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The zucchini that ate my cottage house
Is there a Guinness Book of World Records authority in the house, because today I must tell tale of a zucchini that attempted to eat mine. It started, as I’m sure all good stories do, with the Herculean task of hauling hundreds of pounds of dirt up a hill to my mother’s garden to a just-constructed planter box that would soon be filled with said dirt and a variety of vegetable seeds. What I didn’t know about this dirt was that it was composed of magical properties the likes of which result in killer zucchini. Were I a more studious reader of Greek epics, I probably would have seen that…
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spring blossoms
I was startled to find that it is spring in dear Colorado. After an overly dry and mild winter here, it seemed like the flowers and the trees shouldn’t yet be able to bloom. Surely we needed at least one good blizzard before we might declare it spring? Then, quite unexpectedly, I looked out my kitchen window while brewing some coffee one morning, and saw our sweet, little front-yard tree had positively burst.
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adventures in recycling
I have had a personal triumph. Just now, this very morning, mark the date. This triumph? I remembered to collect the trash and recycling bins from the alley before a diabolical stranger filled them with his own garbage. This stranger has become something of an arch-nemesis this summer. Several months back, the city of Denver changed up how it collects our throw-aways. They took away the big dumpsters placed every few dozen feet along the alley block and issued everyone new bins (brand-new black ones for trash, to accompany the grape-hued tanks we already filled with our recycling). They asked us to move these bins back and forth from the alley behind our homes…
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a cottage patio
I have this dream about buying bushel after bushel of lavender and creating an entire fort made of flowers. As a child my mother cultivated a small parcel of sunflowers on the lower level of our backyard to make us kiddos such a getaway. The idea has lingered with me ever since. Perhaps you never outgrow such beautiful notions. Perhaps I’ve spent too much time with the Anne Shirleys and Jo Marchs of the literary world. In lieu of my lavender-built fort, there is this other place that I know. It’s surrounded on two sides with wooden fencing covered in vines. On the third side sits a gate that leads to a poppy-covered…
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I went to IKEA for a bookshelf and instead bought a cactus
My inability to keep plant life living has been fairly well documented. It’s a bleak history, and though they say history is written by the winners I’m going to keep it real here today. I am horrible at nurturing plants. They all die. It may take a whole month a little while, but inevitably I kill them off. Dead as a doornail. So that’s why, on a recent visit to IKEA to track down a bookshelf, I instead walked out with a cactus. And a throw pillow. As one does.
