A Losing Proposition

“How does your garden grow?” you might ask me. Well, the good news is that many flowers have finally appeared in my raised bed.

Even some of the handful of remaining sunflowers are blooming. This tall fella was the first to sprout color. It took five days from initial glimpse of yellow till it fully opened. Here’s Day 4:

Three others are likewise showing their stuff, but who knows how long they’ll stand. I guess it’s just a matter of time. On the peach front, a few days ago my tree was full. Yesterday everything was gone.

And where did they go?

Today’s Score: Delaware Furies v. Sciurid Destroyers

• Home Team: 6. I picked the last six peaches (small and still green, but viable).
• Invaders: 19 (plus a bonus point). By mid-afternoon they had severed and dropped 19 big, beautiful, perfectly ripened peaches onto the ground, with only one or two nibbles taken, if that. Two days before, they felled 26. The bonus point is for killing the fifth sunflower, severing its stem, during the same rampage.

Eleni suggested the word “bloodlust” to capture the dark and churning depths of my hatred for these rodents, but that’s far too mild. She and Lulu proposed some adjectives to describe me: truculent, ruthless, cutthroat, merciless… but none touches my passionate and abiding hatred. The closest I can get is “a deadly, vengeful obsession that fuels an ideation of savage actions, the execution of which would cause no remorse.” Yeah, that’s a bit more than one word, but this is a complex concept. Maybe there’s a term for it in some other language. Sed de sangre? In Iceland it might be blóðþorsta. And of course there’s ???? in Japanese.

This brings me to Genevieve, whom I met in grad school in Vermont in 2009. Ever since learning of my contempt for squirrels, she has presented me with countless hideous related items: nutcracker, puffy sweatshirt, stuffed animal, board game and much more. Although we hadn’t seen each other since 2018, that didn’t stop her; every few months yet another atrocity would appear in my mail. So don’t ask me why I allowed her to visit me from Oregon this week. I strictly forbade her to bring any of her usual paraphernalia and threatened to screen her at my front door, but did that stop her? 

(She didn’t notice that I stuck masking tape over the title of the board book. It used to be Squirrel Is Hungry.)

Nonetheless, we had a lovely two nights and three days of catching up and relaxing, and she was thoughtful to take the time and money to fly down here.

As I told her, though, it was weird to have someone staying in my house, and I had to admit that it made me Covid-nervous. We’d both had two negative rapid tests before her arrival, but they aren’t always right, and who knows what we may have been exposed to before we got together. So without even realizing it, I’d find myself maintaining some distance, and had to keep pushing aside nervousness. I hate what Covid has done to me in this regard. I’m trying to figure out how to live carefully but without sacrificing human essentials like social contact.

What else? I honestly don’t know why life has been so ugly lately. Extreme weather, fascist leaders, systemic eradication of basic civil and human rights, to name a few. But also, everyday challenges seem so much bigger and more complicated than they should be. 

Take my dentist appointment last week. Challenging: going through yet more torture (three root cavities this time). Unnecessary: the doctor mentioned she’d had a “cold” a few days before (“I’m 75% better.”) What?? Two negative rapid tests but no PCR, which is seriously not okay when you’re breathing over the gaping maws of countless unsuspecting patients every day. A couple times she turned away to cough.

Or how about being given the runaround every time I try to get medical and educational stuff set up for Ember. It simply should not have taken five hours of battling, legwork and stress to make an appointment for a tooth cleaning. (She’s back up in Chico with her family, but will return for a few days next week. I’ll get to see the whole family when they come down to celebrate Eleni’s dad’s 80th!)

The daily examples are infinite but I’ll stop here.

Before I go, here’s a malapropism for you.

JD: “I don’t like taking pictures with my phone. But when I had my single lens reflux…” 

Actually, I must confess this may not be a true malapropism, because even before the word was out of her mouth, she paused because she knew it wasn’t right. So we’re lacking that element of unawareness that makes these things so much more fun. Despite this shortcoming, it’s still worthy of my collection.

Okay, I’m done for today. Eleni: my fate is now in your hands. (She’s always the first to read my posts and immediately texts me about any typos and other weirdnesses so I can fix them, ideally before my other four or so readers see. She has saved me from the shame and humiliation I would have endured had my errors remained.)