When I got back from developing photos, my brother-in-law who lives in the other side of the semi collared me before I got inside, and lead me to the mini-garden between the parking space and the pavement.
I say “mini-garden”: it’s a triangle of ground with poor, thin soil. Having tried other things, I planted nasturtiums there, since they would survive. I love nasturtiums. Admittedly, most people here regard nasturtiums as weeds (if it’s free, it can’t be good) and I had neglected them lately. Even so, I think my patch looked better than the ones in front of the other houses.
My brother-in-law had roughly shoved back the nasturtiums, breaking a lot of stems, turning most of it upside-down, and put in cuttings of the bright pink flowers he has in front of his own house. So that’s orange and pink together.
I saw red. before I could draw breath to ask what the f___ he was playing at, he said, “Carlos agreed it would be good to plant something here. So I just put these in. Remember to water them occasionally, all right?”
I said through clenched teeth, “I liked the flowers that were there already.”
He said, “Well, you can always take them out again.” Ignoring the mess he’d made of what was there all ready.
Now I have a habit of going off the deep end and regretting it afterwards. So I bit back the 97 things I wanted to shout, and went to talk to my husband.
No, he did not agree to this. He’d agreed to the idea of maybe putting a bush in there at some unspecified date in the future.
I’ve taken the cuttings out, of course. (I don’t think they’d have survived anyway.) Now I’m trying to calm down enough to have a sensible conversation with my brother in law about this.
If I put this in a short story, do you think people would believe it? I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.
