I have a tiny little front yard garden. It came with a couple of sourwood trees, half a dozen oakleaf hydrangeas, "Sky Pencil" Japanese holly, and two one species of bush that I haven't identified yet. (Yeah, I know there's an app for that. The Tickler has it, so I can ask them.)

What's interesting, though, is the ecological succession. When I first moved in, I had lots of bare bark mulch and plenty of golden orb weaver spiders. The spiders are no longer quite so prominent, and clover covers most of the bark mulch now. I haven't tried to remove the clover because a) that would be too much work, b) the bees love it, and c) I don't have anywhere near enough capacity in my little yard waste bin for it. Seriously, I fill that bin weekly for months in the spring & summer as it is just pulling up dandelions & thistles. The Tickler says they've never seen clover grow as tall as it does at my place, and I haven't either.

But wait! There's more! Willowherb, with tiny pink flowers, is a native plant that's volunteered in the last couple of years. I'm also leaving it alone because pretty.

And then, over just the last year, the yarrow arrived in grand style. It's now taller than I am, with plenty of inflorescences. Its biomass rivals the clover, so I'm leaving it alone for the same reasons as the clover.

At this point it's all I can do to keep the lavenders I planted from getting choked by clover or shaded by yarrow. I replaced some hydrangeas with lavender because the former don't handle the dry summers nearly as well. Indeed, a common theme here is drought tolerance: lavender and yarrow come through the dry Seattle summer (yes, we have them) without any trouble, the clover and willowherb turn brown but bounce right back in the spring, and the poor hydrangeas & Japanese hollies just burn unless they get lots of shade. I replaced the sun-damaged holly with oregano & thyme back in the spring, to my great satisfaction.

Since clover is a legume, I can't help wonder if the symbiotic nitrogen fixation that happens in legumes (the subject of my dad's Ph.D. thesis!) is preparing the way for species like willowherb and, more dramatically, yarrow.

That stupid cold — my COVID test came up negative — made up in brevity for what it lacked in manners. Good thing, too, because I'd like to be social this evening without spreading the ick. Maybe Shin Black ramen with fishcake helped me recover quickly.

Meanwhile, on the opposite coast, the offers and counter-offers for Mom's house have been flying. Work was busy yesterday, so between meetings I was sneaking a peek at documents and frantically signing them. If we lost a sale because if I was too slow and Good Sister flew out here and cut me into easy-to-carry sections, no jury would convict her at this point.

I spent yesterday in bed with mucus, aches, and reading material to keep me company. The irony here is that the only crowds I was around for the whole Fourth of July weekend were at Uwajimaya, and I wasn't there that long. I did go to Lambert House on Monday, and given how stuffy it was in the carriage house at St. Mark's, I'd put my money on that as the source of the ick.

Finished Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Pretty good characters. Action and plot complicated to the point of frenzy. It doesn't have what The Expanse has: the thing that makes me want to buy the next book right away. But I wasn't in the mood to read something challenging; see "sick" above.

Oh yeah: Good Sister texted & called me while I was in bed to give me the play-by-play on all the hot, hot real estate action. (Did I just make a sexual allusion involving real estate agents? That's so not my kink.) It's looking to me as if this might actually happen in the next few weeks, but you know what they say: never count your chickens before they rip your lips off.

Good Sister texted me a few hours ago to tell me that the house I grew up in is back in the online listings. There are an even hundred photos of it, including several shots from a drone. It's a little the worse for wear since the five of us moved in in 1974, but the updates since then are mostly for the better in terms of salability. To quote GS, "Sell, baby, sell."

I haven't lived in that house year round in forty years. I found myself mentally reconstructing what each room looked like in the seventies and eighties. If only the walls could tell what they've seen and heard: my sisters' dramatic teen angst, my furtive gender explorations, my mother's drunkenness, my father swearing as he hurt himself during house and garden projects. But also music echoing off the floors as one of us practiced; the dinner table conversations that so often seemed to degenerate into something, well, degenerate; all the plants that I didn't know were exotic and the Florida critters right outside the doors.

Could it have been better? In that time and place, with my parents and sisters, probably not. And it sure as hell could have been worse.

I hope it becomes a good home again for somebody soon, and not just because of the money.