2001-05-10 - 8:57 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Life's Been Good to Me So Far", by whoever the fuck sang that.

I AM SO MAD!

I AM SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MAD!

OH MY GOD!

You're gonna laugh at me when you hear why, but

I AM SO FUCKING PISSED!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Actually, at this point I'm beginning to calm down, but that was how I felt about 15 minutes ago.

Okay.

So last year, my mom and I went shopping in a nursery in New Jersey. There was a pot of red dahlias that I had my eye on, but decided not to get because it was $20 and I already had a bunch of other things.

My mom, kind, lovely mother that she is, bought them for me.

So I've always had special feelings for these dahlias. My mommy gave them to me.

Now, dahlias go dormant in the wintertime, like bulbs kinda. I kept the pot in the garage so the tubers wouldn't freeze. I heard some nonsense about taking the bulbs out of the dirt, but I wasn't gonna get into that. About a week or so ago I put the pot back outside, cut off all the dead bits, and started watering it regularly. As you know, I'm new to this gardening thing, and I wasn't getting my hopes up about bringing the dahlias back.

Yet, this morning, to my absolute delight, I saw that there were leaves coming up. And they weren't weeds. They were dahlia leaves.

I was ecstatic. I got to work and e-mailed Poindexter, full of exclamation points, about how I had managed not to kill the dahlias, and they were GROWING and wasn't that COOL!!!!!!!!!!

You know how I am about this stuff.

The dahlias were on the sidewalk right next to my little flower bed thingie with all the tulips in it, just outside the garage. I also had a trough with the morning glory seeds in it, that I planted on Tuesday. This is on the south side of the house, where the sun is best, and not too direct in the afternoons.

That's the backstory. All my joy and fun with the flowers.

The thing is, I live in a townhouse. It's the house, the 3-foot deep flower bed, the 5-foot sidewalk, then the street. We put the garbage can about two feet in front of these pots. There's nowhere else to put it.

Today was garbage day.

Right about here is where you figure out what happened.

I had told Poindexter to check out the dahlias when he got home (well before me; I was tutoring) today. When I arrived home three hours after him and they were gone, I thought perhaps, for some goofy reason, he had moved them.

But then I saw the dirt in the street, which had clearly spilled out of one of my pots.

Sniffle.

My dahlias. :(

My TROUGH. My mom gave me that trough, too. It's actually a window box kinda thing, but I was going to grow the morning glory seedlings in it, transplant those, then put some petunias in it and put the trough up on the railing.

I could just CRY.

I can go out and buy more dahlias, and another trough, but they won't be MY dahlias that LIVED through the WINTER that my MOMMY GAVE ME.

I jumped up and down and screamed in the kitchen for a little while, and then I said, "Well, there's nothing I can do about this."

But it sucks.

OK, I really am calmer now. But it's probably best not to dwell on it.

My guess is that an overzealous garbage man, first day on the job, mistook pots of dirt for garbage and thought he'd do me a favor. It had to be a new guy, because I've had troughs out there with dead pansies in it all winter and nobody took it upon himself to relieve me of those.

Trip to the nursery this weekend for me, that's for sure. Maybe even with my mommy, if they come down to visit like we've been pestering them to. There's an empty spot in the south garden area that I had been saving for to transplant the dahlias if they grew back, and something needs to go there.

Sniffle.

Boo hoo. :(

Go ahead, you can laugh. :)

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