Flowers and Rum Do Mix!

I have a black thumb, and apparently black eyes too. I’m a farm wife, and yet I can kill a flower just by looking at it. Therefore, when my girlfriend Shelly came over to visit the other day and saw me standing on my sidewalk staring at my brown wooden house with an empty drink in hand and a stoic look on my face she apparently felt the need to intervene.

“I have no color,” I said to her.

The next day she did what all girlfriends do, she drove back over with a full bottle of rum, some diet Dr. Peppers, a trunk full of clippings from her yard, and the spirit of sight that I was lacking.

Still in the doldrums, she made me a drink, turned on the stereo and instructed me every step of the way on how to add color to my yard. What started out as a mere planting of starts soon turned into an art form born of shear imagination progressively inspired by Captain Morgan!

“So,” she said, “Whatcha got in the barn?”

“Huh?” I asked, straw sticking to my lips.

“Come on,” she said. “Show me whatcha got in the barn.”

“Okay,” I shrugged.

Apparently, an old broken down wagon makes for a cheap and easy potting bed. Who knew? Well, definitely not me. From there we walked the rest of the place, so much so that I feared a sobering up coming on. We went to the garage where Shelly’s eyes beamed at a pile of old broken toy trucks.

“Hens and Chicks!” she said.

Hens and chicks are a great little plant that looks like an artichoke that apparently needs little dirt, water or maintenance to grow. What can I say, the girl has known me for a while now. Within an hour we had rusted out toy trucks full of plants and flowers.

From there, things got almost aerobic as Shelly placed her drink down and drug me into every outbuilding possible, even daring to go into my husband’s shop and rummage around in his stuff only to locate an old blue tool box which we stole and immediately drilled holes in.

She nailed old pots to broken off telephone poles, filled washbasins with dirt, made a broken clay pot into a piece of art I cannot stop staring at, and turned a wood box into a beautiful flower box which I – in my apparently new found inspiration had Jack color flowers all over – into a flower box for the porch.

Thanks to Shelly, her rum, and her imagination, my house finally has a personal touch and I am starting to see things around my house with a new wonder and excitement. As for the black thumb, that has yet to be determined, but I was overwhelmed with possibilities and a renewed sense of hope by the time she left.

“Thanks!” I said. “Really, I would not have done this without you.”

“No problem,” she said. “Just wait until you see what I can do on Tommy Bahamas!”