It's time to break up

I once had a boyfriend who had me take the almost 3-hour bus trip all the way to his house so he could tell me that he had decided we should break up. The stupid thing was, I knew we should be breaking up too but I hadn't mustered the nerve to initiate it. Why he couldn't tell me over the phone, I'll never know.

Today, when I hear people complain about text message break-ups, I say, I'd take that over a 3-hour bus ride to the outer edges of Scarborough, Ontario for a 30 second break up and immediate return trip home! Sheesh! Though in hindsight it was rather funny in a teenage angst kind of way.

Apparently I'm still not very good at initiating breakups. Even when it's a plant.

A few years ago it took me forever to finally yank out the awful umbrella tree that was using up all my prime, full-sun garden space [see One Small Step for Suburban Kind]. My thinking was: the lot was then barren and it seemed crazy to remove one of the few things growing there besides grass. Once I finally yanked it out, I felt so unbelievably liberated in a gardening-kind-of-way, that I couldn't believe I'd even hesitated to take her down.

Well, now, I have two more bad plant relationships to deal with.

First, this is not my rose of sharon:


But this is my rose of sharon:


Yes, you may laugh. I certainly do.

Need I say more? I've relocated it three times. It has never figured out how to grow bushy leaves. But it does manage to get some wimpy little blossoms in spite of its sickly looking self.

I'm sure there's a life-altering metaphor in there but I haven't quite grasped it yet.



I just moved it to its Last Chance spot in the front garden. I'm giving one more summer (2009-mark your calendars) and then, well, it's getting THE dreaded It's not You, It's Me text message whereupon I shall cut my losses and run.

Next, this is not my blueberry bush:



These are my blueberry bushes (not to scale: they're smaller than they look!):


I've had them (yes, there's really two) for three years. It's not that they haven't grown. It's that they've actually shrunken, measuring in at a completely unimpressive six inches in yet another realm where size does matter. One has leaves, the other has none. Given that blueberries are my absolute most favourite food on earth, I feel this is an injustice.

I was about to break up with them this summer when I surfed the net for a second opinion. I found a local-ish garden blog where the guy mentioned having success growing them in pots, so I started thinking that over: perhaps I could indeed revive them. Do I think I'm the Mother Teresa of Gardening or what?

Why is it that I cling to hope in the face of such appalling reality? I think it's connected to the way I told myself on that long bus ride to Scarborough to see the boyfriend all those years ago that he had probably had a major epiphany and realized both an undying love for me and 306 new ways to experience happiness with me. The possibility of him breaking up with me hadn't even entered my mind. Which is why, deep down, I apparently believe that the rose of sharon and the blueberries are just waiting for that right season to really thrive.

Breaking up is hard to do. Delaying it is perhaps even worse.

PS: The boyfriend showed up at my door about a year later telling me he had made a terrible mistake and wanted to get back together. If I agreed, he said, he'd break up with his current girlfriend right away! LOL.