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raise beds in the garden
Tuesday, May 3 2022
This morning I learned about a leak of a draft decision by the Supreme Court reversing Roe vs. Wade, the law that legalized abortion throughout the United States. It's no surprise coming from this particular Supreme Court, but it was apparently shocking to enough people to result in something of a firestorm. If this galvanizes enough people out of their political indifference, perhaps it will end up being a blessing in disguise. It might also result in some unwanted, unloved babies and some botched home abortions. I fail to see how that makes America anything but a grimmer, less inspiring place. Hopefully democracy can kick in at some point and correct this error, but of course Republicans are trying to undermine that on multiple fronts, because a grimmer more Putinesque future is what they want.
Knowing how little time I have for gardening and given the exceedingly poor performance of our garden last summer, this growing season Gretchen has opted to pay a couple gardeners (they're Hispanic of course) to build us some raised beds. They arrived today with a stack of treated lumber and quickly started building the raised beds. I don't know how I feel about building retaining walls out of treated lumber, but I wasn't consulted for any of this, so I'm letting it play out. The ended up being five coffin-like beds where the main patches of our garden used to be, each measuring four feet by eight feet and standing 22 inches tall (which seemed unnecessarily high, but the more soil, the better).
This evening while Gretchen was off teaching prisoners about poetry, I was watching YouTube streams from the comfort of the laboratory bean bag and snuggling with Neville, who was in the beanbag's deepest hollow. At some point Diane came up and it was clear she wanted to join us. Neville is nice to cats when he's joining them on a couch, bed, or other piece of furniture, but he's nasty when they attempt to join him. Knowing he'd probably make a move against Diane if she gave him eye contact, I put my right forearm between them. Suddenly it happened, Neville snapped, and actually bit my forearm. I smacked him on the head and shouted "NO!" and he deliberated for a moment and then decided to get up and leave. The bite didn't initially feel like a bad one, but when I investigated further, I saw that one of his fangs had actually broken open the tender skin of my ventral wrist. He snaps at the cats a lot in these sorts of scenarios, and they always beat a hasty retreat, but a bite like that could really hurt one of them if Neville were to actually land it. I don't know what it is about him that he feels so proprietary about furniture, but it's a quirk we evidently have to live with and plan around.
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