FINALLY CAUGHT HIM!

He was right outside my door. Sometimes I can really be Not Nice.

My cross-the-walk neighbor, who has whole hands of black thumbs and wouldn’t know a green thumb* if she saw one, never waters the big pot of what-could-be beautiful but are all shriveled-up succulents just to the side of her door stoop.

Since the stoops here have waist-high side walls, she can’t see the plant. And wouldn’t know when or how to water the poor thing anyway. So I stumble over and do it myself, once in a while, when I know she isn’t home. We had a tiff about 7 years ago and she’s been a poop to me ever since. I don’t even recall what it was about. So I try to stay out of her way.

Beside the succulent is a would-also-be-glorious iris plant. She can’t see that, either. Probably wouldn’t care if she could. But I can see it, and I care.

Once a week, my landlord’s landscaping company comes in and does the works on the little patches of grass around our door stoops. Cut the grass, trim the edges, water a little, clean it all up, go home. Like that.

When I first came here 8 years ago, that iris was as tall as me, with profuse blooms every summer.

One day 2 years ago, one of the landscaper’s minions decided it needed pruning, and cut it way back, all the way to its shortest nubbies. I didn’t think it would recover.

After a few months, I could see little tips of leaves poking out. I think it was searching for the guy – is it safe to grow, it wondered, do I dare make even a single bloom?

By the start of last summer, it had about 6 inches of growth. And one impossible bloom about a quarter of the size it would normally grow.

Annnnd wouldn’t ya know it, the guy cut them all back again. He was VERY lucky I wasn’t there to see it.

But the plant persevered, growing a wee bit by this summer. I was outside today, marveling at its commitment to life and beauty, admiring its new little growth tips, mentally singing you can do it! You can do it!

Who should walk by, weed-whacker in hand? The Guy.

The Cutter.
The Destroyer.
The Ignoramus.
The Enemy of Beauty and Natural Growth.

You don’t need to hear what I said to him. You might assume he slinked away with red ears and slouched shoulders. You’d be right.

His boss came over shortly later and started to light into me, now, for having scolded The Cutter.

But see, after a certain number of times of being told you’re worthless, an old idiot, what do YOU know, don’t you dare talk to him that way, and so on ad infinitum, those words have zero potency. Think water, duck, back . . .

I straightened up on my walker so I wouldn’t look so much like ‘just a useless little old lady’ – old, to be fair, I am – but useless I am not. And voiceless, definitely not.

I turned his ears red, too.

I took him down to the end of the little walkway and showed him the other iris plant that no one, for some lovely reason, had ever trimmed. Taller than me. Covered with blooms ready to burst.

I said, See this beauty? This is how that one (pointing) should look. Untrimmed. Flowering. Gorgeous. And you want him to do what, now? Can you please tell me why he got it into his pea-brain to trim it?

He muttered something I couldn’t hear. I said Just stop. Don’t try to make excuses. I can be nice, but I don’t feel like it right now, because you guys wrecked a plant I took a lot of pleasure in seeing every day.

You turned it into a poor, pathetic scrubby mess of dying leaves desperately attempting to survive – and now Cutter here wants to do more to it? If he even goes within 5 feet of that plant for the next 5 years, I will make it a point to call (landlord) and squawk about this. I’m guessing that after that, you wouldn’t have this job much longer.

That’s the edited version.

My teenage peers always called me Razor tongue. Now you know why. The poor man and his weeny minion slumped over to their truck and drove off. Good riddance.

I’m still pissed. There is not one reason on this Good Earth for anyone to be so blatantly ignorant about plants and the other natural beings who accompany us in this journey we call Life.

Oh wait – right – kids don’t go outside to play anymore, do they? How could they know anything? They don’t learn about gardens and forests and animals and oceans and All the Good Things. They eat crap and stay glued to their screens and treat their parents and elders with gross disrespect.

It is my sincere belief that their – and older people, too – disconnect with Nature is the be-all, end-all reason every last thing is fucked up nowadays. And no, not sorry. I mean it. Fucked. Up.

Everywhere I go, it’s obvious, the amount of I-Don’t-care-about-anything-but-me.

It makes me scared, deeply sad, and infinitely full of rage. What have we done????

So I try to do my part to protect it, make beautiful things to wear and to put around us, light up the spaces, grow healthy plants, be nice to people, even.

What do YOU do?

Do you scold the ones who need scolding?
Do you create beauty?
Do you add value and support to those who need it?

Please tell me, because tonight, even with such anger running through my bones, I realize how exhausted I am, after more then 65 years of trying to bolster Life itself.

I feel pretty alone in it all, like most everyone is so involved in mundane stuff their attention has no room for the natural world upon which they walk.

I want to lie down and go to sleep for eons. Millennia.

Then I want to wake up and find the planet and the people healed and happy, plants flourishing and blooming and making luscious fruit, fishies happy, swimming with whales and dolphins, forests alive and thriving –

Yeah good luck with that, my Black Mind whispers.

My White Mind shuts the door on it – I can’t take much more today.

Despite today’s rangle-tangle, somehow, I want to continue to have faith that the energy of Life will win out.

It’s a very thin thread, and feels fragile and frayed, but it’s there. Is yours?

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*Green thumbs – are you familiar with the term? Having a green thumb means you’re a good gardener, can make plants happy, things grow in your presence that wilt away and die in other’s.

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BIRDIES FLY
© Angela Treat Lyon 2026

Creating these designs makes me happy. They make me laugh, and they take the sadness away for a bit. I’d spend every minute doing them if I could. I hope you like them.