yesterday in my garden - comic

Leif has started filling up scraps of paper with little comics about cats and robots and killer cyborg snowmen, so I got him a proper sketchbook. He sits in the back seat on the way to school, drawing and writing. 

I said to him, "And if anything funny or stupid happens to you during the day, you can draw a short little comic about it. Just like 3 panels or something."

And I realized that I don't even do that. Why don't I do that? I MUST DO THAT.

So I did that. Here is yesterday's gardening incident. 

I discover barnacle scale and now I have to burn my house down

Labor Day is one of those holidays I don't have a knack for, like 4th of July or Memorial Day. I use these holidays as an excuse to buy lots of food and clean for company, mostly.

So amidst the mopping and dusting and pie baking and meat marinating, I rumbled the green bin out to the front yard and noticed all the little white carbuncles growing on the lilikoi vines that cover our trellis and windows. Fungus? Disease? I poked one with the handle of the rake and it fell off too easily. I picked at one with my fingers and it gave a compliant little pop of release. My trypophobia shuddered gratifyingly. So I popped a few off in my hand, tried to get a close look, realized I've become blind within 12 inches without reading glasses, squinted at them from a distance, and suddenly knew I was holding something evil. Possibly alien. Definitely going to crawl into my ears and burst out of my orifices in the middle of the night.

So I brought them inside, of course. The teenager hauled out his crappy kiddie microscope and we looked at blurry blobs for a while before packing a few up in specimen jars to take to the high school science lab.

Then I did the worst thing I could do: I googled it. Do an image search for "barnacle scale", and then barricade your door and prime the flamethrower.

The next day, as I sat eating my meal bar and flicking through soothing Instagram pictures of fair-isle knitting and misty landscapes, my son texted me an image, and my screen filled with the larvae-filled underside of an insect carapace at 500x magnification. "Definitely a bug," he wrote. My phone and hands combusted.

Going to battle with gloves, a ladder, and a bandanna knotted around my face. None of these little fuckers are going to use my insides as an incubation chamber.

Start as you mean to go on

And suddenly it is a new year. Again. 

I did my duty as a first-world holiday glutton and got on the scale. Screamed. Died. Made coffee. Complained to my mother. Knitted for the rest of the day while watching Doc Martin. So that's handled, then.

This is the year to grow roots, says me. A year to renovate the bathroom ceiling, build an outdoor shower, set up my painting studio, finish a quilt, plant vegetables that thrive on neglect. The lilikoi has become an entity, the arugula has taken over the front garden, and the Japanese eggplant has become a monster in the back. My idea of magical cozy homes are overgrown, vine-covered, unruly, and filled with books and artwork.  

Getting there. 

Also this was taken yesterday. See how wintry it is? Not wintry at all, that is how.

Started by raking up a bin full of leaves until my thumb blistered, which took care of one of the holiday pounds. In fluid, mostly. From my thumb.

This is the year something big should change, says my mother. She is tired of being lonely in her little condo with irritating neighbors and a frustrating job. She has been making an effort to ride with her bike gang and write her stories and get out to cultural events. "I should have married," she says. "But I don't like meeting men. What I need is a man I already know. Tell your blog I have a spare bedroom for visitors." She does, boyfriends-past. "That might make me tidy the spare bedroom." That means I'll be tidying it, but that's ok, because I'm a busybody like that. 

My mother, 1982 or '83

And I wanted to start the year with art stuff, to gain rolling momentum, so here is the drawing of Xebo I made for my mother. I did one of Hercules, too, but forgot to take a picture of it. He died kind of close to Christmas, so I was a blazing beam of focus.

Pencil & acrylic wash on Strathmore cold-pressed watercolor paper, 4x6

I'm not going to start a pet portraiture thing of it, but I do want a portrait of everyone in the family on the gallery wall. Well, the hallway wall. It will be a gallery when there is art on it, because I say so.

Also I'm going to knit some socks.

And that's the inspirational Start of the New Year with Obligatory Fitness Remorse post.

Yearly goals encouraged in the comments. (Your own. I know mine already.)

BEHOLD THE MAJESTY

Latent gardening powers SURGING.

BLOSSOMING, even. UNFURLING.

I am the MOTHER OF ROSES.

Only, you know - 

on a very

very  

small 

scale.

Actually, what happened is my bush became distressed in the cardboard box they shipped it in from Portland, and it blew a blossom early.

There are also hops planted in that dirt, but they might have died under there somewhere, and I can't buy more seedlings until next pay period. Gardening is not as immediately gratifying as laying floor tile or knitting a sock or ripping up a shitty drawing.