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Category: Laughing
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I’m going to tell a story on my friend. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t read this. So, I’m safe to not spoil a surprise.
Several years ago, my friend bought a condominium townhouse in Durham. It had a tiny little bit of dirt between the front of the building and the sidewalk that was maintained by a company paid for by the HOA. There were a couple of foundation plantings there. But, it wasn’t particularly ornamental.
We planted a ‘Don Juan’ climbing rose behind those and it flourished. And she got some cobalt blue flower pots to plant annuals to liven up the front porch.
One day, she asked me if I would come help her put a rosemary in one of the larger of the blue pots. So, I grabbed my trowel, a bag of dirt and some newspaper for the bottom of the pot and head over there.
When I got there, she said, “I bought this a few weeks ago and I don’t know what I need to do. Everything else has just been put in the pot without transplanting it. But, I think this needs more room than that.”
So, we pulled the pot out; I put a couple of layers of newspaper in over the drainage hole and reached for the rosemary to see how much soil I needed to put in the bottom.
And it wouldn’t lift up.
The pot had been there so long that the roots had grown through the drainage holes on THAT pot and firmly attached it to the ground. So, we left it there and it became a HUGE part of the foundation hedge.
She sold that condo 2 or 3 years ago to move into a rental house with her mother. Her mother died last year and she decided to buy another townhouse condominium, this time, in Apex.
I have bought her a rosemary plant as a housewarming gift. And it already had roots growing out of the drainage holes.
I was going to get a blue pot for it. But, I’m not sure she doesn’t still have one the correct size. So, I transplanted it into a nursery pot that I had in the shed for it to live in until I have a chance to give it to her. IF she has a pot the correct size, she can just drop it in. If she doesn’t, I will get one for it.
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In the early days of the internet when everyone used BBSs and had handles, I was the Iron Orchid. She was a character in a Michael Moorcock series I had just read and the only one of the characters at the end of time to actually give birth from her body. I was the only one of my friends who had a kid at that point and I couldn’t think of anything else that suited me.
One evening there was a conversation about the war with Iraq and, pacifist that I am, I responded to some idiot that those soldiers were not actually fight for my freedom. There was a little more to that small skirmish of words, but, you get the idea. The idiot said something snarky about me being perfectly willing to reap the benefits of the sacrifices made by those soldiers and another user stepped in to back me up and used masculine pronouns. Which I thought was funny.
My response included my feminine pronouns. My (sort of) friend said “oops, sorry” and moved on in the conversation. The idiot got angry because I had been posing as a man. Iron, it seems, is a masculine substance and orchids are masculine flowers since the root of “orchid” is the Greek word for testicles.
I could almost hear him grinding his teeth when I asked how he felt about Steel Magnolias.
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My younger sister desperately wanted pierced ears when she was in elementary school. Our mother told her that she could get some self-piercing earrings if she wanted it that badly. They were hoops that slowly squeezed themselves through your earlobes. And she toughed it out. I thought “If M can do that, so can I. ” and I tried them out.
Nope.
I didn’t make it 24 hours. Those things hurt. My little sister is tough!
A couple of years later, when I was in junior high (before they included 6th grade and started calling it middle school), a friend got her ears pierced at the mall and I got permission to get mine done, too. That gun was genius. Pop! and it was done. I kept them clean and they healed up nicely.
Several years later, I was working at a jewelry store, living on my own, and they did piercings with the gun. I got a second piercing in each ear to wear studs over hoops or other dangling earrings. My mother was not impressed. She asked me when I was going to get my nose done. For. A. Week.
All I could do was roll my eyes and wait for her to get tired of it.
A little while later, might have been a year, might have been a few months, M got one extra hole in one ear. She called me and asked “When is your mother going to quit asking me when I’m getting my nose done?” I said, “Give it a week and she’ll get bored with it.”
I could hear the eye roll over the phone.
Time passed. Our youngest sister went to college.
When she came home with her nose pierced (having skipped over ears entirely), our mother had the grace to say, “I should have shut up about that. Shouldn’t I?”
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It makes me chuckle every time I pass it on my way to work.
It’s kind of blurry because I grabbed the shot with my phone on one of the rare occasions I have actually been stopped by that traffic light.
I am the Audience 