Ordinary

Pruned my roses at the house today in the wind and rain, neighbors stopping by to chat, my son cooking up a big vat of chili, a Mariner's game on the TV. How spectacularly ordinary that all was.

I admit to a general neglect of my garden, having lived elsewhere these past years. Actually, it's a full-on neglect with English ivy run amok, thorny sprouts from the neighbor's locust tree popping up in too many places, blackberry vines clearly in control of it all.

My neighbor had just listed a nice queen sized bed on Craig's List -- hot deal -- and I snatched it up immediately. Here's a glimpse of its journey:

I'd wanted to get a shot of them walking down the middle of the street but by the time I noticed them, dropped the clippers, shed the gloves, fished the iPhone from my pocket (two, three seconds) they were already stepping up to the parking strip. The sky was ready to let loose, but we tucked the mattress into an open slot in the basement just in time. A spot of drama.

But there's a rosebush I've been loyally pruning every March for twenty-four years -- a bush with the most perfect coral blossoms -- keeping it in check even during the neglectful years. And this year I'm late with it all, and for the first time I discovered that it's actually a climbing rose who has never had to opportunity to climb. It isn't what I've thought it was, all this time. (Oh, those metaphors keep popping their little reminders into my consciousness, don't they?) But these immediate times being what they are, it got lopped yet again. Planning on a transplant next March.

Watched a silly Queen Latifah movie with C., piled on her sofa with the dog and assorted cats and a bottle of wine. Happy ending, etc., no terminal disease after all, she gets the man/the man gets her. She kept saying that she couldn't figure out if the setting was the French Alps or the Czech Republic, and I said, "Connie, the set(ting) is Hollywood." (And no, I didn't vocalize the parentheses, but that was my emphasis when I spoke.)

Perhaps this can all be just a movie?
I'm ready for the closing credits.
The End.

Alas.