Coffee Mate
It’s an early spring, and I’m grateful for
that. When the weather is cool, I
spend the two hours between when I get up and when I wake up my wife wondering
what to do about the coffee. Do I make some for me, knowing that in two hours I
will have to make some fresh coffee? Or do I compromise and make some green tea
and wait for my wife to get up before brewing some coffee? Or do I just give
her cold coffee, somewhat bitter from its time in the pot, and heat it up in
the microwave? You see the decisions I face and I’ve only been up a few
minutes. But now it’s spring and the coffee conundrum doesn’t bug me so much,
because I can breeze right through the kitchen with nary a thought of coffee on
my mind, and go right into the garden.
There is a lot to do. There’s the grass that
has taken hold in the garden that needs to be dug up, the dead growth on the
bushes that needs to be cut out, and the mound of bird seed that the sparrows
and chickadees have been careless with all winter needs to be dug up and
smoothed out. Then there’s the pond. I didn’t change the water in it last year
and this year it’s as dark and as weedy as strong tea. That doesn’t stop the
neighbourhood cats and squirrels from drinking it though. Even our own cats,
when they are out in the yard on their long leashes, like to lap at it. Maybe the
organic matter in it has brewed over the seasons into a tasty mess. It doesn’t
smell very good, though, and it tends to be slimy. That’s why I hate cleaning
the pond. Thank god it only has to be done once a year. Most years.
I am winning my fight with the neighbourhood
hares. In the winter, according to the testimony of footprints in the snow,
they romp in the front yard and dance by moonlight in the backyard. That last
phrase is my wife’s. I would never have thought of bunnies dancing. They shit
on my lawn, eat my plants, dead or alive, and sometimes sleep in a snow den
under the bench in the backyard. Hares and I go back a long way, and never
really on the best of terms. When I was in the Arctic doing research for my
doctorate, I had a close encounter with a hare. It was out in the tundra,
nibbling yellow Arctic poppies, and I wanted to take a picture. (There are no
red arctic poppies, as far as I am aware. In fact, in my time there, I saw no
red flowering plants at all). The hare had other ideas. It charged me. I took
one look at that huge snarling hare and ran for my life. I expect those Arctic
poppies have a fair bit of opiate-like properties. In retrospect, it was very
Monty Pythonesque, but I wish now I hadn’t told anyone about it. It inspires a
dignity-sapping glee I find hard to laugh at.
The hares find that the tender green shoots
of my early tulip bulbs are hard to resist, but I didn’t spend hours planting
all those bulbs last fall to have them fall prey to bunnies. When I started to
notice that they were nibbling the greens and actually digging up bulbs to eat,
I sprayed everything with something I got from the garden centre that is
supposed to deter them. It’s organic and isn’t supposed to be harmful to the
critters. You’d have thought it was like adding spices -- a bunny flavour boost -- for all the
good it did. I finally had to net the gardens. My wife doesn’t think I know,
but I saw her Facebook post that said “Bunnies 8, Charles 0”. Well, I am
winning now. “Bunnies 8, Charles 0” has become “Bunnies 8, Charles 1”, as in
past tense (“ate” and “won”). The netting has worked, and I am about to be
rewarded with hot pink tulip blooms and fragrant purple hyacinths.
There’s a bench in the corner of our
backyard, by the mother-in-law crabapple tree. We called it that because when
we moved in to our new house we had only one tree, the one the builder was
obliged to plant in our front yard. Our moms each gave us money for a new tree,
and we bought a crabapple. We joke that a crabapple is the perfect tree for our
respective mothers-in-law to have bought us, but in reality we both like our
mothers-in-law. The bench is the one the bunnies like to sleep under in the
winter. In the summer, it is like being in a secret garden. The tree and some
bushes screen it from general view, and the early morning sun hits it just
right, but you can still hear the water cascading in the pond. I like to take
my coffee – we are back to coffee -- there and relax with the paper. Right now,
though, in the early spring, it is cool and a bit unpromising as a cozy nook.
Our cats think it looks promising though, and
keep trying to reach it despite the fact that their leads are too short to get
there. I can’t really blame them; besides the scent of marauding bunny and
wandering cats, there are several clumps of catnip that grow here. In the
summer, I cut off sprigs of the square-stemmed plant and throw it to them,
watching them roll around in catnip-induced ecstasy. Our yard is a bit of
heaven for the neighbourhood felines – besides the catnip, there are always
flocks of sparrows, chickadees, and other small flying music boxes. Leo – one of my cats – is sitting there
under one of the trees now, looking hopefully at the chickadees that keep just
out of reach. The tip of his black-and-grey
striped tail is just twitching.
But it’s still spring, and after being out in
the garden for over an hour my hands are cold. I go in and put on the coffee.
Today, it will be a compromise. The coffee won’t be stone cold when my wife
gets up, but neither will it be super-fresh. That is what the microwave is for.
Besides, she doesn’t drink it the right way, that is to say, black. She drinks
a coffee latte and even adds sugar, so it probably doesn’t even matter that it
is freshly brewed. Hell, I could probably just pour it out of a box and she
wouldn’t even notice. “Good morning”. I’m a bit startled, concentrating as I am
on pouring the coffee into my espresso cup. She’s not usually up so early. I
turn to her, pot in hand. “Coffee?” I ask.
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