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Nancy Parker Brummett

Nancy Parker Brummett

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Memorial Day

Yardening

May 26, 2017 by Nancy 10 Comments

DandelionsIt’s Memorial Day Weekend and if local nurseries are any indication almost everyone is ready to get into gardening. Or is what you do really yardening instead? There’s a difference, you know.

First, the wardrobe differs drastically. Gardeners wear floppy straw hats, sturdy pants with big pockets and loops for hanging tools, and clogs. Yardeners work in the yard wearing a hat from Disney World, cut-off blue jeans, and the tennis shoes they bought the year they graduated from high school.

Then there are the tools themselves. Gardeners have tools with matching handles. Each tool has a special function—and a special spot in the wooden gardener’s bench at the end of the day. Yardeners are more likely to be out digging with an old serving spoon from the kitchen. They just toss it in the kids’ sandbox once they have the petunias in the ground.

Gardeners have a master calendar for all their gardening tasks, such as dividing seedlings, rotating rose bushes, whatever it is Martha Stewart finds to fill up her calendar even in the dead of winter. They wouldn’t dream of pulling weeds unless it was on the schedule.

Yardeners, on the other hand, may lapse into their yardening tasks quite spontaneously. I once talked to a freelance artist who explained she had missed her deadline because she went out to get the mail and noticed a few weeds growing by the mailbox. Naturally, she stopped to pull them up, and four hours later she was still out in the yard pulling weeds. I understood completely. That’s yardening at its best.

If you see people strolling their grounds, or setting up tents for a garden party, they are probably gardeners. Yardeners are more likely to be seen standing in their front yards on a Saturday morning drinking coffee, contemplating brown spots, and staring down the dandelions. The only grounds on their minds are the ones in the bottom of the coffee mug.

Of course gardeners don’t have to deal with dandelions because, you guessed it—they don’t have any. The anti-weed substance spread with their lawn fertilizer takes care of them. Yardeners, on the other hand, wield little spray bottles of environmentally friendly “Dandelion DOA,” and pop each stubborn dandelion root up with an old screwdriver. (The screwdriver conveniently fits in the back pocket of the cut-off jeans and is equally useful for setting the choke on the lawn mower.)Gardening

The aesthetic results differ, too. Gardeners carefully coordinate the shades of green they combine in any given area of the landscape, and are careful to plant flowers which bloom sequentially, clustered in color groups of cool or hot tones. Yardeners, however, are happy whenever anything turns green, and they’ve been known to water weeds for weeks before realizing they weren’t zinnias.

I have to admit I’m basically a yardener. Thinking I could actually improve my skills, however, I checked out a book on gardening from the library. Unfortunately it isn’t much help, as it was written by two perfectly lovely people in Pennsylvania who are completely spoiled by being able to plant with the assumption that whatever they plant will grow. The “casual gardens” in their yard, photographed for the book, could easily be paid-admission botanical gardens anywhere west of the Mississippi.

Gardener or yardener? Whichever you are, it’s time to get out there. And remember, those dandelions grow while you sleep.

Filed Under: Back Porch Break Tagged With: Dandelions, Gardening, Martha Stewart, Memorial Day, Yardening

Honoring Our Soldiers

May 29, 2012 by Nancy 6 Comments

To add to the Memorial Day tributes I am re-posting something I first wrote in October 2009, with a grateful heart for all the men and women who sacrifice so much for all of us.

The faces and stories on the news and in our local paper have appeared in a steady trickle over the last eight years. Another soldier lost, another family grieving. But the news this week that eight young men from the 4th Brigade Combat Team at Fort Carson, CO, had lost their lives in a bloody firefight in Afghanistan—where they were horribly outnumbered by attacking insurgents—has hit me extremely hard.

You see,  I can stand out on my deck and see part of Fort Carson. I drive by the Mountain Post often. At the shopping center just down the hill, I frequently encounter young GIs in their crisp, starched desert fatigues, going about all the ordinary activities of their lives that don’t put them in mortal danger.

As I watched the news accounts of the losses this week, I looked at each face intently. Is that the young man who held the door for me as I went into the cleaners carrying a pile of dirty clothes? Are those the guys who stood in line with me at Black Bear Coffee last summer, turning to say, “Have a good day, mam!” before they left?

One day my friend Pat and I were having lunch in the sushi restaurant down the hill in that same shopping center. We couldn’t help but notice a couple of young soldiers counting out their change to cover their lunch tab. “Never mind!” we called out to the waitperson. “We’ve got their lunch.”

“Oh, no mam,” one of them said, turning to look at me with his piercing blue eyes. “You shouldn’t do that. We’re here to serve you.”

“Well, you are serving us,” we said. “This is the least we can do.”

With a heavy heart one morning this week, I dug one of those rubber bracelets everyone wears to support their causes out of my jewelry box and stretched it over my hand. It’s camouflage green, and I got it when I gave blood in a drive for the soldiers a few years ago. I wanted to wear it as a reminder to pray for the eight families grieving.

As I went about the activities of my day—enjoying my protected, free life—I wanted to remember that we are still at war, that troops are still in danger, and that all of them need our prayers and deserve our deepest gratitude.

These were our boys who died this week—guys from our neighborhood. Remembering them with honor? Well, it’s the least I can do.

Filed Under: Back Porch Break Tagged With: Memorial Day, Remembering, Soldiers

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