Sense of Adventure

Slowly I assert control over my yards, fore and aft. I’m conquering the weeds and preparing to put in some form of landscaping.

What I want is xeriscaping. Not just because it saves on water, although practically it’s a concern. I happen to think it looks cool.

What I’m not so clear on is: okay, how exactly does a xeric plant differ from a weed?

Case in point: I was surveying for a final season-ending orgy of weed-whacking when by the north front corner of the house I saw exploding from the tip of what I took to be a Noxious Weed a spectacularly beautiful blossom, with deep red-purple petals surrounding a bright yellow head.

Well, weed or not, I wasn’t purging it. It’s too dang pretty. One of the prettiest flowers I’ve seen, in fact. Moreover, as a couple days have passed, it’s been joined by similar blooms.

Driving back along Griegos from walks with Emma Dog (notice the subtle way I work her in here; she draws more traffic to the site than I do) I’ve noticed similar flowers blooming in a number of yards, some from pretty respectably-sized plants (mine are a tad on the, well, weedy side.) They’re obviously incorporated deliberately into designed xeriscapes, not just happy accidents like the ones by my house.

I looked for them in my sundry books on xeriscaping and couldn’t find them. Then I finally turned up my new copy of The New Mexico Gardener’s Guide: Revised Edition, which I stumbled upon and snapped up at Costco last month. My good pal Larry, who’s shaping up to be a pretty hotshot xeriscaper himself, gave me the original edition as a gift a couple years ago, which is excellent. This version is even better, rewritten and with these big, clear color plates.

And a couple/three pages into the listings I found myself staring right at the culprits. They’re Cosmos. Cosmos pinnatus, in polite company. Which these hardly are, to be sure.

How these beauties came to sprout in my somewhat blighted front yard is a mystery to me. But I’ll nurture them, and be sure to grow plenty of them deliberately next year.

I’ve been wondering what flowers I wanted to grow in the beds by the house and the fences. Now I know one for sure.

Indeed do many things come to pass.

Actually, it came to us of its own accord. And thereby hangs a tale of terror, appropriate to the remorseless approach of Halloween.

As recounted in my previous post, When Great Sky Demons Attack!, my Black Sharpie, Emma Dog, is terrified of hot-air balloons. She’s afraid of Round Monster Heads as it is. When they’re great big and fly and roar and breathe fire - well, how would you expect a girl to react?

Even a Tuff Chick like Emma, who is in almost all ways a most valiant defender of Daddy and Pack.

Once, walking along the lateral ditch that runs south of Montaño to the clear ditch, Emma and I encountered a stout, elderly Lab-cross dog running frantically the opposite way. Usually I’m upset by loose dogs; I’m always concerned they might get frisky with Emma, and issues ensue. In this case, no: the poor beast was puffing hard and clearly scared stumbling.

Her owner, a pleasant young lesbian (the haircut, the bulky sweatshirt - just give me this one, okay?) came trotting in hot pursuit. “She’s trying to get home before the Moon comes up,” she explained in passing. “She fears the full Moon. She thinks it’s a hot air balloon.”

At which Emma and I could only shake our heads in amusement. Emma doesn’t fear the Moon, full or not. She knows it’s just an orbiting celestial object. Whereas hot air balloons are Great Sky Demons.

Nonetheless I dared entertain the hope I might wean Emma from this particular phobia (why, I admit, I’m not sure.) Until, that is, a certain afternoon early last winter. Or perhaps the winter before.

Emma was out in the backyard. Suddenly I heard her just totally fly into pieces. This wasn’t just barking; it was nigh hysterics.

I ran out, expecting Charlie to be coming over the wire. Or at the least the back fence. Instead I beheld, floating neither high up nor far off, the familiar inverted-fruit shape of a hot air balloon.

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Actually, they haven’t much this year. Yet.

Emma Dog has always had problems with monsters with giant round heads. Not long after I got her in May of 2004 we were driving down Candelaria in Albuquerque’s North Valley to our usual walking-place, the ditch that runs along the east edge of the fields of the Rio Grande Nature Center wildfowl preserve. It was afternoon, full summer by then, and hot. And walking toward us on the far sidewalk I saw a couple of people with a parasol. Oddly, that’s something I’m not sure if I’ve even seen before here in Albuquerque, although given the stinging - and burning! - quality of our UV-rich high desert summer sun, it makes all kinda sense.

And Emma did this Jim Carrey-in-The Mask eyes-stand-out-on-springs take. She clearly perceived this apparition as a horrible four-legged megacephalic humanoid monster.

According to the best and most sense-filled book I’ve read about dogs and their bizarre longstanding relationship with a certain primate, The Other End of the Leash by Patricia McConnell, dogs don’t really grasp things like clothing and accessories. Given their limited ability to think in the abstract and eyesight that doesn’t appear very detail-oriented, they seem to perceive your putting on a hat or a bulky jacket as actually changing your body shape.

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I try to keep Emma Dog supplied with rawhide bones. She tends to get bored - I’m just not real exciting company for a dog, our walks (still not regular enough!) notwithstanding. The bones keep her entertained for hours.

The other night her Uncle Joe noted she had what he thought of as “small” rawhide bones, and suggested bigger ones would last longer, hence be more cost effective. I buy them in bags at the best discount I can get, usually when they fall off the truck and wind up on the shelf at Costco. They carried some from a brand called Healthy Hides a couple years ago that just lasted forever.

Perhaps that’s why they don’t carry them any more.

It usually takes Em a few days to chonk through one of the bones I’ve been giving her. But I thought, Hey, maybe Joe’s got a point. He is the wisest man I know, after all.

So yesterday I went to PetSmart to get her a bag o’ food, and checked the rawhide bones. And my eye lit upon the Super Colossal Dinosaur Shinbone model. Aha! I thought. That’ll hold her.

So I got it, and bestowed it on her late last night. She accepted it eagerly. Then she dropped it on the living room floor and peered at it.

“Chew your bone, sweetie,” I said.

She looked up at me like, “Dad? How?”

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The real one. Here in New Mexico the seasons usually arrive on or about the first of the month they’re supposed to start: December, March, June, and of course, September. Despite what the bureaucrats say, the feel of the air, the nature of the light, the mellowing temperatures tell the tale. And I’m not the only person who thinks this way; Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy does too.

Usually I can smell and feel the approach of autumn by about the middle of August. This year, after again having a cool start to summer, we got a late-season heat spurt that kind of hung on. There wasn’t a lot of autumn advance notice.

But today when Emma and I went for our walk it was clearly beginning to be autumn in Albuquerque’s North Valley. My favorite time of year.

We walked the ditch that runs up through Tinnin. It’s a beautiful walk year-round. The yards are mostly a combination of immaculate lawn and well-designed and maintained xeriscaping (that latter’s usually the sticking point.) The houses are mostly gorgeous and well-constructed, as I learned when I got to walk through some of them during construction years ago, courtesy of my friend Chip, who was in the business.

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