You know in your mind that you're plumb insecure and that killing a man is real immature

[sovay]

I have never before independently lived anywhere I could sit on the stoop of my building and read, which is what I was doing this afternoon with the summer-weight sunlight and Karen Burroughs Hannsberry's Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir (2003) when a_reasonable_man came by. According to the herbal app on his phone, the ground cover mixed with the violets and broken glass in our back yard is soapwort or bouncing bet, matching the provisional identification by pameladean. We walked around the neighborhood for my first time in depressingly literal weeks—either I have missed cherry blossom season or we have no cases within range, but there were flowering dogwoods and redbuds, something that looked like a may-tree by the Mystic shedding whitely into the water. I am stir-crazy with no stamina, but it was wonderful to be outside talking with a friend. My life has been feeling like the diminishing zap of an old cathode-ray TV. I did not expect as a side effect of thinking about Westerns that my brain would earworm me full-time with the Limeliters' "Gunslinger."

Comments

[sovay]

Given the situation of our bouncing bet, I wouldn't quite say it needs broken glass to thrive, but it certainly has no objection to it at all. Ditto Canada violets (those are large white ones with a yellow center and a pink splash on the back of one petal).

I personally would prefer a yard with fewer sharp edges, but I'm glad it's unlikely to trouble the plants. So far we just have the purple kind of violet, although at this point I am not predicting what else will turn up in the yard. This afternoon with a_reasonable_man I suddenly noticed clumps of chives.

Those tulips are both homely and absolutely other-worldly. Thank you.

You're welcome!

[pameladean]

I'd prefer fewer sharp edges too, but at least the plants help cover them. No going barefoot, though.

Chives are wonderful! I love their flowers. I planted a big clump to protect a rosebush, and it divided and then wandered off, and some time later the rosebush decided not to come back one spring. I hadn't expected the protection to necessarily work, let alone abandon its charge and go grow along the fence, protecting nothing but volunteer mulberries, which do not need any such thing.

P.