Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 11, 1994 TAG: 9404120018
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It's the certainty that infects most people this time of year that this weekend they really are going to plant all those bedding sets they've bought.
The other Wednesday night, I stopped in at Lowe's around suppertime to pick up some birdseed, and the place was mobbed.
I mean, this was Wednesday night. Not Saturday morning or even Friday afternoon. But the middle of the week! And there milled hordes of people with pickup trucks, loading in flat after flat of tomatoes, peppers, marigolds, pansies, scarlet sage, salvia. They were even buying trees and peat moss and bales of straw - something they wouldn't have been able to do a week earlier, when it was still dark at suppertime.
It was intoxicating. I almost caught the bug.
I found myself looking longingly at sacks of fescue, bags of onion sets, brightly colored displays of vegetable seed. I whiffed the heady scent of new leather work gloves. The luster from still-shiny hoes and rakes set my head spinning. A new riding mower, so green it even smelled like money, stopped me dead in my tracks.
But then I shouted, "Get ahold of yourself!"
I reminded myself that my yard is still littered with branches, twigs, pinestraw, large parts of entire trees. That my flower beds are still choked with old foliage, old weeds and rotting pine bark mulch. That I haven't managed to put in, much less finish, a vegetable garden in 10 or 12 years.
"And you want to buy bush beans? You want to buy pear trees and radishes and begonias and Weed-Eaters?" I demanded to know.
Oh, yes! I most certainly did! I wanted all that, and more.
Suddenly, standing there clutching my basket in one of the store's dark aisles, I started dreaming. It was a fever dream, but as real as day.
I envisaged lush green carpets of grass around my house, artfully decorated with the nodding heads of colorful flowers, blooming from now till September. (And I don't mean, by that, dandelions.)
I saw curving landscaped areas, bright with peonies, azaleas, hydrangeas, tulips, hyacinths, daffodils. I imagined bowers of fruit trees, humming with bees; grape arbors, heavy with purple and bursting green fruit; raspberry canes; and fresh asparagus beds inhabited by sweet little white bunny rabbits that don't like asparagus at all. I pictured hedgerows, gravelled walks, birdbaths, sculpture gardens. Topiary, Bonsai, greenhouses full of orchids!
Then I woke up.
"Get a grip!" I told myself sharply. "This is Lowe's you're in. And it's only Wednesday night."
A Wednesday night so early in April, I might add, that frost is still a possibility. And then what will all those folks do with their pickup-loads of bedding plants? Put them in the kitchen, I suppose, and yell, over and over, at the cat, "Get out of there!"
On that happy note, I loaded up my sunflower seed and wildbird food and lumbered out of the store.
By the way, the birdseed is mostly for the squirrels (I'm afraid they'll chew through the walls if I don't keep feeding them) and for whatever critter is growling under my office. I suppose it's just a 'possum, but I'm afraid to look.
Monty S. Leitch is a columnist for the Roanoke Times & World-News.
by CNB