The four-inch lavender plants? Or the gallon size? My gardener wanted to know.
The four-inchers are a lot cheaper, she said. But they’re small. “They won’t look like much for a while.”
I don’t have a while.
“Get the gallon size,” I said. “I don’t want to wait.”
How much time do I have, really, to wait around for a scrawny lavender plant to grow to full size? For azaleas to bloom?
How much time do I have for anything?
Not as much as I thought.
Before Jon died two years ago, I figured I was immortal. Well, not immortal exactly — but a person with another twenty living, breathing years left to me on this planet. My grandmother had lived to a month short of her hundredth birthday, and I long ago determined that I would do the same.
With all those imaginary — illusory? — years between me and extinction, I felt immortal. Most of us humans, if death is not right there in front of us, can wrap ourselves in cozy denial and pretend the inevitable is not going to happen, to us.
That’s what I’d been doing. Until someone died on me — my fellow traveler in life, a man born the same year I was, with pretty much the same life expectancy, a fit man who took his vitamins and worked up a sweat regularly on that recumbent bike over at the gym.
My Years Are Numbered
Maybe I’m not immortal after all, I’ve had to conclude these past two years. No, not maybe. For sure. For sure my years are numbered.
Facts are facts, and it turns out that I don’t necessarily have a lot of future ahead of me. Will I have one year, two years, five years, twenty? There are no guarantees for the likes of mortal me and mortal you. I am not my brother-in-law’s 1988 Toyota Celica, which made it to a Methuselan 500,000-plus miles, even if I go to the trouble to get all the oil changes.
So, I’m thinking I’ll go for the biggest, fattest lavenders and the lushest azaleas on the market. I’ll pay the money. The gardener will get them into the ground. I’ll watch them bloom this summer. Next spring at the latest.
There’s no time to lose.
I don’t recognize your yard . . . are you sure you are not worried about the wrong house? Is it your neighbor’s, perhaps? Just kidding . . . Elaine affirmed that you are correct. (I am in error! Is that possible!! Well, maybe.) Rich W, (your neighbor who is still elsewhere)
Yes. It’s our front yard — but it was seriously torn up and rearranged months ago. All that rain kept it from getting replanted, but now the gardener says that the soil is dry enough and it’s time to plant. Watch this space!
3 gallon, good decision. Will be over for a cup of tea to admire the planting!!
Love ❤️ 😍 Elaine
Stand by! 😉
Humm – more money than time. There is a book called “Die Broke” — the perfect answer? Tough to time though. I’ll be over to visit your new plants. Hugs, Ellen
Right. The timing is pretty impossible . . . New plants coming in two weeks, unless it rains — again.