Spring has arrived at least three weeks ahead of schedule this year. Or so everybody indigenous to Northwest Arkansas tells me. The trees have already fully leafed out. The dogwoods and redbuds have bloomed and are fading. The lawns are green. The treefrogs are singing in the trees at night. I found a big fat toad in the lawn a week ago while I was mowing. Fortunately I saw him before mowing him down. That would be an inauspicious start to the season!
My lawn is a public embarrassment. I don't remember it being a solid expanse of weeds last summer, but it certainly is this spring. One moment there was brown grass and a few scattered dandelions, the next, it's a forest of dandelions, with stalks a foot tall! I mow them down and -- Bam! -- twenty minutes later they've all magically regenerated, only there are more of them!
I'm afraid I'm THAT neighbor: the one whose lawn is always ragged, whose garbage cans go days before they get moved back up near the house, and whose Christmas tree is (I shit you not) still lying out by the curb. Bentonville, apparently, does not pick up Christmas trees. You have to haul them to the compost center yourself. Not mine, though! Mine is parked out on the edge of the lawn, with dandelions growing up through it!
Guess I ought to do something about that.
My yard is also overrun with wild violets, which my mother warns me are highly invasive and a bitch to get rid of. I think they're kind of pretty. And they grow low, so from a distance they might almost be taken for grass.
Almost.
How about clover? Clover is benign, isn't it? Bees like it, it doesn't get too tall, and it's fluffy and green with pretty white flowers. What could be objectionable about clover? Yet I'm still obliged to mow it down once a week.
I also have a fine crop of little low-growing yellow flowers, several clumps of wild onion, some sort of flowering vine, and one really quite spectacular nettle. Very little actual GRASS, however. I'm considering putting a sign up in my front yard that says "Wildflower plantings: Please do not disturb." Only I don't think my neighbors would fall for it.
I don't want to be THAT neighbor, but I also don't want to spread a bunch of plant poisons on my yard to get rid of the weeds. Those might be toxic to the toads, and I'm quite fond of toads. So I'm not sure how best to proceed. I'm considering goats.
And on a related subject:
If you're going to fall in love, do it in the spring. The whole world around you feels like it's celebrating on your behalf.
I walk to work in the morning past all of THIS:
how can that not be my personal celebration of love??
Falling in love is awesome. Amazing. Fabulous. I can't come up with enough words to say how truly Great these past few weeks have been.
* However *
There are also few words to describe adequately the level of uselessness to which I have descended at work as a consequence of all this wonderfulness. This is caused by many factors:
1) Exhaustion. Being on the phone talking to John into the wee hours every night does not make 6 a.m. arrive any later. I'm running on about 5 hours of sleep a night. This is not contributing to snappy writing on the job.
2) Hangover. Being on the phone talking and drinking into the wee hours.... see above. There have been several mornings on which I was convinced, on first waking, that one of those fuzzy caterpillars that are so prevalent this spring had cleverly replaced my tongue. I'm a bit fuzzy myself until about 10:30 a.m., and then regain functionality only with the helpful ingestion of Monster hits or truly shocking amounts of coffee.
3) Facebookitis. The compulsion to check facebook every three minutes looking for messages from John. Or, once messages arrive, to engage in meaningless instant message chat while the museum burns down around me. There's another form of this affliction which involves coming up with clever things to post to his FB page. All of this is also, I'm sure, excruciating for our friends who are obliged to endure it indirectly.
4) Googoo eyes. This is probably the most embarrassing of the symptoms. This is the helpless need to pull up pictures of the beloved on my computer and gaze at them stupidly for minutes at a time while my brain leaks out my ears.
5) Space Jamosis. Listening to every song he's ever posted on his FB page, and/or cruising Spotify to find music that will add to the growing imaginary soundtrack of our relationship that I'm building.
6) Levitation. Floating on air feels lovely, but I can't write when my feet don't touch the ground.
