Self Thought She Wanted a Crabapple …

Self thought she wanted a crabapple.  There comes a certain point when you get tired of looking at the street, and want something else in front of your bedroom window.

So, in an uncharacteristic bout of firmness, she went to “go-to” plant nursery, Redwood City Nursery on El Camino, and she bought a huge crabapple.  Tall and spindly and straight, with long tendrils already showing buds.  It was maybe 12 feet tall.  She closed her eyes when handing over her credit card.

The man self hired to help her dig the planting hole was supposed to come last Friday, but the job he was finishing up did not actually get finished up, and so he came today instead.  He took a look at the crabapple self had bought and said, firmly, that it would outgrow the space self had selected, would never thrive, and would end up dying.

So, where to put it?

The man planted it right in the middle of the front lawn (which is ugly and dry and brown, 3/4 of the year).  Self thought:  brilliant!  It will certainly have plenty of light and air and will grow big, big, big, just like the beanstalk in the children’s story!

But hubby, who self called because he is quite possessive about the lawn, said “Ixnay” to that plan, and so self ended up exchanging the tree for two camellia sasanquas.  Tall, filled with cheerful red flowers.  And what do you know, after the gardener had put them in the earth (and also, by the way, torn out the rotting porch railing that looked decrepit and worm-eaten and caused self to feel disgust every day that she looked at it), they were beautiful and stately!

And afterwards, self decided to clear up her office, which is getting to look like a tornado hit it, after the exertions of the holidays (even though son was rarely in the house — bwah ha haaaa), and she found a book by Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

She has every single book ever written by Ms. Nezhukumatathil (She can say the same about Zack, and about Luisa Igloria).  The one self is balancing on her lap at this moment is called Lucky Fish.  She loves the poem on p. 4:  “A Globe is Just an Asterisk and Every Home Should Have an Asterisk.”

Here’s how it begins:

Before a globe is pressed into a sphere,
the shape of the paper is an asterisk.

This planet is holding our place in line:
look out for metallic chips of meteor

hurtling through the universe. On my drive
to work, I saw my neighbor’s lawn boiling

over with birds. Like the yard was a giant lasagna
and the birds were the perfectly bubbled cheese,

. . .

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.