WINTER'S LAST FLORAL HURRAH PRIOR TO FIRST SNOW FALL

Below, gaillardia Tokajer followed by yellow mum, wine red mum.

Above, purple alyssum

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Ethereal  pearl  colored miniature rose blooms just before last week's snow fall.

How sweet it would be to channel a pre-Raphaelite beauty who limits her demands to exquisite color and intoxicating fragrance. All her needs would be met by a small rose garden. Mine is a coarser world that requires brute manual labor in order to yield flowers whose ethereal beauty is a thing of a day.
I enjoy this wealth of roses, peonies, irises and poppies as much as I the heavy clay soul I have been amending for twenty years. I have made a garden in a meadow where cows used to graze a couple of centuries ago. The cows are gone and so is the miller whose land this was long before my village earned its place on a map. On this land I have grown roses that once graced a mandarin's garden. I have also grown peas, potatoes and huge crops of weeds, of which creeping charlie, the most detestable pest, came to the New World as a medicinal plant. Creeping charlie leeches the soil from water and nutrients better mannered plants badly need. I fight it with a crusading zeal and it fights back with such panache I want to come back in my next life as an invasive weed.
Yesterday, I issued a fatwa on another imported--the accursed and inaptly named tree of heaven. There was shock and awe in the garden while I battled these foul fiends. Now I can finish planting beans and potatoes. I have peppers and tomato seedlings to be brought out of the cold frame; there are new clematis and roses in need of borders. I will continue the good fight. My sidekick will help. Eventually, the weeds will return. Such is life.

LOVE AND BETRAYAL

I loved him from the moment he came into my life. He was so bright, full of potential. I hoped we would be a good team and even now I thought we were. We wrote a novel together, gathered distant friends around us, created a history of togetherness and trust. We gave each other two of the best years of our lives and then the worst happened--he betrayed me. He is going into rehab soon, my Zed Bestboy, aka HP Pavilion dv2120. He will have his perfidious heart torn out of him so that a new, presumably faithful one, can be installed.

Will I ever trust him again?As most women in love I closed my eyes to reality. I forgot that relationships such as ours cannot defy built-in obsolescence. Still, we should have had four good years, at least. WHY, why, why did he fail me? I will never know, but one thing is for sure, my next laptop will be an IBM. Meanwhile, there are pansies heleborus and daffodils blooming in my garden, there is Madama Butterfly on PBS, raspberry sorbet in the freezer and other loves, far more constant than Zed's, the pig.