It was one of those weeks where something bad happened, and something wonderful happened, and then an ice storm and days off school. It was life, to be exact.
One time I was at the local library with my three littlest and encountered a new mom I hadn’t seen before. She was majorly pregnant and had a pair of twins who weren’t two years old. I made conversation (because out of compassion you do so for a mother who cannot bend over to retrieve Legos, or dolls, or balls, or whatever thing that makes a two-year-old scream). It turned out she was pregnant with a second set of twins, due any moment. She was new to town. Her husband was the new manager at the CVS. I asked her if she needed anything.
Or maybe I didn’t ask–I could just tell.
She laughed when she said it, but it wasn’t a laughing matter. They’d moved into a rental home and arrived with little furniture. The only chair to speak of was a kitchen chair. She pointed to her swollen ankles,
“I’d give my left arm to have a chair where I could put up my feet,” she chuckled.
So that evening, I sent over my swivel-rock recliner and some tacos to her house.
We were friends for the temporary. She came over to my place one afternoon and we looked up labor-inducing pressure points. I rubbed her feet while the kids destroyed the play kitchen. She delivered her babies (many days hence–I am no labor whisperer) and I brought her supper when she got home from the hospital. She opened the door and joked that her husband Brian was the only one in the house not wearing diapers.
He called me after the second twins were born. He was on dad duty and one of the older twins had fallen and maybe broken her arm. Could I come watch the others while he took her to the ER? Mama was out of town picking a friend up at the airport.
I took my five-month-old baby over to their house and watched the newborn twins and the older twin for several hours. We made it past bedtime and it occurred to me how impossible it was to wash even one dish in the sink.
I think about that situation sometimes when I feel my life is in any way hard. Two sets of twins under the age of two and a half. Being pregnant with no way to rest your feet. There is so much to be grateful for in this life, the least (but not little) of which is having a place to prop your feet up after standing on them.
Which brings me to my dumb dog, the dumbest, most aggravating dog ever. Well, the problem is she is not dumb as a dog ought to be–no, she’s too smart. But calling her dumb is the meanest and most satisfying thing to call her in this situation. A real stupid head.
When it warmed back up after the snow day and the ground was thaw-ish, we pulled out the last tulip and daffodil bulbs and put them in the ground, around thirty or so remained from what I’d bought back in September.
(The least we can do is plant a few hundred flowers and hope some of them do their duty.)
Gretty’s and my dream has always been to see a flower in every direction. Colorado on the front range was exceedingly rude to tulips and bulb-flowers. It was dry and scorching as the desert.
I had the best luck with lupine and poppies in the southwest part of Colorado, but I think it was because of snowmelt dripping off the roof right into my raised bed.
A lucky, unintentional xeriscaping of sorts.
I thought we’d made it to the Shangri-La of gardening here in the midwest. I mean, any climate that has purple redbuds and sunny daffodils exploding in April is mostly a miracle to me.
The problem is, we didn’t take into consideration that our dog, Minnie, was watching our every move like we were hiding Easter eggs for her to find later when she got bored. Between the time we put them in the ground and the next morning when we went outside, Minnie dug up every bulb we planted.
What a horrid foiler of plans.
Still not on the level as no-recliner-when-pregnant-with-twins, but I’m still mad about it.
Our best hope is that she planted them in an even better spot. But I draw the line thinking she is that smart.
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