Mortar Girl, Round 2

I had such success with my steps that I went to work on the area in front of the house that poses as a grossly undertended flower bed. You know the kind of space -- the sidewalk runs parallel to the house, but can't be right up against it, so you get a couple feet of dirt there that pretends to be a flower bed.

My particular fake is three feet wide -- too wide for a good flower bed because I can't reach the far side without getting into some pretty precarious positions -- and it grows nothing as well as weeds, rocks, and roots. (In this part of Oklahoma, we all grow our own rocks.) Oh, yeah, and of course it's a prime gopher and mole attraction.

The mortar work was actually the easy part this time around . . . well, except on the second row of rocks. If you ever really look at a rock wall, you'll notice that the stones they use have one thing in common: they're mostly flat on all the edges. There's a reason for that (I know now). Being a creative person (or inexperienced mason, some might say, though then I'd have smack them), I was drawn to the odd-shaped rocks. They're different. They're cool looking. They're a bad choice. A really bad choice. It's very hard to get the second row of rocks to stay in place long enough to mortar them when they're balancing on a point here and a bump there.

Building the 3 X 14' border didn't take too long. (That's about half the flower bed; a crape myrtle that volunteered to grow in the middle of the bed necesitated dividing it into three sections.) Silly me -- I thought the hard part was done. Little did I know that the real work was just beginning.

I won't bore you with all the details. Suffice it to say, my nails may never recover, I need an adjustment or three from my chiropractor, I now have a farmer's tan to go with all the scrapes and bruises, and I have a killer flower bed, all planted in zinnias. I love zinnias (especially the apricot ones -- too gorgeous!.

And by the time the next crop of rocks is ready, I'm starting on the rest of the bed.

Like I said before, just call me Mortar Girl. Rachel8:07 AM