***second caution - my language is about to get very Saxon***
I'm making turkey vegetable soup for dinner tonight. It's a proper January day: miserable, with a chilly relentless rain, a dark and leaden sky. It has been 2 degrees above zero all day.
January it may be, but in this coastal climate my garden herbs are still flourishing. I put on my wellies and headed out into the wet, a pair of scissors in hand, to snip a few stalks of dark green, rich-smelling thyme, and some spiky, rain-beaded rosemary.
Pretty, isn't it? Still alive, just sleeping.
Then I saw this.
I'm sorry my friends, but I have to use this word. I know it's a rude one, but this is a rude situation.
It's dog shit.
Dog shit right on my beautiful, majestic, English thyme.
To get this in perspective for you, this dog (not my dog, by the way) has shat, somehow, ten inches off the ground. This dog -- this accursed, ill-bred, malicious, and apparently acrobatic dog -- has managed to cover 30% of a large thyme plant with a squashy, soft, smelly, slippery, creamy grey mound of shit.
This is not a low-lying ground cover, my friends. This is a large, potted, three-year-old English thyme.
Moreover, this is a food plant. I cannot simply scrape it off, give it a good hosing, and let it carry on.
I have taken pruners and excised the thyme that Cerberus befouled, and of course prudence demanded that I take every last little bit of plant which may have been actually shat on, which may have bent to graze the enormous grey slippery shit in the wind storms which have ravaged for the past month, or which the winter rains may have dripped onto, having first been puddled on top of the shit. There was a lot, my people...enough to completely fill a large plastic grocery bag. To fill it with shit and thyme.
There's a poem in there somewhere.
To the person whose dog jumped my fence, wandered my backyard and shat on my English thyme, shame on you. Shame on you and your whelp of Satan.
4 comments:
Damn. Nothing more to say, just a sympathetic "damn".
Damn. Nothing more to say, just a sympathetic "damn".
Last night I was in bed and Joe was closing up the apartment in advance of sleep. Suddenly I heard this huge laugh erupt two rooms away. This is what comes from living with someone for over forty years - I called out 'Are you reading Shannon's blog?' He was. There is a particular laugh that he laughs when he reads your stuff - it's identifiable. You've a gift for writing comedy. A real gift.
OMG I nearly spat my coffee out when I read this and now I'm chuckling to myself! Are you sure it wasn't fox poo? The ones we get like to poo from a great height and don't get me started on what the badgers get up to - well, since you asked, they like to have a communal latrine; so that when one decides to poo somewhere they all come along and do it there and it's usually in a walkway.
Oh and quit complaining about 2 degrees - we've been below zero for the past week you great wimp (only joking btw)!
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