Dead whisps of plant matter

There’s a fine layer of dust covering my
hair, when I look in the mirror without the
aid of my spectacles that tells me I should
brush the dust off and re-twist my dreadlocks

Further inspection with the aid of
refractive material and rims tells me that I
have continued to gain grey or white hairs
indiscriminately throughout my hair.
The dust is permanent.

Happily, I can’t see the wrinkles
in my eyes or the hairs on my chin
without the aid of bifocals. Upon
closer inspection though, I do notice
the peach fuzz of youth above my lip
has turned into a dark mustache.

These are the reasons, I only look in
the mirror in the morning. Others may
see me and I might ask, “Is my hair
standing straight up? Or, do I need to
re-twist the back,” since I can’t see
the back of my head.

Vanity can’t help or hinder me in gardening.
The mud is yellow, brown or black,
it splashes on my face, squishes between
my toes and gets under my nails.

My pants legs get wet and it takes
me awhile to get used to the feeling of
wet ankles, (preferable to wet butt
but that is another story entirely)

There always manages to be a splotch of
dried mud on my face when I come back inside
for the evening. I hope its a sign of working hard
or maybe just working with mud.

Girly helps me by removing the markers
from my garden in true toddler helpfulness,
“mommy couldn’t possibly want a row of
toilet paper cores in the garden, that’s just silly.
I’ll just ball them all up and give them to mommy
with a big bear hug. She likes hugs.”

(translation provided as whatever seems to be
the most positive response to gardening with
a baby girl who likes to step on plants, pull out
plants and smell Gerber daisies.)

She is quite like having a deer in my garden,
but during the daylight hours
while I watch her explore the limits
of my gardening OCD. OCD cannot remain while
a toddler is present, the school of good enough
and in the ground is where I live most of the time.

Many of my rescued plants are dormant
which is my way of saying, my ADHD allowed
me to forget they were alive in that bucket
over there and when I dumped said bucket to
make sure I wasn’t breeding bloodsuckers
I totally forgot about the thin dead whisps of
plant matter that were so beautiful
from the car when I drove by.

I really do want those purple flowers and
wild yellow daisies, but like I
said they are dormant now.
I’m working on growing
echinacea and not weeding it
out because it looks like plantain.
All of these errors could be avoided if
I had an attention span, I believe.

Flower Girl

Since it was not meant to be,
I’ll just be me in the garden with Girly
helping me garden ungarden garden ungarden
spray with the hose, aim high spray far
she lifts her hands up like water
is manna from the gods
as it drips down her arms onto her sleeves.

(She doesn’t have a problem with wet clothes
touching her skin.) The big grin of a
curly haired imp up on tippy toes reaching
for water is worth everything to me.
There will be more toilet paper core
rolls in the world later.

(I just totally got back from an internet definition vacation and I seem to be on the fence about the usage of the word whisp, which really does mean a flock of snipe, which I didn’t realize were real birds since I have heard of being sent on a snipe hunt. They must be really hard to catch. Whisp took me to wisp which took me to snipe, which proved my ADHD for the morning. What the hell was I blogging about earlier?

Oh yeah, dead whisps of plant matter, I guess the “h” hasn’t been used since Webster dropped it in 1913. I guess I’d better get with the program. I like wh in whisp. I’m not sure my neural plasticity is going to let that h disappear. Mmmm wisp. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Whisp

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