I've been ROBBED

damn it!

On Mother's Day, my DH and boys took me to our local home gardening center. Not the "big box boys" mind you, but a real local family owned nursery (yes they still DO exist) so that I could select and compose my "ideal" container gardens for our big deck out back.

I greedily stuffed three wagons full of flowers and herbs and varieties of squash and tomatoes. (Oh joy..oh glee...I imagined myself an Earth Mother to Be)

All the while dreaming of the bounty of color and fragrance and taste that would await me in the wretched heat of the summer to come.

The wretched heat?

It has yet to show it's glowering/shimmering/breath robbing face.

It has been so damn gloomy and rainy here for the past two months I feel like we went from spring directly to winter, although slightly warmer.

But still my plants survived and thrived.

And I rejoiced in every new bloom, every shiny plump new fruit that glimmered on the vine, every heady frond of earthy delight that managed to survive the deluge that would drown out its life.

Until today.

Today...there are NO MORE FREAKIN plump shiny unripe fruits on my tomato and squash plants.

They have been stolen away, in the dead of night, by some unknown scavenger. I have no DEFINITE ID's, but I suspect

a fox (nice threads girl) or maybe a raccoon (okay you have the mask) possibly a possum (sympathy for the ugly but persistent factor)

CRAP

One side of me is PISSED as hell that I won't be enjoying the fruits of my labor this summer

THEN the other altruistic side of me (and by the way I don't like "her" very much. The alruistic side? She is far too freakin sensible and rational and makes the pissy side of me want to kick her ass)

THAT side says "Poor animal, how hungry she must be. Pushed on all sides by this city's insatiable need to build and develop and destroy her habitat...how can I begrudge her a meal"

But striking a balance I have to ask....did the scavenger have to eat EVERY SINGLE LAST COTTON PICKIN ONE???"

I swear, it's enough to want me to toss all the plants to the compost heap and throw in the towel.

And just because I need to give my self-indulgent self a good swift kick, I think to myself

"At least you aren't trying to make a living doing this like your grandpa did"

I tell you truly, sometimes the war between my early childhood Catholic guilt self and my latter year Presbyterian pragmatist self make me want to howl at the moon.