potted

We live on a beautiful avenue lined with old houses and pots and pots of colorful flowers.



We had a pot, too. We planted it every year but it was never very lush and, since it was at a bus stop, folks would sit in it. The pot cracked, the flowers withered and every year our pot would be the one that broke the line of pretty.

So, this Spring I said to Russell, let's get a new pot and really plant it with cool stuff....away from the bus stop. He was eager. We got the pot, the soil, and waited for our interminable Buffalo Winter to end so we could plant it with majestic bloomage. Well, Spring is also the time of year when I start getting so busy and distracted with art show stuff. I have only myself to blame. When Russell called up to the studio that he had found some "stuff for the pot" and did I want to come help, I demurred. He could do it just fine. I trusted him. Later that day I saw greenery poking up past the rim and smiled. wondering what kind of flowers he got. He was vague about it and, as I said, I was busy.

As time went by, he would add stuff, usually because I was concerned that the pot was so green. Where was all the pretty? Oh, there was lots of decorative grass in there, he would assure me and he would add some little purple flowers or something and I would be appeased for a few more weeks.




I don't know when I started to get suspicious. I know I mentioned how TALL the thing was and he beamed. And then one day I actually looked at the thing and I said to Russell...is that....CORN?? He grinned and admitted it was and wasn't it so cool?




I looked down the avenue at my neighbors pots, filled with petunias and impatiens and geraniums and coleus. Lush, beautiful riots of color. And then I looked at our pot. Of corn.

It actually has 2 corns growing, he boasted. Look at the beautiful silk!



Well that is kind of cool, I admitted to myself. Then I looked to my left and to my right. Across the street. All those pots, looking sort of the same. The gardens the neighborhood is so proud of that there is a tour every year that brings out the suburbanites in herds. All very beautiful, but so traditional. And I looked at Russell grinning about his corn. I saw it as he did. How beautiful the purple striation of the leaves. How proud and tall it stood. The little corns with their beautiful manes of silk. The few flowers nestled in the stalk acknowledging what the pot was expected to hold. The absurdity of it on a city street in the garden district.

And I laughed and went for the camera. Whimsy. I live for whimsy.

But next year, I plant the pot.