A quote: “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” ~~ Warren Buffett
I’ll start with a story …
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When I noticed the hole in the garden, my first thought was “gophers!” Which, truth be told, filled me with dread. I hate the traps, shudder at poison.
I even toyed with selling the house and moving into an apartment to avoid the mess.
But then it was the pansies that went, one by one, so I dragged out the traps. Yet the next morning it was an azalea now missing.
Lights off, I stayed up and watched as the guy next door dug up my gardenia bush.
I left the gopher traps and laid another. This time tonight …
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Sheila Garrett says: Kinda pointless to lock the gate when the fence is gone.
I get it, but I can feel the energy drain right in the middle of that section of hip-high grass.
Grammy said they wouldn’t be able to close the gate after they’d gone through. All they could do was to build a fence and make sure nothing was visible on this side.
I miss them so much. But my folks were on the government’s side and they said I was too young to be serious about Peter.
I crawl through the gap in the fence.
Cameron says: I stepped through the gate and took a deep breath. This land was untouched and would stay that way for as long we lived here.
“Good morning, Sunflower,” I called.
A moment later, the dryad appeared. She smiled in greeting. “Hello there. You heard my call?”
“Hard to miss it given my family. What’s wrong?”
She scowled in annoyance and pointed behind her.”A few environmentalists are trapped here. They made an awful mess.”
I shook my head. “Sorry, sweetie. Please free them and I’ll escort them out after they clean up. If they resist, you can do something about it.”
The first sign of trouble was coming home on the bus and seeing the Wilkensons’ gate padlocked shut. Sure, they had a big, fancy fence around their place, but until that day, it had always been for show, with the gate open wide so you could come right up their big circle drive. But within a week the spring grass was growing taller than they ever tolerated.
A week or so later, the Vandenwalts’ place was starting to look neglected, with the bright golden eyes of dandelions everywhere. Looking closer, I could see a funny box on the knob of their front door, and I tried to remember the last time I’d seen a car there.
I asked my dad what was going on, and he said a bunch of words about how we made stuff stretch instead of buying new. I didn’t understand what it had to do with the big, fancy houses that were now empty, but this was in a day and age when you did not talk back, so I nodded my head and said some grateful-sounding words.
Looking back, I’m thinking those families were way over-leveraged. Some of them may have been old money, but they’d borrowed on it to keep up their standards of living. And when the economy soured, they didn’t have any reserves to carry them through. But that would be a lot for a kid in grade school to understand, so he gave me a lesson about the importance of making do instead, and hoped it would help.
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