Another pretty flowering shrub in the old section of the village. I hate the idea that all these will be lost when the wreckers are sent in.
Of course I could go in there and get a bunch of cuttings but I already have a dozen plants that I care about on my balcony and the new gardens are a different style and not mine.
Make-believe curtains are the go for the moment, until I decide curtains or blinds.
The carpenters clamps, rope and bed sheets curtains to the side installed by my son, and the highly unusual ceiling detail overhead.
There are four pristine white levels with only two of them faced with painted-over timber for curtain rails and/or blinds to be fixed overhead …
To be fixed overhead on two levels, neither of them ‘regular’ lengths. Which will make it hard to buy off-the-shelf products.
This morning I was distracted while researching indoor necessities by a pageful of Temu growlights, followed by discovering specialist products are not needed to help my plants survive.
It’s too long to wait for plants until the depth of winter to get a decent day of sunlight. So that’s another ongoing search for solutions. Love a good problem to get my teeth into!
The tadpoles saga is ongoing. As a cat who eats only cat kibbles—and there’s a very good reason for that—I am amazed by the kinds of food that tadpoles will take to.
At a certain point my human said, “I’m done trying to chase up oak-leaf lettuces. They’re obviously not in season. And expensive when I do come across one. We’ll try these little beasts on a few other greens.”
Which we did. The taddies, as we’re calling them now, would have nothing to do with icebergs, silverbeet, warrigal greens or boiled lettuce. Fussy little beggars. Then, out of sheer desperation, my human broke a nasturtium leaf from the abundant plantation of nasturtiums we have camouflaging Skink Haven.
Personally, I hate nasturtiums. I hate their smell on me. I hate their wibbly wobbly leaves, and how they are just the right height to get in my eyes when I walk among them. So, no. I don’t go in that jungle. Which is probably why the nasturtiums have been encouraged to sprawl over the one-time garden bed where now a community of a special sort of skinks live. Since I’m not allowed to hunt them.
But the taddies, now. They love nasturtium leaves. Look at them! But which left us with the fish food problem. They went off fish food, left it floating on the surface of the water. I like it so was mightily tempted to go fishing for it. A couple of times I almost overbalanced reaching for a tasty titbit.
Watching my antics, the pernickety old woman said, “That’s it! No more fish food. We’re going to have to try them on something more substantial.” She went hunting in the backyard with an insect net.
I fetched a salt-reduced cat-kibble that’d been soaking in my water bowl. Dropped it into the pond. See what happens, I thought. It’s the pernickety old woman’s own, favorite, and nearly always useful expression.
Eight or ten of the taddies made a straight line swim to the sodden kibble and started in on it, butting at it and tearing crumbs off it. They obviously like it. I could say I told you so.
The pernickety old woman caught a great big grasshopper eating something precious, and killed it. I didn’t see how. She could’ve let me do that. She lay the grasshopper carcass on the water where it floated for three days.
Then! You guessed it. It had needed to rot a bit before the voracious little beggars could get their teeth into it. Do tadpoles even have teeth? They ate that whole carcass though, worrying at it even after it sank.
Dozens of hungry taddies lined the top of the water, waiting for a meal. They worried me. What if Mr Egret came along now? He’d have a feast!
My human had a couple of solutions. First she soaked a bunch of salt-reduced kibbles, put them in a fruit-net from the green grocer’s with a couple of hefty pebbles, and sank the parcel in the pond. “So they don’t spend all their time at the top of the water, easy pickings for the likes of that egret.”
Next she found a dried Bangalow palm frond and cut it more or less in the shape of the pond. Wedged it in there. “Camouflage for the little critters. And, when they start their legs …”
What? These critters would be growing legs? I intended to spend a whole lot more time on the pond edge to see that happening!
When it rained lots and lots, and it was close to summer, the pernickety old woman ran around putting buckets in the backyard to catch rainwater. Even when it stopped raining, she left them standing where they were.
Even as the Hand-of-God, I was mystified as I went round smelling at them. Just rainwater, half a bucket full, that I couldn’t reach to drink. What were they for? Couldn’t be for animals to drink from. I just proved that.
When the buckets were about half-full of rainwater, the pernickety old woman dipped her hand in the frog pond, scooped up a handful of azolla water weed and carried it dripping to the buckets and dripped a bit of the weed in each.
