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The Thing About Flowers

I’m getting to the point in my life where a Coke sitting on the refrigerator shelf looks tempting at 7 a.m.

I never drank coffee, so what else is a middle-aged girl supposed to do?

A friend agreed with me the other day that we’re bone tired — and not the kind of tired you get from carrying a rolled-up 8 x 10 rug across Home Depot, but the kind of tired you get from a life of motion, of sprinting toward goals, of having been through 16,000 wash cycles, three kids, six cars, four houses and two dogs.

I’m beginning to wonder if we humans have a finite amount of energy to get through life and when you’ve cashed in all your chips, you literally run on empty. It’s not that you stop in your tracks, but you realize you’re not as bouncy as you used to be.

This spring, I went to buy flowers for my front porch and decided on two of the biggest hanging baskets you’ve ever seen. The sales clerk, who was helping me decide if I needed a U-Haul to get them home, warned me that I was buying petunias.

“Don’t forget that you have to snap off the flower after they die. And not just the flower, but the whole stem.”

I knew the petunia drill already, but what I failed to consider is how big the baskets were and that I might be spending the whole summer under a hanging basket looking for wilted flowers to behead.

Those big baskets should come with a warning: “You will hate me in one month.”

So, I hung up my flowers from hooks on the porch ceiling — the envy of baskets everywhere — and it took one day for the hook to fall out of the ceiling and for one of the baskets to fall to the floor.

Two days later, the second basket, not to be outdone, did its own swan dive, bolstered by the wind.

“Is it the ceiling or the hook?” I asked the guy at the hardware store.

I came home holding a packet of drywall anchor screws, but when I got to the porch I was too tired to stand on a ladder and figure out how they work, and I sat down to think about it.

I looked around the porch, hundreds of dead flower heads lying all over the place-floor, furniture, porch railings — and I decided I’d spent more time sweeping those things up than I had actively beheading them, and I decided they were trouble and that I never wanted to see a petunia again.

I took those baskets — once my pride and joy, and I walked them to the backyard and I found spots for them there, in places where they could die by the trillions and I wouldn’t care.

I normally kill anything from a nursery with a swiftness that even shocks me, but these petunias continue to purposely flourish. Hanging now from their less prestigious perches in the backyard, they seem to be taking steroids when I go to bed. When I wake up in the morning, they’re yelling, “Excuse me, you have wilted flowers out here! And don’t forget, you’ve got to remove the whole stem.”

My friend from Kentucky called me the other day and told me she was on her way to the craft store to buy fake flowers. She was going to put them in baskets and planters around her yard because she’d had it with the flower thing.

“You spend a few hundred dollars every spring and by July, they’re all dead.”

I told her about my hanging baskets, which at the time were still hanging, and she said, “I’ll give them one week.”

She was right. They’re not dead but they might as well be. I decided they were too much work and hid them.

I have a neighbor with the most beautiful yard. She’s in her 70’s and on her own steam, her yard looks like a golf course. All summer long, different flowers bloom at different times, and everything is magically edged and neat and tidy and she makes it all look so easy.

I’m convinced it’s in her blood. In a past life she was an award-winning English gardener for some queen, turning out rare orchids and supplying the royal palaces with fresh cut flowers grown by her 10 green thumbs.

“Don’t you ever get tired?” I want to yell across the fence.

I think she’s too smart to buy petunias, because she actually reads a book on her porch from time to time.

Work smart, not hard. That’s what my father used to say.

Think twice, then, about petunias after the age of 40.

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