Out Watering Another Blog!

In my early twenties I lived in the basement apartment of a Welsh woman named Ann. I am pretty sure Ann only rented the apartment to me because my last name was Jenkins, also Welsh, and I told her I was a vegetarian. She said she just couldn't take the stench of meat and in theory I agreed. I say in theory because the week before I moved in the idealism of my twenty year old heart was quickly broken by a whiff of bacon one hungover morning at a greasy spoon in the city. After that I cooked bacon all the time in my rented basement apartment, the smell of fatty pork wafting up over the English rose garden and into Ann's house.

For some reason Ann still liked me. One summer she asked me to housesit for a few weeks while she went back to Wales to visit family. It was a natural, of course, me already living in her basement. I was told to collect the mail and water her garden. Nothing a twenty-one year old renter can't handle, right? Except that by the end of the first week her roses were already turning brown at the edges, singed by the sun. Plants once thick and glossy were curling and shrinking. And so it was that in week two that I panicked and left the sprinkler on for two days straight, thinking surely it was because I hadn't watered enough. Suffice it to say that when Ann returned from Wales all the glued together consonants in the Welsh language could not adequately express how deeply disappointed she was in me. The Welsh language is known for being a phonological roller coaster, but I distinctly heard Ann call me something that sounded like cymraegnadyddyllgowys, which I'm pretty sure translated to "you bacon-eating American twit, you killed my garden and now I'm raising your rent."

And so I am a bit surprised today that I have been asked to water yet another garden, this one of the horticultural variety bloggus-succulentamaternas. I will be posting over at In the Trenches of Mommyhood today while Sarah is on vacation. I am bringing some Miracle Gro and a pair of pruners and hoping against hope that I don't kill her blog. Because something tells me that if I do Sarah doesn't swear in Welsh and I will understand every single name she calls me. Come visit me, if you don't mind, we can raid her liquor cabinet and maybe you can tell me how to turn that damn sprinkler on.