I think there were five buckets. The stuff grew like—well, a weed—and soon all the buckets had an island of green floating in them.
That evening, a clap of thunder! I raced for my favorite hiding place in the bottom of the bookshelves. Another thunderstorm. More rain.
The pernickety old woman loved a good thunderstorm. She stood laughing in the open laundry door, only slightly sheltered. “Smell the petrichor?” she said.
When the storm faded away, and the rain fell only mistily, the down-pipes from the roof started to boom. Or maybe call it a belling. A loud insistent kind of ringing echoed from ours, and all the ones in the neighboring yards on both sides. A racket!
“That’s them,” the pernickety old woman said. “The green tree frogs. The rain woke them, flushed the leaves from their hidey holes, and they’re sitting there—each under his own pipe—calling loud enough to bring any green tree frog female happening to be about.” She laughed.
Ah, I thought. They sit under the down-pipes to have their calling amplified. Smart. I miaowed and joined my human at the laundry door.
“Tomorrow we shall see what we’ll see,” she said. “The buckets will be in all night demand, I’m thinking.”
It was a dark night. I didn’t see a thing peering through the glass doors in the sun-room. I was so curious by the first morning light, I scratched at the pernickety old woman’s bedroom door. She didn’t let me sleep with her for this very reason. She being a night owl and I preferring to be up at the crack of dawn. All I heard was a groan. I think she meant for me to go away.
I did. For about five minutes. Scratched at the bedroom door again. “Fine!” I heard from the bed. Then it creaking.
The pernickety old woman grumbled from near the wardrobe. I understood her to be clothing herself. Humans are so bereft without fur. I skipped back to my position at the glass doors.
My human came bleary-eyed from the bedroom. Dressed in her usual long pants, cotton shirt and kimono loose over the top. She yawned. “Let me put on a pot of tea first.”
“Miaaoow!” Let’s go see outside first, that meant.
“Might as well, I suppose. Water won’t boil for a bit. Beautiful sunrise, all said and done. Wait till I grab my camera.”
She walked. I pranced to the first bucket. We peered into it. “Ah ha,” my human said. “I think we have a jackpot. Look at that! I think a whole clutch. Green tree frog spawn for sure.”
My modem is ‘on the blink’, which is a colloquial way of saying it has started to fail. Sometimes its little lights work well and my computer has an internet connection.
Sometimes they’re blinking and I know then there’s a gappy reception and goodbye to getting anything done online except by mobile. That means one-fingered typing for me.
I’m sitting on instalment 16 of Cat Tales, with no way that I have found of getting the photos from the computer onto my phone.
People will tell me the cloud and/or dropbox. Seems like neither of them like going in reverse. Mind you that could be a personal bugbear.
Anyway, there it is. Another hold-up.
Now to access the other photo …
Gardening is like a hands-in-the-dirt kind of writing. That’s the thought I had about them both while I pulled out weeds this morning.
What I was doing there–with that thinking–was trying to construct a metaphor. You will have noticed, though, that I had doubts and inserted a ‘like’. The two things that I was trying to relate to each other at that moment felt like they are too different from each other and I settled for making a simile.
But what is there about gardening and writing that I thought I could bring them together in a metaphor? Thinking thinking thinking. I guess it is more about the ways that I engage in each process.
Gardening, you pull your garden gloves on, walk into the backyard and start weeding. For example. When you’ve picked all the dandelion flowers due to set seed and put them in the organic refuse bin, you’ll see that the newly planted pansy plants are looking a bit limp. Without having to wonder what you’ll do next, you’ll get a watering can, fill it and give the pansies a drink. Next, you’ll notice that the excess thyme plants you ripped out last week, are looking nicely dried. You’ll give them a good shake above the vegetable patch to release all those little dry leaves, where they’ll add to the mulch. Every little bit helps. And so on.
Writing, you’ll open the software you’re using, open the files you’re working on, and start adding into or subtracting from the section you last worked on. Soon you’ll discover that if you add this action to a character’s arc here, you’ll need to seed that character earlier in the piece, and you work on that for a while. While you are getting your lunch, you think of a nice metaphor with which to explain one of your most recalcitrant plot points, and so when you get back into it, you shift your attention to that part of the arena. And so on.
See the similarities?
Gardening is a hands-in-the-dirt kind of writing and writing is gardening with words.
Rita de Heer 