Window Boxes Redux Redux

As I've waddled through my two-year evaluation, and it looks like I'm going to live, at least for the time being, and I'm boring myself silly with monitoring my blood pressure and deciding whether to take pills in the morning or evening or some here and some there -- how quickly we have shifted from thug to pansyass -- I guess I'll rev up the Gaga and....

Love Gaga.

Shit. Now I'm having trouble sitting still. Oh right, I was going to resume writing, not jigging about. Much has happened since my last entry that I will not go into beyond a summary: weddings and trips and holidays and getting paid for writing, which is always nice.

Zo. The post-Thanksgiving window boxes have been decorated and they are even less natural than usual. Little besides the ivy draping over the corners, and the fringe of wandering jew that will linger only until frost, has roots. The rest, as always, is a mix of the finest Chinese plastic and various mystery products, a sprinkling of glitter, and branches pinched from trees and shrubs as filler. It's all tied up with big purple bows.  

Hung over from last year are the fat balls of faux boxwood, which are my temporarily permanent centerpieces. These I found on-line after innumerable failed attempts to grow the real stuff and true to their nature they look exactly as they did when I removed them from their packing and jabbed them into the boxes, of which there are five, by the way.

Nearly invisible behind them are what I had previously considered my permanent centerpieces--a fringier fake evergreen that arrived a little too skimpy for the job. This is why I now hedge my announcements of what's permanent and what's  not.

The red berries are fake too. I stuck those in a couple of years ago and was so pleased with their apparently permanent jollity that I let them stay to perk up the geraniums as they went in and out of summer bloom.

New Fake Replacement! In past years I've predawn skipped about stealing branches from hither and yon to dangle down the front of the boxes, which really looked very dramatic. This year, fully in the spirit of coddling my malaise and self-pity, I went to one of those atrocious craft stores that make me alternately vomit and emit giddy screeches of acquisitiveness (I can do that!), and bought branches of plastic fir and pine. I am shocked, SHOCKED at how real they look. How many hours of life have I wasted in thievery ... tsk.

Topping it all is more newness...actual genuine fir branches tangled with some bent and twizzled sparkly stems. The sparkle stems will shortly (I hope) move indoors to perk up the mantle and be replaced with the little white lights that I intended to have up by now, along with colored balls and other bits and bobbles.

However. The Prince had a calamity in the linen closet that contains the attic hatch and I expect it will be Some Time before they, and the rest of the holiday ornaments, will be accessible.

I'm particularly pleased with the addition of the fir branches that splay so perkily against the windows, adding scale and dimension and a rousing flourish...it is a modest tribute to a box I saw last weekend in Culpeper, Virginia that had a Giant Evergreen Branch stuck in the center.  As stealing anything of that size intimidates even me, we made do with clippings from the base of the Christmas tree currently resting in a bucket of water on the back porch.

Rant warning. 

The movement of said tree from porch to dining room and glittery stuffs from boxes to mantle is contingent on the cessation of work -- or various work motions -- of said Prince who has been (as far as I'm concerned) lethargically restoring the house to its usual state of livable decay and disarray, its wabi sabi essence, since LAST APRIL when he was inspired by my asking that he stick a piece of molding (that had been leaning against the wall behind the radiator for a solid year) back up in the kitchen and went mad, tearing down plaster walls and hatcheting the bathroom tiles and pulling down fixtures and then...lost interest. As soon as I attempt to kind of limply straighten up, things that need doing are suddenly revealed to him and new clouds of dust and stink descend. This means it's generally a good idea to do nothing and sit out with the shitting feral parakeets in the greenhouse and read Allure or the New Yorker.

Of course the exterior of the house, which was MOSTLY repaired and repainted a year ago, a months long process that was aborted when I ejected the writer/painter he hired to do the job (an act of entirely misguided charity), is not immune from his sudden compulsions. Just this morning? This:

And where is he? Gone.