No-grow

In the ongoing effort to make our yard look attractive while minimizing the need for actual skill in keeping things alive, I recently purchased a number of old sap buckets and a beat-up wash tub. They are all painted in attractive pastel colors, probably to hide the fact that they are so rusted through the paint is basically the only thing holding them together. These I plan to place strategically around the yard in an effort to provide some color should my flowers fail me, which, statistically speaking, is more likely than the chance that you will, at some point in your lifetime, put something edible into your mouth.

"Are you going to plant flowers in them?" my mother said when I told her about the buckets.

"Noooo, I'm trying to think of something nonliving to put in them, like maybe rocks or shells. Just so I don't have to try to keep something alive," I said.

There was silence while she digested the fact that, despite her best efforts at instilling in me an appreciation for life's finer things, I was deliberately building a junkyard.

My mother has always been dismayed at my affinity for primitive antiques, and laments the fact that I will readily pay for someone else's old stuff when I could have her old stuff for free.

Do you...have any flowers anywhere?" she asked tentatively.

"You mean live ones?"

She sighed. "Vegetables?" she asked, without much hope.

"I do my best to support the local grocer," I said.

Finally she seemed to resign herself to my low-brow tastes and lack of talent. "You know," she said, "if you need another old wash tub..."