A Smashing Good Time

A Smashing Good Time

Posted by Heather Harris

The first really warm days of the year happened last week. That was really bad timing because I had 15 tomato plants sitting in a tidy little row by my sliding glass door, lifting their sad little arms towards the light, begging me to plant them. I was faced with the same problem I have every year: Are my seedlings better of growing sickly in their little start pots while I wait for the magical "Mother's Day Weekend", the date every sage gardener says is when to plant tomatoes, or are they better of being planted in the nice fertile garden beds, where most assuredly some nasty cold front will roll in right before Mother's Day weekend?

I voted, as I always do, for planting. After all, if they die in the pots I only have myself to blame. If they die in the garden I can blame just about anything else: weather, gophers, my cat, the kids...mollusks.

As usual, I couldn't just stop with planting tomatoes. I looked over my lovely garden and my eyes kept screeching to a  halt at the weed choked cinder block pile lying just beyond the edge of my vegetable paradise. Someone long ago decided to stack cinder blocks, two bricks high, in a horseshoe shape in the boggiest part of the yard. What was it? Who knows. Maybe a really ugly flower bed designed for skunk cabbage, maybe an ill-conceived dike, maybe a pig roasting/rotting pit? No clue. But it was ugly, functionless, and falling apart. In the lovely sunshine I thought, "Today's as good a day as any to move it out." That is right about when I heard the glass shattering screams of my daughter coming from down by our creek. I was certain she had stepped into a bees nest. My four-year-old son ran up to me, as I ran down to the banshee wail,  shouting, "Lily fell in the creek!" Out from under the redwoods lumbered Lily, arms outstretched, like a really loud, wet zombie. If she was a zombie she would be a loud one.

She was drenched from head to toe. Apparently she had grabbed onto a branch to catch a frog on the other side of the creek and the branch broke. You can picture the rest. I tried to be motherly, but really I wanted to laugh and/or explain how her dunk tank adventure was taking up precious gardening time. I kept it in though, which I suppose is what being a mom is all about. I shed my gloves and rubber boots and got her into the bath tub and then trudged back down the hill to address the cinder block problem.

I went to pick up the first one, and discovered the mud was not going to relinquish it so easily. Black, dense muck was packed into the holes of the heavy cement block, and weeds were growing up through it, lashing it tightly to the block underneath it. I let out a sigh, grabbed my trowel and began hacking away at the water-logged soil. I managed to get one out and heaved it into my yellow wagon. Then I pried the other one out and threw that in with the other. The only problem was that I forgot to remove my finger from the side of the cinder block, and managed to smash it between the two blocks. I mean really smash it. The kind where it doesn't even hurt because you know you have bigger problems, like finding the nearest emergency room. I grabbed it with my other hand, not really wanting to look, and woozily tromped back up the hill, feeling a little queazy, and a lot mad. Lily came skipping out of the bathroom, all of the creek drama forgotten, and showed immediate concern. She was ten times more motherly than I had been moments before with her. I peeled back the digits that were clenching my wounded index finger and investigated it. Not good. It was swelling quickly and abnormally. I'd broken my foot before, and this had all the hallmarks of bad news. Greg was gone at a class in Portland and not answering my telegraphed emergency texts. Hurt. Stop. Think I should go to emergency room.Stop. It's my finger. Stop.


I ended up loading the kids into the car, drove with one hand down the road while resting the other on the ice that Lily lovingly prepared for me, and then sat through two hours in the emergency room with snot nosed, typhoid ridden children running around playing with Luke and Lily. The doctor looked at my x-rays, and said, "I have good news. It's not broken", and then proceeded to wrap my two fingers together with a $100 piece of tape. Oh, Luke and Lily got an apple juice, so maybe it was just a $98 piece of tape.

Anyway, some lessons were learned from this. One: Lily is a better mother than I am. Two: Don't move cinder blocks without another grown up around (I've already ignored this lesson. 10 more blocks to go!) Three: The tomato gods will seek their revenge, one way or another, if you plant before Mother's Day!