Please - Try to Contain Yourself

I live in that part of the country where all green things grow themselves.  Seriously.  Those fuzzy seed deals that drop from the tree in our front yard must be stopped before they hit the ground, or an instant forest - complete with squirrel families - pops up at dawn.

This was not a fact of my life before I moved here.

As a child, I was aware of exactly two seasons in Wyoming:  Mild Winter and Bad Winter.  During Mild Winter my mother frantically planted hundreds of petunias in the hope that seven or eight blooms would survive long enough to create a floral whiff in the late August storm that blew in with Bad Winter.

Mild Winter was when the sagebrush blitzed through its entire life cycle - twice - and basketball-sized white poofs plummeted like bombs from the cottonwood trees.  My hay fever stayed Out Of Control despite years of injections, inhalations, and eye drops, but the advice I most clearly remember our doctor telling my mother was that I should wear sunglasses.

Can doctors legally play practical jokes when insurance reimbursement is involved?

It was hard enough to avoid the City Park's cottonwood trees with swollen eyeballs, but the sunglasses rendered me completely blind.  Stunned tourists frequently offered food at the tops of their lungs as I stumbled between picnic tables looking for my family.

I left Wyoming after high school and moved to Phoenix.  My limbs thawed rapidly thanks to the seasons:  Mild Summer and Bad Summer.

Landscaping consisted of tiny, scrabbly rocks.  Most "lawns" had spiny succulents stabbing up from the gravel - seeming to double-dog dare that sun to bake off even one more needle!

The sun always obliged.

The ritzy lawns in Scottsdale had actual grass, bordered by flowers normally found in Ohio.  They also had people hired to stand outside all day clutching garden hoses in both hands.

The impact of my move to the Midwest is illustrated here by the Gasp Factor.

When I first stepped off the plane that July afternoon, my lungs were greeted by enough humidity to fill a child's wading pool.   I gasped!

I flashed the International-Hands-Around-Throat-Because-I'm-Dying symbol at the Southwest Airlines captain who was grinning from the cockpit and thanking us for flying.  (Side note:  Why ever do those pilots do that?  We should all - every single soul - be hands-on-fuselage kissing their feet for landing those things like they do.)

I managed to squawk out a plea for an ambulance.  Instead, a super-smiley stewardess herded me into the waiting area for New Arrivals From Desert Climates.

On my way from the airport to my new home I was completely engulfed in a sea of dark green.  I gasped!  Apparently, there is a connection between humidity and foliage of freakish dimensions....

On and on it went.

Summer eased out and the trees turned crazy shades of gold.  I gasped!

Winter blew in and I did not change expressions....  Long before age 12 I had learned to maneuver in drifting blizzards, and I can still tell you which way to turn the wheel in a spin whether you're driving or walking.  Those prissy, sissy, namby-pamby Midwesterners panicked at the first snowflake, cancelled school if the forecast called for two snowflakes, and knew nothing about winter survival.

Then my first ever ice storm hit.  I gasped!  I called a friend and screamed into the phone:  IT. IS. RAINING. ICE!  IT. IS. RAINING. ICE!  I finally shut up when the power went out.

The morning a crocus peeked up out of the snow, I choked.  Coughed a little - then I gasped!  That whole first year was like living in one those foreign phenomenon books we read in grade school called "Earth's Four Seasons."

I signed up for today's class, Container Gardening, to learn about containing some of this nature.  It's everywhere!  I do not waste energy installing flowers - my "garden" time is spent digging up whatever new green thing has staged the latest takeover.

Bonus head scratcher:  Someone exclaimed early on, "Oh, gosh!  You're so lucky - you have hostas!  Hostas are expensive and they're so hard to grow!"  Probably the realtor before we signed the papers.

I babied those plants for approximately two days before resorting to a machete to keep them from ringing the doorbell every night.  'Hosta' is the root word for 'hostile.'  (See 'takeover' above.)

The Container Gardening teacher turned out to be a Renaissance Woman.  She landscapes, tuckpoints, makes herbal remedies, farms, does carpentry - all while raising children and a husband.  And she managed to keep her lovely smile going when faced with questions like, "How do I get rid of tulips that clash with the bricks on my house?"

But instead of teaching tricks on home wilderness containment, Mrs. Renaissance tricked us into taking home more plants - probably the flowers she'd dug up from her own garden that morning.  Nice move.  It fooled the whole class.  I should have brought hosta clippings for everybody.

We made hanging flower baskets - no artistic talent allowed - and were assured they were beautiful, no matter how many tall things we had crammed in with how many short things.  And, obviously, watering would not be a big deal.

In Wyoming, we only watered during the mildest part of Mild Winter to avoid icicles on petunia petals.

In Arizona, if we skipped one day of watering, the geranium's skeleton by the carport shamed us the next morning.

But in the Midwest?  We water our tomatoes daily just for something to do, and even after a two-week vacation there is still plenty to harvest.

Occasionally, when returning home by plane, I'll find someone struggling for breath on the jetway bridge.  I always stop and offer my arm.  We stagger to Baggage Claim.  The person begs me to call 911.  Instead, I promise they will grow functioning gills and become rare hosta experts in no time.  I show them photos of my container garden on its first day

and the way it looked 48 hours later.

Sometimes they tell me they could never live in a place like this.

I always gasp.

(Does Yellowstone National Park really have anything to do with how stars in our solar system got their names?  Let's meet right back here next Friday and find out!)