldn’t do that! I know they wouldn’t do that! But how am I going to get them out of the Well of the Malefic Tadpoles and back to the Palace of Blood and Shag Carpeting where only the bravest will survive the confrontation with the Keeper of the Cubic Zirconia of Death?+ –Oh, there’s treasure to be won, you know. They aren’t facing the dread Keeper for laughs. I don’t think I know what the treasure is yet. Maybe I’ll find out tomorrow. If I get them out of the Well. It’s got frictionless sides. Whose idea was the frictionless sides?
+ I’d like to say I’ve been rereading Andre Breton, but it’s more like Clark Ashton Smith.
^^ Except when I have to stop to unentangle
*** Almost. But the moment I–and a lot of other people who are having exactly this same conversation with themselves–start planting out our dahlias, we’ll have a late frost.
† Browning had been living in Italy too long when he wrote this. http://www.bartleby.com/246/647.html He left out the rain.
†† The only thing I hate worse is raking. I especially hate raking when it’s not my tree/ugly frelling laurel hedge/crisp packets. Cheezum eff eff eff do I hate picking up other people’s rubbish.^
^ Corollary: possibly at the top of my Least Favourite Things list is standing in someone else’s dog’s crap while picking up my own. I don’t know about the rest of the dog-crap-picking-up world, but I find I have to stare at said crap fixedly while I grope in my pocket for a bag–and then curse furiously, more or less under my breath, while I try to peel the little bleeder open and ready for action–or the object of my intent will have become Invisibly One with the Landscape. Until someone steps in it, of course. Which has happened to me more than once: the fixed stare leaves one vulnerable to other hazards. I tell myself that at least some of the unpicked-up crap lurking in wait around this town has done the invisibly-one thing to its earnest, responsible would-be picker-up, who went home crapless and couldn’t sleep that night as a result.+ But I harbour the terrible suspicion that some of the crap decorating the scenery is still there because some dog owners are depraved and heedless pillocks and I hope they all find themselves in the Palace of Blood and Shag Carpeting with a blunt sword and the wrong password. And may the giant flesh-eating centipedes get the remains after the zirconia is finished with them.
+ Or the next night. And possibly the night after that. It ought to hurt, not picking up your dog’s crap.
††† Especially fussing
‡ I have never in my life changed my own oil.
‡‡ Except of course for the several small expensive difficult-to-replace crucial things I missed.
‡‡‡ I would NOT have wasted the afternoon’s gardening WATERING if rain were PREDICTED. Rain was predicted two nights ago and we got a little light mist.
§ All those other people dithering about planting their dahlias watered this afternoon too. Some of them may even have used similar language.
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