A Digression

We bought our house in Arlington, Virginia, in 1986, a cottage with a lovely front porch. The previous owners disliked the house and moved after one year into a characterless McMansion.

The yard was a mess. A previous owner had added a fishpond in the center of the back yard and just filled it in when he got bored with it, leaving a large perpetual puddle. The border along the fence was dense with weeds up to two and a half feet high, some of them poison ivy. It took a considerable amount of work to yank it all out and start something more civilized. We discovered three azaleas under these weeds.

One spring I found an article in Better Homes and Gardens about how to use bone meal to outline different sections of seed plantings in order to have an orderly garden bed. I decided to try it.

I’d been working at it for well over an hour when I heard a loud gasp from the back stoop. I looked over my shoulder to see Perry with his hands over his mouth.

Perry had let out our two Pekes, Fanny and Diva, earlier, who, unbeknownst to me, had been silently following me along the garden bed snorting the bone meal. I turned to see two white-faced dogs –reminiscent of Al Pacino after he made a face plant into a pile of cocaine in Scarface--wagging their tails happily, with very little left of my work.

Note to self: bone meal is essentially doggie cocaine. Never use it again.