It’s a Mayapple. They are all over the “garden” at the back of my back yard, which bumps up against the little mini-woods between my yard and the schoolyard. I have never seen a mayapple in bloom before and they are probably still living back there after all these years *only* because sometime back in the Jurassic Age, a nature person (you know the kind), got all excited about them. I couldn’t figure it out. I thought they were just big leafy things. I have big leafy things all over my yard. Most of them qualify as weeds. Of course, if you go by what The Botanist says, “A weed is any plant that’s growing where you don’t want it to grow.” Something like that. So says Sam the Archaeologist and she would know because she has toiled in The Botanist’s bountiful garden many a year.

Today was a nice tinker-y kind of day. I ran my Roomba through her paces and cleaned my garbage and recycle containers and did some laundry and went to a couple of grokkery stores and made some lasagne sauce. One of the Houghton Lake web cams got dropped and now takes fuzzy photooos so I decided to put a message on those pages that we knew about the problem and had ordered a new one. Because the whole Courtois fam and a fair number of other folks check the Houghton Lake webcams frequently, don’tcha know. While I was doing that, I cleaned up the html. I don’t know who created those pages, I don’t think it was me but it was fun cleaning them up so they passed the dreaded validator. (P.S. I know my blahg doesn’t validate so don’t bother to tell me that ’cause I don’t have time to care.)

And then I dredged around for some, um, gardening glubs and dragged the handy-dandy Planet Ann Arbor compost cart to the back yard and, uh, well, you have to start somewhere, don’t you. Even if you have a black thumb. I decided to start with the stuff that I *know* actually lives. Some irises and tiger lilies and things. So I was weeding stuff from around those (I *do* know what dandelions and things look like) and I looked to the right. What was that big round white thing? Hello. An actual mayapple flower!

So I am encouraged. My house is almost kinda sorta clean. Please do not wear white gloves (or glasses) when you visit. The Chitchen and the Blue and Only Bathroom are always clean. My refrigerator is almost empty, which is just how I want it to be right now before the chaos of the coming summer season descends. And my yard doesn’t actually look totally bad and there are a few things besides weeds that grow despite my best efforts to destroy them.

P.S. Haven’t found anything with urushiol oil in it yet. Fingers crossed. Er, and knock on wood…

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