by Rainn Laned

Created on: June 03, 2008   Last Updated: June 09, 2008

I was never much of a gardener to begin with. It was a few years back when a friend, let's just call him "C", and I decided to help out his mom in the garden. She was growing some type of special flowers that she said was hard to find because the seeds were so small and wouldn't grow just anywhere.

"It's bad enough," she said, throwing her head back, "that Georgia has such terrible red clay that you can't get out of your clothes! Now it has to grow some super flower."

"Might be a weed," my friend added teasingly. "Knowing your luck, mom, that just might be true."
I perked up and added, "It's true; he has a point. Your luck is bad."

She looked to the two of us and scrutinized us for a moment, quietly, and then she said,
"Alright. I'm going to give you a week to plant something and arrange my flowers. Since you two are hot shots, you can handle this gardening business all on your own."

I looked over to my friend, and he nodded before looking to his mother and saying, "You're on."

The next day, we started-our gloves were on, overalls were already dirty from chasing the pets out and I was thinking we were going to win this. That's before it rained. We ran into the shed and waited for thirty minutes before the "storm" left us. It cleared up relatively quickly, so we headed back out. Ten minutes later, it rained again, only harder. Taking shelter inside of the house, we watched as the sky cleared up again. We waited another ten minutes before going outside, but as soon as we did, thunder boomed.

"Alright," I yelled at the sky. "I guess we'll continue tomorrow."
C sighed but ended up laughing. "Well, hey. Nothing's perfect and who knows? The ground might be good enough to plant in tomorrow because right now, it's all," he looked down at his feet, "swampy."

I agreed and we went back inside, taking off our things until tomorrow.

When tomorrow came, the weather was much better. The storm rained itself out overnight, but just in case, we brought out trash bags to protect the flowers from over flooding during the rain. We checked on the flowers. Aah, perfect! So we moved over to the botany trees. C's cat was lying on its back on the table, napping next to one. Naturally we thought the cat would move when we approached because usually she's a little skittish. Unfortunately, no. She just slept and was, generally, useless. C looked at me with a blank expression and I shrugged, figuring that the cat would be no big deal to move.

Oh, she was.

She jumped up when we touched her and then she

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