Wednesday, October 15, 2008

a farewell to the one truly great thing about my new apartment...

So we've established that mid September is most definitely NOT the ideal time of year to be searching for a place to rent in Oxford, Mississippi. Given my limited budget and tight time frame, I felt lucky to find a place period, even if it was in an apartment complex I've always regarded as being thoroughly unremarkable. There was one little thing that cheered me up about the place...the fact that along the wall beside my front door were three wild and lovely abelia bushes, always alive with butterflies. To be fair, I didn't know exactly WHAT they were until I clarified it with my good friend Lisa over at Shower Fresh Garden. When Lisa saw these bushes however, she made her jealousy perfectly clear...and if Lisa is jealous of your plants, then you have some seriously great plants. She informed me that it was nice to see my abelias looking the way they're supposed to, as in the aforementioned wild and lovely. I'm fairly certain that she advised that the worst thing to do was to cut them back...so imagine my horror when I arrived home for lunch today to find my bushes hacked into sad, low squares, with more stick showing than leaf or flower.

OK, so I know that technically they aren't MY bushes, and that in all likelihood, I'll be moving on to a (hopefully) more fitting Oxford location in July. Still, I feel like my otherwise boring little place has lost the one thing that gave it instant character. And I'm definitely making a mental note to plant some abelia bushes at my next place...