I didn’t write yesterday (and that’s OK) because I was having a long and disappointing day pitted against the Powers That Be regarding my health situation, resulting in the way it is now: because of the specifics of the bureaucracy in which I live, things are about to get very much worse for exactly six months, at the end of which I will either be miraculously recovered or I get to step down from this fight of one-and-a-half-years and counting, and engage in a new, similar battle with some other bureaucratic functionaries (like myself) who (like myself) have no sway over the whole inhumane system themselves. It should come as no surprise that today I’m grumpy and not feeling in the slightest creative.
I thought to myself, thus, why not show people some stuff I’ve picked up out and about and brought home to brighten up my garden? It’s a beautiful sunny day (oddly enough), I have a friend coming by in a while, and I’m expecting delivery of the first book I’ve been able to buy for myself in years, Derren Brown’s “Happy”; really looking forward to it. No time for the gloomy-glooms! Here, check out some of my cool stuff.
This putto turned up in a bin outside a house being demolished. Fairly often I see something in a skip and think, how could someone just throw that away? I’m sure I’m not alone in this. There was no way I was going to leave this guy to the landfills! Luckily this was several years ago when I was still physically capable of doing crazy stuff sometimes, so I popped the little fellow up on one hip and walked the six blocks home. He wandered around the garden for a while, and ended up here. He has a very handy piece of rebar sticking out of the top of his head to anchor flower pots on.
We have a system here whereby if you have stuff to throw away that’s too unwieldy for regular channels, you can make an appointment with the city and on the day, put out a pile of trash. I found a very nice picture frame in one such pile just this morning. I couldn’t believe it, though, a couple of years ago when I opened my front door and saw this table, in all its glory, on the other side of the street in just such a heap of junk. I rushed to it, and seized upon it with glee,
promptly discovering it to be made of ironwood or some shit. It took me 20 minutes and threw my back out just getting it across the street and into the back garden. And I’d do it again. Isn’t it magnificent?
Now I accidentally collect iron animals. These three turned up in respective skips over a period of about a year. The flamingo has spent the past months receding into the nasturtiums and seems comfortable there. The rusty chicken (isn’t that a dance from the 1930’s?) keeps a bowl of marbles and the lavender shrubs company, while I set the Frog King up to survey the entire garden and peer into the living room. He has a little door on his back and a candle-holder inside.
This, we call the Pickle Plant. Not because it’s a cucumber plant – obviously it isn’t – but because that’s who’s in there. Pickle was in our lives for a couple of hours, a
crow my kid and I rescued from the streets of Amsterdam in the dead of winter when we came upon him huddled in the middle of the sidewalk with two kind, caring, panicking teenagers in attendance. I told them we would get him to the bird hospital and thus began a half-hour journey trying to arrange to meet the animal ambulance somewhere, culminating in a two-hour wait at a downtown
police station during which he sadly died (research after the fact, including a discussion with an avian vet, made it obvious he had a bacterial or fungal infection of the crop and would have been very unlikely to survive even if he’d been found by a vet in the first place).
Here’s a picture of me and Pickle my kid took at the police station. We brought him home and buried him in this wonderful pot I’d found, and I was preparing to go out and get something to plant atop him when my kid said, “Get something with green flowers.” (Because his name was Pickle.) I gently explained that any flowers at all in the middle of January was unlikely, and green flowers are pretty rare. But lo and behold – they had this green hellebore for us. Three years on, and it’s really looking good!
No, my neighborhood isn’t infested with Disney witches (more's the pity)! These are used to clean up the streets here, and sometimes one gets thrown away, and I think they look nice here in this corner.
Well, there, that’s a bit of a little tour of some of the things I’ve found which make me happy. While I was taking these pictures, one of my pals dropped by to hang out; unfortunately I haven’t been able to give this one a name because it doesn’t have any distinguishing marks (I call them all “buddy” though; they probably think it’s human for “jackdaw” by now), but it’s a friend of mine, dropping by just to hang out sometimes even when I’m not making with the food.
Whatever your day is like wherever you are, I hope it’s a good one.
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