My garden girl escapade
Are you kidding?  First, it was Lyme Disease.  Don’t go outside without full body coverage and a good soaking in DEET. Then there was the Stink Bug invasion and just this year, ta-da … Corona, and I don’t mean the beer.  Stay inside and when you do go out, add a mask.  Carry hand sanitizer.  Stay six feet away from everyone.  Let your hair turn into a rat’s nest of indeterminate color.
We’ve seen a dramatic increase in weird weather:  tornadoes in New York City, flooding where it never flooded before, snow on Mother’s Day. And, to top it all off?  Murder Hornets!   Hornets the size of a small bird.  They kill bees and their sting is said to be akin to childbirth or a kidney stone.
I mean, what next? Will it soon start to rain frogs and fish?  Should we be building an ark?
I could have just sat like a dummy in front of the TV and zoned out on interminable series or retreated to my bed with the covers pulled up over my head, but I thought, “There are many ways to build an ark,” especially when the sun is shining.
Last Sunday was spectacular. Warm, sunny, a gift after what seemed to be a two-month glut of cold, rain and gloom, all crowded into April.  A day when the virus and hornets and ticks faded into the background.
I went outside.    Ah, fresh air, sunlight, the scent of spring and the sounds of spring peepers.  Glorious!  I was mesmerized.
There must have been some kind of horticultural legerdemain afoot at that moment because she who had, at most, used a crochet hook and vacuum as exercise, immediately gathered two rakes, a shovel, a pair of clippers and a wheelbarrow to assist her in what turned out to be a questionable aspirational moment.  I was garden girl.  I would rake and weed and trim and do all those things that people dressed in white clothing and large brimmed hats do in movies.
Remember, my most energetic activity for the last two plus months has been to taste the baked goods that I made to assuage my inability to “get out.”  This fact seemed to have slipped my mind.
My first attempt at this began with trying to wrangle the climbing rose vines that were lying on the ground wrapped around each other. After the need for the application of several band-aids and some triple antibiotic as a result of the struggle between me and the rose vines, I returned to the task with faux leather gloves.  I trimmed some of the dead vines, gingerly moved some that appeared to be alive up behind a green wire that I had brilliantly thought to put there last year and gave up trying to pull out the enormous amount of ivy that had situated itself behind the roses because there were no band-aids left in the house.
I moved on to the next task on my list: the leaf covered patio.  I began to rake. After five minutes, a signal from my lumbar spine, mediated by my right hip said, “Sit down.”  So, I did.  It took me an hour to rake what is, at best, 64 square feet of bricked patio.   Following that escapade, I went inside and took three ibuprofen accompanied by a sandwich to mitigate the argument between my stomach and the meds and then, of course, a cup of tea and two cookies, just to make sure that the ibuprofen wouldn’t prevent me from completing my mission.
Back outside, I decided that the patio didn’t look good enough, so I rounded up my old outside broom and swept the patio.  You really haven’t experienced insanity until you try to sweep up leaves, dirt, pieces of rose trimmings with thorns, the gravely stuff that holds the bricks in line and other unidentifiable substances.  I neatly moved the assorted detritus in a pile so that I could scoop it up into the wheelbarrow when the phone rang.
It’s now the next day and that pile of stuff is sitting right where I left it.  Somehow, between exiting the patio and answering the phone, the muscles in my upper arms and back began to seize up and scream, “No more.”  I’d reached the maximum dose of ibuprofen, so I opted for a warmed rice bag and more tea.  I’ll just relax and finish tomorrow.  Yeah, sure.
There wasn’t enough ibuprofen on earth to stop my aging body from telling me what an idiot I was to attempt that garden girl escapade.  Nothing helped. Not tea, not wine …ok, maybe a little, not a long hot shower.  I just had to wait it out until the chemistry of overworked muscles righted my ability to hold a cup of coffee.
The pile of stuff is right in the middle of the patio. It’s raining today, so moving it wouldn’t be prudent.
And as far as building an ark of any sort?  Are you kidding? I can’t manage lifting a Swiffer duster right now.

Ann Ferro is a mother, a grandmother and a retired social studies teacher. While still figuring out what she wants to be when she grows up, she lives in Marcellus with lots of books, a spouse and a large orange cat.