Forget the Apology, Joe Bob!

 

by Pa Rock

Yard Farmer

I need to begin by posting an apology (of sorts) to Joe Bob down the road whose character I impugned yesterday by suggesting that he may have stripped the blooms and buds from the beautiful rose bush that sits out at the end of my driveway near the road.  It produces buckets of beautiful yellow blooms several times a year, and this spring they were stunning - until every bloom and bud disappeared last Thursday night.  

A friend who also lives in a sylvan setting but in another part of Missouri, emailed yesterday after reading that post and reported that she, too, has a rosebush that produces yellow flowers, and she said the local deer always eat them.   I, too, have an abundance of neighborhood deer, so although I have never personally seen them stripping any of my rose bushes, and I have never lost any of my yellow roses in the past, I suppose it is possible that the local deer enjoyed a floral dessert on me.  Apologies to Joe Bob.

I have several pink roses in a grouping close to the road that produce masses of flowers but aren't as stylish as the yellow ones close by - and the pinks never get bothered by two-legged or four-legged vandals and miscreants.  Why would deer prefer yellow?  It's a mystery.

Speaking of mysteries, I recently read a story in one of my mystery magazines in which one of the quirky characters was an unemployed woman who lived in a stylish neighborhood - and who took her shovel and stole yard plants from the neighbors whenever they were away from home, often planting the stolen plants in her own yard.  That lady had nothing to do with the murder the story revolved around - but was just an interesting red herring.   However . . . 

She got me thinking about the time many years ago when my wife and I bought a home in Mountain View, Missouri, and were slowly moving in, one carload at a time.  One evening before we had taken up actual residence, we showed up late and found a neighbor lady, shovel in hand, digging up flower beds on our newly acquired property.  As I walked her back to her property, she carefully explained how the people who had sold the house to us had given her those bulbs and she had just been late in collecting them.  We also found her a few months later collecting fruit from our apple trees.  I guess she had been promised that crop as well.

We were living in a different community several years later when we returned home one evening  after work and found that the bank of blooming jonquils behind our house hd been stripped during the day.    A few days later my wife went down to talk to one of the neighbors about babysitting for our children - and the neighbor invited her in where they sat among vases of jonquils while talking about babysitting.  We didn't wind up hiring her.

And then there was my uncle, Bob Dobbs, who lived in a nice house on US 71 in Goodman, Missouri.  Uncle Bob had a blue spruce in his yard near the highway that was about four feet tall.  He bought it as an 8" sapling and carefully nursed the little tree along for several years.  Spruce are not common in Missouri, and Uncle Bob was very proud of his.  But one cold December day he had to run to town for just a few minutes, and when he returned his little spruce was gone, sawed off neatly near the ground, and undoubtedly on its way to becoming someone's Christmas tree.

It's so much easier to enjoy the efforts of someone else than it is to expend the damned effort yourself.  I'll forgive the deer because they have to make do with the scraps that civilization leaves for them, but the people with saws or shovels sneaking around to take take what looks "purty," well, no.  If you need something of mine, come knock on the door and ask for it, and I will extend the same courtesy to you if I ever need something of yours.  But if you "need" a bouquet, grow your own.

I would share the pears that grow in abundance on a single tree in the backyard, but in the fifteen years or so since I've lived here, I have only had a couple of them myself - and they were delicious.  The deer beat me to them every year.  I've seen them standing beneath the tree at dusk or dawn, or their back legs and reaching up into and the poor old tree with their front legs to shake the fruit loose.  The deer work hard for those pears!

And after the beautiful creatures have eaten their fill, they stroll off down the road and Joe Bob shoots them.

Come to think of it, Joe Bob, forget the apology.  I'm still pissed!