more yard work and still not through

Finally got a good picture of the 10 petal anemone which are popping up everywhere along with the dandelions. 

Last Saturday when my great niece was here getting the last of Pam’s things we got to talking about the things mothers save when their kids are growing up like every piece of ‘art’ scribbled on paper, locks of hair, report cards, special article of clothing, shoes, little mementos of achievements that get squirreled away in a chest or a desk or a storage tub. Eventually we forget about these stashes only to rediscover them decades later when the kids are grown, when we are going through old chests. My mother had stuff like that from me and when I traded my hope chest for hers, I got possession of all that because moms just don’t throw that stuff away. So it was when I was giving the hope chest to my daughter I sorted through all the stuff I had kept and gave her a box with all her little keepsakes and passed my son’s stuff to him as well. What am I supposed to do with this stuff she asked me. Whatever you want I told her. So Sarah was telling Vickie about me keeping all these things…locks of hair, drawings, old report cards, etc…and giving them to her, and what the hell mom, and that one day she was sorting through some storage tubs and found all those very same things she had kept of her own grown children. So what did she do with it all? Put it all back for her children to deal with in time. Because that’s what we moms do. Vickie admitted that she too was keeping a lock of hair from her son who is only about a year and a half. So it begins.

More pruning back of roses. I said I had 5 more roses to prune but that’s not really true. I had five more in the front which I cut back yesterday but there are four small and two big red ones along the fence of the little backyard and the big pink one in the day lily bed and the red and pink climbing roses intermingled with the crepe myrtle by the garage but I don’t prune those, just cut the dead canes out every year or at least the ones I can reach. I don’t know who the rose aficionado was who lived here previously. The only one I planted here is the heritage red rose that I brought cuttings of from the city house, the sister to the monster rose over in the shop yard. I don’t prune them back every year, usually just every other year, and some of them only every three or four years, like the big pink one in the daylily bed. Anyway, I did the last five in the front and worked on the monster in the shop yard and then worked on all the wild growth on the east end of the shop. This time instead of taking it all to the ground I’m trying to save the dewberry bushes for a crop later, just focusing on cutting the leafless virginia creeper and wild grape down to the ground and pulling that out. 

Earlier today I took out the rest of the cosmos, cut back the plumbago, the morning glory bush and the confederate roses (you can see I’d already started before I thought to take the picture and you can see the big pink rose bush on the right in the middle in the background), 

and then came in to cool off and rest. It’s already very warm and humid and besides, Jade and Autumn were here for the day so Mikey could finish working on Jade’s car and Paisleigh was here too. She and Autumn and Jade made good use of the sidewalk chalk with Paisleigh while I finished up and then we came in. 

I pulled out the box of costume jewelry that I no longer wear and Paisleigh wanted all the bracelets and necklaces on.  

Then she took this picture of me.

After everybody left I went over to the shop yard and finished pruning back the monster rose bush which is now basically just stumps, so no longer a monster, but it will be covered in new growth in a couple of weeks.