By Loretta Humble/Around the Town
It is a wonderful time to be living at the farm. The weather is mostly mild, with a little rain to make the plants happy. Some plants apparently think it is spring, because I’m looking at some huge fall hibiscus blossoms, and something that looks like a vine but doesn’t climb that is all the sudden full of bright orange flowers shaped like big clusters of great big honeysuckles. I think it is called something that has fire in its name. The blue morning glories weren’t much to brag about until about a month ago and they finally went crazy. Now I see what they were up to. The vines, ugly now, are full of seed pods. They are getting ready to plant next year’s morning glories. All of these last bursts of color are beautiful and precious, like the butterflies I see on them.
Now that the really hot weather is past I remember that I love gardening. I’ve been making cuttings of lots of things and setting them in pots to root and become new plants. If I wasn’t trying to fill a column up with this chatter I would be out there right now making creating multiple hibiscus and roses and that orange thing, which I just found out is a Cape Honeysuckle. Conventional wisdom says spring and summer are the best time to root things quickly, but a lot of these cuttings are making tiny new leaves already. That is pretty exciting. I did some propagation in the spring, but when it got hot, I couldn’t care less if I got more plants at all. But now it is nice, and I am having a big time working in my little old green house.
I really love that greenhouse. It is basically a frame supporting the old paint-peeling windows that came out of my house right here beside it. Aaron Lynch, who was doing the remodeling, built it for me. Basically, I just wanted to get the windows off the ground, and I thought a little house it would be cute. I didn’t know I’d ever use it. But now it is full of new plants being born, and it is wonderful. My niece Margaret gave me a big old-fashioned porcelain kitchen sink, and I have it hooked up. I bring little scraps of pretty things to decorate my playhouse. Every time I find an old beat-up stained-glass window, or part of one, I stick it up in there. I get light from a lamp whose base is figurines of the boy and girl crossing the bridge. You know, the one where the angel is watching them. The girl is missing part of an arm, but she is still beautiful to me.
My friend Maggie is still with me and doing great. For years Maggie has taken a lot of medicine, but when she had that stay in that Mayberry jail, she lost her meds. And she hasn’t got around to getting them replaced yet, and she seems like to me she is doing just fine. She has a doctor’s appointment and we are pretty sure they will tell her she needs to be taking a lot of those meds. She hopes they will agree to let her try taking much less. Now that she is feeling better she is starting to be a lot of help around here. We will miss her when she leaves us.
Maggie wants to stop smoking, but she has some other stresses she is dealing with, so she can’t handle that right now. So we are going to order her a cigarette rolling machine. We think that might help in a couple of ways. For one thing, it can save her a lot of money. For another, it takes some effort, so it might slow her down a little.
I want to state I certainly am not advocating smoking. But I know some people have a real hard time quitting and a hard time paying for them. So when Maggie gets her cigarette rolling machine, I will report to you how it works out. You may know somebody who would like to try one.
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