As of yesterday afternoon, I have two jagged but continuous lines of angry bruises running from my knee to the top of my thigh. My upper left leg is so incredibly sore, and I can't bend at the knee without pain running up my leg. So I won't move much today.. take it easy.
Since yesterday's small disaster at the pond, the water lilies have bounced right back to the surface of the water. There will be two blooms today and one later in the week. I cut off all the broken pieces of the lotus plant, and while the large flat leaves and small buds that represent a summer's worth of growth are gone, there is enough left that it at least looks like a respectable young plant. The water iris no longer stands erect at the corner of the falls, but droops downward with the tips of its spikes touching the water surface.The orchid that I've been babying since April when my daughter gave it to me for my birthday, has lost the long slender stem where the buds grow. It has bloomed continually all summer, but now there is no bloom stem left. It will live, but will probably not have another bloom stem until next year. The pickerel has been smashed down to nothing. Hopefully I'll get a little new growth before autumn sets in. The good news is that we now have sun. The removal of the pussy willow has opened up the pond area so that we get more than four hours of morning sun, and even an hour or so of late afternoon sun. I could grow tomatoes if I wanted! Or.. I could move my herb garden which gets a little bit of sun, but which sways and creeps out toward my walkway in search of more.
I tend to edit whatever gardens I have, constantly eyeing things, moving things, deleting a very few things and adding much more. Down at the end of the back yard are the native plant beds we put in two autumns ago. There are blueberry bushes, spice bushes, viburnum, jacob's ladder, osier dogwood, and lots of other things that are wildlife friendly. This is their second summer, and the first summer that the cardinal flower has bloomed. I can't see it very well unless I am all the way at the end of the yard, but I catch flashes of brilliant red as I walk past the rhodies or when I stand on our porch. So yesterday I moved one of the the plants up to the pond area where I can see them, and where I now need more plants. As soon as I plant the cardinal flower, a hummer helicopters in to take a closer look at it. A few minutes later a wet sparrow, (flying out of its bathing spot at the top of the falls), lands on one of the stems and bends it nearly to the ground. ACK! I have a tall bumblebee on a rod made out of bend metal that stands about two feet above the ground, so I move it next to the flowers and entwine them in the bee wings in the hopes that wet birds will perch on it instead of my flowers. It works.
So I think as soon as this nasty bruise clears up on my leg I will no longer write about my knee woes. Other than range of motion, I think the knee thing is over.. and yes, I can walk with full weight and without feeling that familiar pinch and ache in my knees. PT should take care of the range of motion.
One of my comets has a deformed mouth -- too small even for the small pellet of food. It cannot eat the fish food until it has softened and is easily broken into crumbs, and it takes a while to soften and so is gobbled up by the other fish. This fish is about 1/2 or even 1/3 the size of the others. I think it has been living on algae. Last evening when I fed the fish it did not surface. When I finally caught sight of it, it was just moving slowly around the bottom of the pond. I'm not sure about its survival prospects.
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