Good Neighbours and Black Thumbs

My street is considered one of the most beautiful because of the flowers in pots and vines. For years when I spent summers in Geneva with only the rare weekend in Argelès, I didn’t hold up my part in creating the beauty.

Then I bought two blue ceramic pots. Over the last few years I have planted and watched die a number of plants to the despair of my green-thumbed Catalan neighbours who give me lots of advice.

When I arrived for my holiday this year, I found one of the pots had been replanted with one little seedling and rocks placed around it to keep Bianca and Lola, the neighbourhood cats, from considering the pot a kitty litter box. The leaves had spread. My next door neighbour, a Catalan gentleman, so in love with his wife of 50 years that he makes her breakfast in bed every morning, proudly told me how he had rooted it.

The other pot held pansies, which slowly wilted as the season progressed. I had planned to buy more flowers for it, but was waiting.

Little Mrs. Martinez, part of another Catalan couple, had been keeping a flowering plant for me, when I went back to Geneva. Leaving it alone in my flat for the time I would have been gone would have been a death sentence, although it seems any plants I have lately tend to give new meaning to the phrase bite the dust.

Yesterday I came down and found the plant happily in my pot, the sad pansies swept away to some plant purgatory.

Senor and Senora Martinez had big smiles on their faces. I only have a couple of more weeks before I go back to Geneva. I hope I can live up to their expectations and keep everything alive until then when they will take over.

I have heard from others that they say behind my back they still hope to teach me how to be a proper gardener and that except for my lack of skill, I am still a nice person. They are nice people, nice neighbours who accept me and my black thumbness