Disclaimer: Any innuendo you might see in this post is entirely in your own naughty mind. I certainly intended nothing like that.
Down in the Crotch Garden, there once dwelt a little red wooden cart full of flowers, surrounded by huge flat river rocks and some field stones. My father built that little red cart so he could hitch it to his riding mower and slooooowly pull Baby Belle around his yard.
After Dad died, Mom gave the little red cart to me, and Hub coated it with polyurethane paint and we put it in the Crotch Garden and I filled it with flowers. Every time I looked at it, I remembered Dad building it, or pulling Baby Belle around in it.
The little red cart had been in the Crotch Garden for many years. This year, when it was time to fill it with flowers, I realized that the cart was on its last legs. Or wheels, as the case may be. The wood was rotten and even a new coat of paint would not be enough to save it.
When we picked it up, it literally fell apart in our hands. I told Hub to haul it away quickly before I could change my mind. It was not salvageable, but sentiment often rules me where logic should.
So. What to put in the Crotch Garden?
We decided on. . . . . climbing roses. So we put a beautiful trellis where the little red cart once stood, and planted a climbing Fourth of July rose bush behind it. Rhododendrons on either side of the trellis, and voila. It will be a thing of beauty next year any day now.
The stones needed to be repositioned so I’ve been doing that. We’re talking about stones about four inches tall and a foot wide. They weigh as much as a baby elephant, apiece. Put six in the bed of the truck and the whole chassis sinks six inches. There are maybe two hundred of them down there.
All afternoon I’ve been down in the crotch, repositioning things. I finally got the little wall shaped as I want it, but it still needs to be rebalanced and kind of beautified. You know how it can be: once someone is poking around in the Crotch, it’s hard to know when to stop.
The leftover stones, I am bringing, a small load at a time, up closer to the house to position around other rosebushes, snowball bushes, etc. The Crotch can’t hold EVERYTHING, you know.
This is southern Indiana. It was in the high nineties this afternoon, and if it had been any more humid it would have been raining.
I still might be out there, though, but for two things: One, I dropped a stone on my finger and the nail is already black and it hurts like right bloody hell, and Two, Hub came out and wanted to know if a Tropical Sno sounded good. It did.
Yeah, I quit for the day.
That stone wall has been down there in the Crotch for many years, and the original bottom row was totally buried underground. I had to use the pointy shovel tip as a crowbar to get them out of there. Some are still there; they were just too big and heavy and it wasn’t me who bent that shovel’s pointy tip. No wonder ancient stone ruins have a layer of dirt a quarter mile or more on top of them; that stuff builds up fast, if the Crotch is any example.
That was my day, just messing around in the Crotch. It will never be the same now. Hopefully, it will be better.
How was YOUR day?