Thee-Day ©

Today was Thee-Day at my place.
It’s the day my mother has not been looking forward too. My parents have been living in this house for 36 years. The house is almost 100 years old and over the last 3 decades, my parents and I have been slowly modernizing it.
When we first moved in there was linoleum on the floors and ugly paper on the walls. The front yard was a forest of weeds and broken glass. The back yard was a junk yard for cars long dead and forgotten. My father got a good deal, 2 houses for 26 thousand and the mortgage was cheap.
We all worked to pay them off as quickly as we could. At the age of 10 I was going to work after school to help my mother and when I got old enough to work by myself, I had a job and all the money went into the stew pot. The stew pot was the family. They let me have a small allowance but I didn’t really need it. Many of you who read my Evolution post know, I made more than enough after work.
While my father concentrated on the house it’s self, my mother worked in the front garden.
Since we live in the downtown core of the city, a lawn was a waste of time. The part in front is 50 x 40 ft and 1/3 of that is a pathway. So she opted to get rid of the grass and make a large flower bed instead.
The piece she had to work with is 20 x 30 ft. We spent 36 years and thousands of dollars getting it to where she can sit on the porch and enjoy 3 seasons of colorful flowers.
In the spring the tulips, daffodils and the crocuses would blossom and slowly as summer creeped in they would die out and would be replaced by the Peonies, Poppies and the Irises. Through the heat of the summer the John Cabot rose bushes would flourish and large clumps of pink roses would flood the air with their sweet fragrance and people would stop for a whiff, the smell of summer. The Hydrangeas would be huge and beginning to bud and the various Phloxes (pink, white, purple, red) would be spreading slowly across the garden. The lilies would now be 2 feet high and ready to show off their flowers.
Fall would slid in with a cloud and a shower, spraying a mist of water through out the garden, creating small pools in the flowering Lilies. The Hydrangeas would have red, white and blue flowers. The small ferns would be turning a coppery red, which is the sign that winter is approaching.
This is a typical year in my mother’s garden.
This was a typical year in my mother’s garden.
I say was, because at 7 am this morning, a back hoe came in and violated the 36 years of work and love my mother put into it. She stood at the door and watched it being ripped out.
The city is putting in new sewage pipes . They said they would be replacing and plants that were destroyed, but they won’t be the plants my mother put there and nourished.
They won’t be the ones she fought to keep alive and then wait for the following year to see if they reappeared.
I could see in her eyes the sadness, of loosing something she loved and worked hard to get just right.
She went back into the house and sat in the kitchen to watch TV.
About an hour later I came in from the back door and I asked her to come out into the back yard for a minute.
She came out to the deck and sitting out there in front of the car were all her plants. I had gone out to the front and dug through the pile of dirt and hauled them all to the yard.
We’ll put them back when they leave I told her. She smiled and sat there for awhile.
She's probably thinking on a new battle plan for the front



Walker