My mother loves gardening. So, during the week she was with us, she never stopped saying that we needed to plant flowers. But we are hopeless gardeners. Once, P put vegetable seeds in a pot, watered them with concentrated grow food, and declared the project a failure. As for me, I am disgusted by wet dirt.
Still, my mother convinced me to do some garden work. Under her supervision, I cut off branches from the solitary Christmas tree that we allowed to grow into a giant problem. She even made me commit the sin of operating a chainsaw from the top of a stepladder. Somehow, I regained my senses and rejected further requests to work at greater heights. But after the effort, I had to admit my pleasure at downgrading the Christmas tree problem to “future concern”.
Then, for two days we watched her pull out weeds as a substitute for tending flowers. It was such a sorry sight that we finally relented and went shopping for flower plants. Back home, I forked my good lawn to prepare a flower bed. The next morning, she was up very early to start her gardening. When she had planted all the flowers, she did the same with the lucky vegetable seedlings that had survived P’s experiment.
She has now gone to my sister’s, leaving me with instructions for looking after the plants until she returns. Seeing how much she enjoyed tending the modest flower bed, I feel a huge responsibility and do not want to disappoint. So, it has now become an after-work habit for me to stick my finger into wet dirt to check for moisture, to water plants, and to pull out weeds with my bare hands.