Late last summer a long time friend of mine came to town for a visit. Due to some sort of a snit we had not seen each other in a few years and I was somewhat nervous to see her again. As expected, she was thin and in good shape; she and her husband run a ginormous ranch somewhere in the badlands of Wyoming and theirs is an active lifestyle that appears to melt any and all fat from the bones. I, in turn, was curvy and soft as can only be expected from a lifestyle such as mine ~where most everything is overwhelming and too enormous to even grasp, so I mostly just don’t and spend most of my time in a sloth-like state. However, it was such a lovely evening to see my friend, catch up on events and renew a friendship that began somewhere around the sixth or ninth grade. We chatted about all things, our children, her uber-husband, my lack of a husband, our jobs etc. And then she mentioned that she had taken up gardening. My  immediate thought was, “Well, of course you have. Because you simply haven’t enough to occupy your time between volunteering for the local ambulance shift and heading up the high school girls’ etiquette committee.” But as she went more in to detail about her gardening I realized she indulged more than just the occasional window box of petunias. She had a freestanding greenhouse, she begins “pouring over her seed catalogs in December” and starts planting by mid-February. And the more I pictured it, the more jealous I got. It wasn’t that she flew on a private plane to Paris to shop for her Spring wardrobe. Nor did she get an annual plastic surgery upgrade. This was gardening. But the way she described it was pure heaven, and a slice of heaven that I wanted.

I couldn’t afford a free standing greenhouse with my tax return this year, I thought about it but health insurance and Devon’s ongoing OT bills won out over it. So instead I opted for the plastic multi planters that house 72 seedlings to begin my growing endeavors. Last weekend Devon and I planted sunflowers, echinacea, cosmos and other bright colored plants. And the next day? I found holes in the plastic compartments. So again we panted more seeds. And again, the next day? Not only did I find holes, but I also found empty seed husks. Turns out the mice in our sun room enjoy the planting efforts enormously. The little fuckers were eating our seeds as fast as we could plant them. So then I went out and bought more seeds and the plastic planters with the clear, plastic covers. And today we repeated the seed planting all over again. On top of that, today Loren and I built above ground planter beds out of railroad ties and filled them with top soil from a previous project. Well, not entirely filled, we still have quite a bit to fill, but my back just couldn’t take much more today so the effort remains about two thirds done. While I find this whole project a step in a positive direction, I can’t help but think of my Wyoming friend and how she started this four months ago. Did the mice eat her plantlings? Did she really plant all her seedlings eight weeks before the last frost like the directions indicated? I am quite sure my efforts will all be in vain and that I will end up with a few spindly plants that look nothing at all like corn or lavender. I can picture the beauty as it should be in the middle of the summer: my butterfly plants attracting colorful winged creatures, the corn high and yellow, the carrots all orange and covered with dirt. But right now all I have is a sore back, a bunch of empty seed packets and some fat ass mice who are laughing at my stupidity.