Home, garden show is fun (02/19/07)

The beautiful music of Ecuador was playing in the background as we passed the castle. The Singing Nuns were selling CD's. I hadn't realized that they were still around -the Nuns not the Ecuador musicians.

Merlin the magician hopped off his display and began talking to passersby as we rounded the corner. In front of us was a set of five huge, monolithic (probably man-made) stones arranged in a circle. Mists swirled in the center and orchids ringed the outer perimeter of the giant rocks. The whole display was surrounded by various bushes and plants. My favorite specimens were the three or four shrubs - I think they were cedars - at the entrance. They were a decided shade of brown and were well on the way to becoming crispy. It just goes to show that even experts can't always keep things alive. Now I don't feel so bad about that gardenia dying a slow death in front of my window.

Those were a few of the highlights of last week's home and garden show in Cleveland. We inhaled the delicious scent of hyacinths forced into bloom and marveled at the proliferation of bubbling rocks. It seems that every conceivable shape of stone had been turned into some kind of fountain. I wondered about the amount of sheer muscle it must have taken to put the displays together. The theme of the show was Ireland and from what I saw it must be a very wet, rocky country.

After getting our fill of the garden part of the show we toured the home improvement section. The theme there must have been rain gutters. It seemed everywhere we turned there was another booth offering some form of gutter guard guaranteed to keep leaves out of our gutters. There were even decorative rain chains designed to let the raindrops trickle down the chain and flow gently to the ground.

At one point I told my husband he should be very proud of me because I did NOT pick up yet another free yardstick to join the half dozen or so we already have at home. However I could not resist the ruler from a foundation repair booth that proclaimed, "How big is your crack?" We have another one just like it that I picked up last year. It's a good, sturdy ruler and I can never have too many rulers.

All in all it was an enjoyable day. Then we met my brother-in-law and his wife, Diane, for supper. We hadn't seen them for more than a year so we had a lot of catching up to do. We shared family gossip and learned of new interests. We exchanged goofy birthday cards. We laughed and ate and laughed some more.

We had an easy but long drive home the next day. The cat was glad to see us and the furnace was still working. The water wasn't frozen and I went to work on Monday with a renewed sense of energy and well-being. One of my favorite people called unexpectedly and wished me happy birthday. He said he was stuck inside as his wheelchair couldn't handle more than an inch or so of snow. I thought about taking him and his wife a piece of birthday cake the next day.

Then Tuesday it started to snow. I changed my mind about sharing birthday cake. It snowed some more. Then the wind started. The world turned white and stayed that way. Everybody had stories to tell about the weather.

As of now I still have snow at the edge of the driveway. The city snowplow built a wall of the icy stuff as a way to keep me off the streets.

Our plans for tonight and tomorrow include relocating the last of the snow walls to the sides of the driveway so we can make it to the store to stock up for the next blizzard. I hope we are not still snowed in by the time you read this. If we are then it will mean that we had another big snowfall to make up for the mild December and January. I think all this global warming has convinced Mother Nature to dump an entire winter's worth of the white stuff on us all at once instead of a little bit at a time.

Meanwhile, I'm eternally grateful that we don't live in a place where the snowfall is measured in feet instead of inches.[[In-content Ad]]