Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details.Welcome to the year of the bees by J. G. Fabiano I never thought I would look forward to the first freezing day of the year., but, this has been some year. My lawn has been growing as if it was on some new form of herbal steroids, my garden absolutely refuses to stop producing vegetables and mosquitoes have discovered that if they live longer they produce more offspring. I am so tired of having to mow my lawn two times a week I actually feel sick every time I pass my mower. I am convinced my lawn mower's carburetor feels the same way. This poor machine has been tortured since early May, hacking through the swampy areas of my lawn trying to cut through grass that has the strength of bamboo. Even after I cut through my tropical forest lawn the cuttings cover the lawn like a thick woolen comforter. If it was up to me I would leave them right where they are thus having them kill the monster once and for all but my wife insists on having the lawn around our home look as good as the insides of our home. Earlier this year I tried to rake up the cuttings, destroying many rakes and leaving my hands looking as though they had been dipped in battery acid. I then drove out to my friendly Sears store and bought a lawn sweeper I could tow behind my tractor. This marvelous new machine promised to clear my lawn of cuttings within minutes. It actually worked quite well until the bag filled up with the cuttings. I then had to decide where I was going to dump them all. I finally put them in a far corner of the yard near my garden and left them to compost. After I had swept the entire lawn I realized I had created a small mountain of grass cuttings. I didn't think this was a problem until the next morning when my neighbor called and asked if I had killed some sort of wild animal the night before. Not having a clue what he meant I went outside and was hit in the face with the foulest stench I had smelled since my last trip to the town dump. It seemed my mountain of green had turned into a mountain of manure overnight. At first I thought using the garden hose to water it down might help but it only made the smell worse. I then found an old and unused bottle of my wife's cologne, poured it into the sprayer I attached to my garden hose and proceeded to spray the monster down. All this did was combine with the smell of rotting manure to make the whole garden smell like a brothel for horticulturalists. Not that I have ever had any experience of a brothel for horticulturalists. It seems this year my entire garden has evolved into an entirely new eco-system that doesn't want to succumb to the first frost. This may seem like a good thing but the truth is that picking green beans deep into the month of October makes my back ache. Let me make something perfectly clear. I love the taste of fresh picked green beans. But the late fall green beans simply don't taste as good as green beans picked during the growing season. These late fall beans are the size of baseball bats and taste about as good. I love the taste of fresh picked zucchini, yellow squash, eggplant, peppers and tomatoes during the summer months. But when summer is past I find my palate turns to winter and I start yearning for frozen vegetables from the supermarket. Being of Italian heritage my mother used to tell me never to waste food. So, even though my wife and I were sick of string beans, I still went out to the garden to pick bushels of the green things in order to have them for dinner. Cutting the tips dulled a couple of knives and what used to take a few minutes to steam into sweet green succulence took well over half an hour and tasted like cardboard. I think maybe I should send a couple of samples to the Pentagon because the skins could be made into bullet proof vests. I can't say I enjoy the onset of winter but the first winter frost does liberate us from the nightmare of mosquitoes. I noticed this year that the longer the mosquitoes lived the stronger they got because the many creams and sprays we used to keep them at bay during the summer not only didn't work in the fall they seemed to act as a kind of dressing for the little blood suckers. I also believe the longer mosquitoes live the smarter they get. The mosquitoes that made their home in my backyard this year developed some sort of communication system between them. During the summer we all suffered a bite here and a bite there but during the latter months of fall they seemed to strike in coordinated waves. The other day I was out in my garden attempting to wrestle a few giant green beans off their beanstalks when I was hit half a dozen times by mosquitoes on different parts of my body. I'm sure I only confirmed my neighbors' worst suspicions if they saw me in my bean patch this fall flailing wildly around me with fistfuls of giant bean pods. One major reason for disliking a prolonged summer is that my biological clock has been thrown off kilter and my summer clothes have worn to the point where they are made up of more holes then cloth. They have also faded to the point where they all have the same color and shrunk from over washing so that when I put on one of my of favorite tropical shirts I find myself baring a fashionable swathe of midriff except that in my case there is nothing fashionable about it. And when I bend over in the garden to pick my mutant beans I fear I am treating the neighborhood to more than it wants to see of the infamous plumbers crack. I fear my fall and winter clothes have been neglected too long and maybe they will express their displeasure by excreting that stale, musty smell that comes from clothes that have been stored too long. One day last week I rebelled and ignored the Indian summer temperatures by putting on one of my favorite fall sweaters to school so I could give it a bit of an airing. This was a big mistake because all I did was sweat all day so that my beautiful woolen sweater became saturated with body odor and had to be left in the garage when I got home. This weekend I have to do something about the giant mound of lawn cuttings that is fermenting in the far corner of my yard. I thought that when I moved it I might wear my nice fall sweater so its smell of too much Jim would be replaced by the smell of rotting vegetation and my wife wouldn't mind washing it because she would know how hard at work I had been cleaning up the garden. The End.
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