Someday I suppose I'll have to come down from this two-week high I've been on, if only to assure that I remain gainfully employed.
Other than these slight oddities of behavior, I think I'm dealing with the whole thing rather well. Granted, I'm stopping by his house every morning to smooch his face before I go to work, where I do little but daydream about him until I get home and can start planning our next meeting before getting into bed to talk to him by phone until one of us passes out.
I suppose it's good to know that the feeling of falling in love remains the same even at the ripe old age of 45. I'm sure if I compared my behavior now to my behavior when I first fell in love as a teenager, the only differences would be my hair color and jeans size. It's absolutely reduced me to a giggling 16-year-old. In spite of all the lessons so painfully learned at the romantic school of hard knocks I've been subjected to over the intervening 29 years, I still succumb as readily to love as ever. It is a powerful intoxicant, and frankly I've no interest in resisting.
I've said it jokingly on numerous occasions, but it's true that I really was starting to worry that I was turning into a jaded old dame -- that old broad at the end of the bar with a cigarette and a glass of scotch, rasping on about what shits men are. Whew. Dodged the bullet on that one. I must remember to thank John especially for that when I see him next.
Okay, strike that last post. I am no longer buying a house, it seems.
My house-hunting project fell flat on its face and slunk away in embarrassment. Despite sending up a Hail Mary application to the sort of lender who provides mortgages to deadbeats and hobos, I was still unable to attain a loan. In short: I owe too many people too much money. AND: lets face it, I suck at finances. Lets call it a lesson in fiscal responsibility.
So be it. Que sera sera, etc. The good news is that I was able to use part of the money I had saved up for a down-payment to pay off some of those debts, so hopefully I'll have better luck next time. "There's always another house," as I've said before. When the time is right, hopefully next spring, we'll begin anew.
Meanwhile, life in Bentonville gets curiouser and curiouser.
Having not-so-long-ago exited a relationship, I had made up my mind that I would remain steadfastly single for awhile. Thought I'd surf around, widen my circle of acquaintance, and keep it loose. I had no idea there was a freight train in my future.
The freight train's name is John.
I'm currently in the middle of experiencing something I don't think I really believed in anymore until about two weeks ago. God help me, I'm in love.
Remember this post, when I was feeling like there was something missing in my life here in Bentonville? I decided that I needed to stop bellyaching about not feeling right and just hand it over. I tried to get myself re-centered, and focus again on opening up to the Universe. And since, if you want to win the lottery, you have to buy a ticket, I also signed up on OKCupid.com. I bought a ticket, so to speak. And the Universe delivered. There was a gentle knock on my psychic door, and when I opened it up, this blonde freight train ran flat-ass over me.
It started out a couple of weeks ago as a simple walk in the park with the dog. Then drinks after work at a downtown watering hole where his sister tends bar. Next thing I know I'm talking to him on the phone for three hours every night, making plans for two months in the future, taking down my OKCupid account, and dropping by his house on the way to work every day just to say "Good Morning."
Cue the Dean Martin music...
If this sounds insane to you...Good. It should. It should sound insane to me, too, but it doesn't. I'm on Cloud Nine. I won't say I threw caution to the wind... the impact of the freight train knocked it right out of me.
Let me tell you, this is the last thing I expected. I thought I'd turned into this jaded old broad who didn't believe in True Love anymore. I can't even tell you anything specific about John that I love. I guess I'd have to say it's everything about John that I love. The total package. It just fits. Like your favorite jeans. We just work together.
And before you assume that I'm just lost in the sexual Fog of War, let me explain, at the risk of providing too much information: this guy hasn't even gotten to second base! We're just soaking up one another's company, every chance we get.
So fuck it. I'm going for it. This kind of thing doesn't happen to everybody. I'm incredibly lucky and I can't think what I've done to deserve such a thing. But I asked for Love and the Universe dropped John on my doorstep, and you don't fool around with Mother Nature.
