Our Garden! Our Beautiful Garden!!!!

I'm going on a five day canoe trip in Killarney today. I was working late last night to get all my work finished up, and on my bike ride home I was thinking - I'd better water the garden. I want to make sure that it will survive the 5 days without me. We have spent a lot of time and money working on this tiny little patch of soil that we call our front garden. When we moved in, it was terribly overgrown with some invasive creeping plant, that took weeks and weeks to get rid of. My friend Chris helped me to carry loads of compost over from the park on Environment Days. Dan and I spent many evenings shopping at Garden Centres. I read dozens of gardening books from the library. I started shopping at Lee Valley. I've had many emergency massages after a weekend of back breaking work in this garden. But it is now full on summer and we have some beautiful flowers growing and I feel less ashamed about the state of our garden. Sometimes, we even feel pride. So, you can imagine the horror when I came home from work to find two plywood sheets laying on the garden.

My initial thought was - what the hell. You are crushing my flowers! Dan was in the house working and hadn't even noticed it, since he came in the back door. He came out and lifted the boards to reveal this 6' deep crater where my beautiful flowers once bloomed. What the hell!!!!

Yes, there was a backhoe parked across the street and some patches of asphalt had been dug up. But why would a problem across the street require them to ruin my garden???? Finally I found a neighbour who told me that the water main runs under my garden, and they needed to run a new line to the house across the street. So, they dug up my garden. Bad luck, I guess. Lucky that they didn't have to dig up the neighbours interlocking brick. What would they do then?

So this morning, I'm running around packing up my last few things when I heard a scuffling outside. I opened the front door and there were four men standing on my front garden, who sheepishly turned to greet me. They explained that they will replace all the flowers that they ruined, but for some reason, I can't imagine that it will be that easy. I watched the guy work inside the big hole for a while, then decide to leave them to their work. After all, I'm going on vacation!