Every picture tells a story

And just what story is this picture telling?

Before I begin the answer to this question, let me say it is the Victoria Day long weekend – the weekend honouring a long dead queen which most Canadians consider to be the official start of summer. Normally “summer” begins here much earlier. Normally it starts in early May or even April. This year not so much. This year summer really did begin the third weekend in May. The weather has been glorious for the past three days.

So let me break down the story of this picture.

In this part of the photo we see that not only are there flowering plants in the hanging baskets on either side of the window, but it is actually warm enough to get the basil growing in its pot. (For those of you who haven’t followed the frustrated gardener’s story from the beginning, it took me a year – or two – of fucking slugs gobbling up my on-the-ground pots of basil for me to have my eureka moment. If I wanted to grow basil for me and not for the slugs, it needed to be planted in pots hanging by wire. No matter how tempting slugs may find it, they cannot squirm down wire. Ha!)

In this part of the photo we see, not just Stella, but a laundry hamper containing folded clothes. Yes, indeed. Yesterday for the first time this year I was able to dry a load of laundry on the line. Heaven.

This part of the photo may not be as easy to decode, but if you look you will see that the three deck planks closest to the wall are quite a bit lighter than the rest of the deck.

Earlier in the week I got down on my hands and knees with a bucket of hot, soapy water and a scrub brush. An hour and a half later I’d managed to clean three and a bit planks and I decided this was bullshit. My mate Charlie has a power washer which I was pretty damn sure would do this job a lot quicker. So I got up off my hands and knees and left him a message requesting the borrowing of said piece of kit. He’s bringing it over this afternoon.

Two things occurred to me during my ninety-minute scrub. The first was an inability to remember the last time I did this (leading me to the worrying conclusion that perhaps I never have). The second, after the dirt came off the three planks was that I never got around to staining the deck, which I should probably do after de-grunging it.

The deck (and the clothes line) is relatively new. The thing Mike most loved about the house when we bought it was the trees, the sense of living in a forest. I loved that, too, although I confess that I did wish there was somewhere on the property, other than the garden (which faces the road) to sit outside with my coffee in the morning.

After his death in 2011 I decided some of the trees at the back of the house had to go. Firewood – yay! And more importantly enough actual light to put up that clothesline and get a small deck built.

It took me until 2014 to get the leftover branches cleared (finally accepting that they were not going to simply biodegrade in my lifetime. That done, I started to do some “landscaping”.

It now looks like this…

Not bad, eh?

But I digress. Watch this space for photos of the power washed deck. Hopefully there will be follow up photos of the stained deck.

Happy Victoria Day.