How many times can I possibly write about the same topic?

Every May I look with envy at my neighbor's yard.  It spends every May through September in glorious color and bloom.  Okay. I'll admit that I get a little jealous when I look at my own barren and dead yard.  So every June I buy a few flowers and look smugly at my two pots and think how jealous my neighbor probably is of how beautiful my flowers look with so much less work than she has to invest.

Then in July, I ask the nursery employee why my flowers are dead and the neighbor's are thriving.  The employee will warn me about over watering and needed nutrients and about measuring sunlight.  I always have a witty retort that sounds suspiciously like,  "Um.  

What was that you said about 'watering' ?" And then the employee will guffaw about having never heard of anyone killing flowers by NOT watering.  Ha! Ha! Ha!  "Do you feed your children?"  Ha! Ha! Ha!  "Don't YOU eat?"  HAHAHA!!!!  

It's at that point I leave the nursery because I cannot be bothered with feeble-minded idiots.

Last fall, I outsmarted myself.  I picked up a catalog and pointed to a few bulbs and ordered them.  A few weeks later those little, oniony-looking bulbs went into a couple of potting tub-thingies, and I covered them with newspaper and put them under my despised camper to rot.

Of course, I didn't mean rot because I knew exactly what I was doing.

This spring my husband needed to pull the camper out of the garage, and look at that!  There were those pots that I had forgotten clearly remembered.

I proudly put them in front of my house.  Take that, green-thumb neighbor!!!  And then, while flowers came and went all around her house, my family and I enjoyed lots of spindly green something or others in our potting tub-thingies.  Occasionally, my children would inquire about what they were, and I would smirk.  "Silly, dear children!  They're our flowers!"  My precious children would begin to question me again, and I would quickly silence them by going for ice cream.

But look what happened this week!!!  We have flowers.  Nine things I don't know the name of colorful, graceful, elegant examples of my horticultural talent.  Take that, condescending nursery employee!  Be jealous now, talented gardener neighbor!  Enjoy, oh ye children of little faith.

Checkered tells me that we might even have rain for the next few days, and we all know what that means:  these nine flowers have a chance to live until next week!!!!!

Sometimes, I absolutely amaze myself.