RDP Sunday: Gumption

Géza Vörös
“, Red-clad girl with dog”

It is nearly the end of May and Summer hasn’t started yet but if Halloween is as a big of a deal at your blog as it is at mine, you’ve been roughing out and post dating stories and poems for a month now.

In that today I realized that since the end of 2019 most of my days are spent working, wearing a mask, sweating bullets until I was vaccinated and ignoring the drab, gray, and boring world around me.

And I’ve been thinking about ‘ after this ” a lot too.

I also keep thinking I could have done more, but what I wished most of all is that I had planted a garden.

That’s my biggest regret. I didn’t plant a garden.

The reality is I am really, really bad at making living things grow. I did wonderful with herbs, but seriously,  they’re like a lawn and dandelions. They’re going to grow  whether you want them to your not.

I kill pretty flowers and decorative bushes  with serial killer like skills that are on par with Jack The Ripper’s.

I would stand there right next to my victims with my gardening gloves on my hands and a big floppy hat on my head and my Ray Ban Sunglasses protecting my eyes. Mozart would be drifting from my pink CD Player on  my potting bench.

It looked normal, it felt normal. I was normal.

Did anyone ever suspect what I was doing to those poor defenseless roses and Pansies and those other flowers whose names I never learned because what was the point? They never lived long enough for anyone to care what they were.

It’s not like anyone was going to point to their little dried up corpses, point to them and say, ” Ooo, what’s that one called?”

I was just a dumpy faceless lady who wore funny hats and  Ray Bans and spent all day in her garden with a trowel in one hand and nothing in the other because it was usually clenched shut.

I did wave and smile when people strolled by.

I was pretty good at that. You know. Acting normal when the moment demanded.

Still.

With some effort I could stop off at the grocery store on my way home from work and pick up some flowers in those plastic trays. All I would have to do is pop them out and put them into the containers that I keep on hand- hidden in my storage shed like a guilty secret, because they are most certainly evidence of my shady gardening past.

I don’t know.

Maybe it’s the boredom. Maybe it’s because I’ve been locked  up in a gray and dull world. Maybe it’s gotten to me.

But all I can think about now is planting a garden and hunting down the perfect blooms to put in it.