Mrs. Teabody Greets the Day

Joie de vivre*  (joy of living) is a French phrase often used in English to express a cheerful enjoyment of life; an exultation of spirit. Is July taking its toll on your joie de vivre , Gentle Reader? Forcing you indoors away from gardening projects? Forcing you to start your day in crisp white linen only to find yourself a sodden mess of accordian pleats at day's end? Forcing you to think about packing your bags and relocating somewhere else -- somewhere where it is not so wretchedly and relentlessly hot? Because that is how Mrs. Teabody feels about a July as hot as the current one. Mrs. Teabody long ago abandoned visits to public pools for reasons that would be patently obvious were you ever to catch her in a bathing costume - - AND YOU WON'T - - (Mon Dieu!), but she is remembering with great fondness being able to plunge into a pool to cool off on the hottest of days and perhaps that is your way of staying cool. Whatever your method of bringing your core temperature

A Shropshire Lad II: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. ” from A.E. Housman,  A Shropshire Lad  (1896) Good Morning, Gentle Reader on this second day of July in a summer of exceptional wetness and weediness and storms that send even the bravest of souls scurrying for cover. The gardens at Chez Teabody are serving as battlegrounds between what is planted, cultivated and desired and what is uninvited, aggressive and undesirable, and Mrs. Teabody's peace-keeping missions are ofttimes short-lived, sad to say. In spite of all this and