What Ho! It's Curly Willow!

Today's constitutional, designed to keep me in robust physical and mental health, brought me as always to Marvelous Market, where I sat on a bistro chair for an hour and by turns tried to figure out something to write and glared at a baby in a stroller to see if I could alarm him (I assume it was a him since he was wearing a blue onesy).

I was not successful at either thing. Blather blat blat blat went my pen in my fat pink CVS spiral notebook and no matter how formidable I tried to look, whenever it was that I looked up, the baby just stared at me  and then offered a big mouthed yawn as his mother finally wheeled him away. There is something very askew with my ability to terrify.

Blat blat blat I wrote that down then packed myself up and crossed the street to examine Eastern Market, as if I don't examine it nearly every day but Monday when it is closed.



What ho! Something is new in the flower division. Whatsername, the talented but rather, shall we say,
unsocialized lady that owns the stand, has gotten in some red curly willow branches that appear to be about 6 feet tall. This is tremendously exciting because in all the years I've lived in Washington I have never seen these willow branches -- and I've asked myself hoarse in my efforts to get someone to carry them.

They are not just branches, see. They just appear to be bare and gnarly, like something you'd stick in the kind of house that has a wreath covered with twee stuff on the front door for every season and bowls of potpourri on every surface. No no, you stick 8 or 10 bare curly willow branches in a tall glass vase and in not so many days they burst out with the freshest green leaves, creating a massive display that is particularly glorious in early March when you want spring so badly and it's still weeks away. It's even more spectacular if you can contrive to put the vase in front of a mirror.    

So whatsername attempts to brusk by me, as she does, and I move in with a body block, as I do and I wrestle the price out of her. $22 a bunch.

I am outraged and I stomp off and run into Kristen, who is buying tortillas for Maddie who is 14 and is milking her first failed romance, and I say, "Whatshername has curly willow!"

And Kristen says something like, "Whoo hoo!"

"But she wants $22 bucks for it. I can get it at the Philadelphia Flower Show for $12," I say. "But then...the show would be $24 for each of us....and probably $50 in gas and tolls."  And mentally I add lunch...maybe dinner. And in Philadelphia you have to go to the farmer's market since it's across the street from the convention center. And the show ends this weekend and it doesn't appear that we're getting there, even though we'd sort of planned to.

"Sounds like a blog entry," she says.

"Yes," I say, "it does.