Member-only story
My Boarder Left Without a Word
It’s about her, not me.
It was pretty weird to get up and realize the woman who had been renting a sleeping room from me for the past five months was not coming back.
I rented her the use of the sweet back bedroom I had painted a soft, dove blue-gray two years ago. The room with generous 9-foot high ceilings is one of several bedrooms in my 100-year old craftsman style home. The view out the west window is the first thing you see each morning when you wake up from within the room.
The sun comes up early blasting a hot spotlight on the former horse-carriage barn turned tiny garage. Growing out of the base of the garage is a beautiful garden I planned and planted precisely for early morning spring-time viewing with the sun beaming hot on the newly emerging perennials. Some of the plants are relics that moved with me several years ago. More are new plants, acquired by a variety of means since I arrived in my new state.
Spotted lungwort is an incredibly impossible plant, with bright white, polka-dotted leaves, long, almost banana shaped, thick, deep green, and prickly hairy — like, don’t-touch-them-hairy-they-will-hurt-you. The flower blossoms grow out of a long slender lime-green stalk. The flowers open as small bright pink magenta cups. A buds continue to open while climbing up the stalk they turn a…
