Monday, May. 13, 2002
Dear Diary:

The weather forecast for today was cold, dreary and rainy with about FOUR FREAKING INCHES OF SNOW PREDICTED FOR TONIGHT and so I did what any rational person would do when faced with meteorological mayhem.

I went to a garden center.

No, actually, I went to two but I learned my lesson from my last garden centre binge, so I brought along strict adult supervision in the form of my 78-year-old mother-in-law. Although she barely makes five feet, she is a formidable force who firmly believes no matter what your age, She Still Has The Right To Tell You How To Live Your Life And You'd Better Darn Well Listen To Her.

My attitude to this has always been that I will nod in agreement with whatever recommendations she might make, consider them, and then wander off to do whatever I think is right.

We have always gotten along very well because of this. It's all in the nodding, eh.

I am usually very quiet in a car whereas my mother-in-law feels that there is no such thing as companionable silence. She filled our 45 minute drive to the garden centres with stories about her friends who all seem to have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. Oh yes, I'm so looking forward to aging.

NOT.

Okay, so we get to the garden centre and my mom-in-law begins her exploration. She has very simple taste in plants and mostly fills her gardens with tuberous begonias, impatiens, and geraniums. I know and she knows that that is what we are going to walk out of the garden centre with, but we don't go directly to them.

Oh no. First We Must Examine Every Freaking Plant There and Discuss Why It Won't Work In Her Garden.

Wrong colour, Too much maintenance. Requires too much water. Needs more sunlight than she can give. The list goes on. I can feel my will to live oozing out of my pores. But we wander around in the cold and the damp because she wants to consider her options.

And then she freaked me out. In addition to the usual suspects, she bought TWO flowering cabbages, one purple, one white. This sort of wild and crazy devil may care purchase was just so completely out of character that I was reeling.

Look, lilacs smell good and they're beautiful and I NEED them, dammit, I NEED them.Dizzy and disoriented, I found myself in with the lilacs. I love lilacs. And before I knew it, I was hauling two three gallon pails out to the Marnmobile, one containing a six-foot-tall pink 'James McFarlane' the other a five-foot-tall white 'Mme Lemoine'.

Oh, be quiet. I was in shock, I tell you.

The Marnmobile is an itsy bitsy Toyota Tercel. The trunk was already full of my mom-in-law's other purchases, so my lilacs were coming along for the ride with us. I briefly considered the ethics of leaving my 78-year-old mother-in-law out in the cold and rain nearly an hour from home and putting my new cherished lilacs in her place in my car.

I thought that maybe I could explain her absence by telling the spousal unit she'd run away from home. When I decided he might have his doubts, I grudgingly let her have the passenger seat. It was a hard decision, eh.

The back seat of the Marnmobile is not designed to take two ginormous lilacs. Somehow, I tipped them over and wrestled them in place and we motored home. After dropping my mom-in-law off at the home farm, I drove back into my own yard. It was at that moment that my head cleared and I remembered that I had promised the spousal unit I would not go nuts this year buying plants.

My first wave of insanity has been cunningly hidden from him, already planted in my garden. Trouble is, it's supposed to snow tonight and there's no way in heck that I'm leaving my lovely lilacs, which are at the point of flowering, out in the snow.

When he comes home tonight, two ginormous lilacs will greet him from our porch. I'm pleading post-traumatic stress disorder, brought on by the completely out of character purchase of two flowering cabbages by his mother.

I'm sure he'll understand.

It makes perfect sense to me, eh.

--Marn

Old Drivel - New Drivel


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Want to delve into my sordid past?
She's mellllllllllllllting - Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2012 - Back off, Buble - Monday, Dec. 19, 2011 - Dispersed - Monday, Nov. 28, 2011 - Nothing comes for free - Monday, Nov. 21, 2011 - None of her business - Friday, Nov. 04, 2011 -


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