Arum

 March 23, 2024

Got some of the new plants into the ground, covering the roots of creeping phlox just as rain began to fall. Tick. .  Tick it went on the blade of the spade. Male fern, coral bells. 

Last night’s error was to drink a pot of tea throughout the evening. The tea was caffeinated, and my sleep was strange and fitful. Up at 3 drinking a shot of Irish to mellow out. 

Several weeks of rising from bed with a crippling backache seem to have come to an end. I’d stagger around, trying to flex, trying to stoop, before I could engage any enterprise as taxing as sitting on the toilet. For two mornings now, gone. The exercise provided by gardening?  Simply a new manifestation of my custom, which is to have every affliction known to man, but each only for a little while?

Rehearsal for the reading of the Passion at All Souls. My part includes the curious passage about the young man in a loin cloth, who, after they try to seize him, loses the loin cloth and runs off naked. The internet suggests this is a dead person whom the proximity of Christ raised from the grave. 

T and his second son A mowing the yard, a little prematurely, I thought, but bring on summer. A is more playful than B, his other son. A wanted the bamboo poles I had cut. Someone told T that arum is poisonous. I demonstrated that it wasn’t by putting a leaf in my mouth and eating it. Unless it is, in which case I’m in for a surprise.