When my realtor reminded me I still have to do that, I nodded as if it was something I do all the time, plant flowers. I've had the big planters flanking my front door for at least seven years, and that's only because my neighbor dragged me by the ear one day to Home Depot. I remember being baffled. By the size of the pots, by the weight of the bags of soil, by the relatively poor selection of flowers that don't really need sun. Actually, I was kind of surprised that there were any flowers that don't need sun, but I hadn't really even contemplated that issue. Note to self: next time, purchase a house that faces south if you want to make a good first impression.
So today I will somehow need to figure out how to replace the weeds growing in my two neglected pots with colorful blooms that are able to thrive on something other than photosynthesis. Frankly, I'd rather go back on my extra tall and very precarious ladder to change lightbulbs. Oddly, I feel much more at home hanging on for dear life as I attempt to switch out fragile bits of glass than I do with my feet planted firmly on my stoop while I fill up perfectly innocuous looking pots. I think it's because I'm afraid the flowers won't look pretty; the colors might not blend exactly right, the petals might find themselves arranged in a haphazard mess. The lightbulbs are a no-brainer -- the base of each bulb matches up perfectly with a socket in the chandelier. The worst that can happen is I fall off the ladder and break my neck.
Ah, time to give myself a pep talk, infuse myself with confidence, dare to do what a kid raised in an apartment in Brooklyn is just not prepared to do. Yesterday somebody I barely know told me I should live life to the fullest, make every day count as if it were my last. Good advice, but easier said than done. Maybe I'll start slow, build up to the Home Depot expedition. Maybe I'll visit a Starbucks one town over today, expand my horizons a bit in a coffee house with a completely different configuration of couches and chairs. After that, maybe I'll get bagels from a different bagel joint. Who knows, maybe I'll even try cream cheese instead of butter. Then maybe I'll go sky diving. Like my father always told me, I can do anything I set my mind to. If I can master lightbulbs twenty feet up, change up my morning routine, and go skydiving I can certainly face the flowers.
And if my flowers end up looking as if they were air dropped into the pots by a plane in the midst of a hydraulic system failure, so be it. They'll fit right in. With the table in the foyer that I found perched on a curb in Mexico City one day. With the rooms painted in every color of the rainbow, and the family of carved wood coyotes that resides by the staircase. With the pictures on the wall that always seem to tip at odd angles, no matter how many times I adjust them. With all the relics and mementos of nineteen years of kids growing up and adults growing apart and together and apart again and people and pets coming and going and life just charting its own wild and woolly course no matter how hard we all tried to arrange things just right.
Come to think of it, the light bulbs are an anomaly in a life and a house filled with square pegs and round holes. And I think the fun lies in keeping it that way. Time to face those planters, time to get my hands dirty.
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