The minute I turned into the parking lot I saw them: tall, shelved carts filled with colorfully blossoming plants. The store’s garden center appeared to have more plants than room, so the workers had lined the sidewalk beside the store with the overflow.
Usually, going to a garden center fills me with excitement and anticipation. Today, remembering that I was only two and a half months post hip replacement, I felt ambivalent. I wanted to buy plants, put in a garden, and take care of flowerbeds, but I didn’t know if I could physically bend over far enough to do the necessary work. Immediately after the surgery, bending at the waist more than 90 degrees was prohibited.

I’ve been feeling afraid to bend down to weed my flowerbeds for fear of hurting myself and find that I quickly tire after a very short spell of work, but I keep trying. Slowly, I’m hoping to build my stamina back up.

As I walked though the aisles of plants, picking out a modest amount of baby plants that needed to be tucked into a moist, earthen bed, my excitement mounted to the point where I ended up buying more plants than I had originally planned to buy. When I reported my purchases to my daughter I explained, “Do you remember the comedian who liked to claim, ‘The devil made me do it!?’ Well, the devil had nothing to do with my plant purchases. What happened was that an able-bodied gardener temporally took possession of my body and made me do it.”

Speaking of the devil, besides worrying about my post-surgical ability to bend enough to garden, I also worried about the overwhelming number of blood-sucking insects in my yard.