Just One Snip

Accidents happen, and I had one on Tuesday. Oh, nothing serious, but I wasn't happy about it nonetheless. It happened in my garden.

I'm no stranger to mishaps in the garden. The one that stands out most in my mind is the time I nearly put my eye out planting tulips. Yeah, gotta watch out for those tulip bulbs. They can be vicious. Oh wait, that was the willow tree that got me, not the tulips. Gotta watch out for those willows. They can be vicious.

I've had other more minor incidences where I forgot to put gloves on and suffered cuts on my hands from dead Miscanthus blades. I guess that's why they call them blades. Those can give you injuries like paper cuts times ten.

And then there have been the numerous times - too many to count - where I pulled a weed, just to realize two seconds later that it was a flower seedling. Almost as bad as pulling them out is stepping on them. Sometimes I am my own worst enemy, I swear.

Famous "We have met the enemy..." Pogo strip
from Earth Day 1971

Tuesday was a pretty nice day around these parts. It was mostly sunny, 68°, and even when the rain came later, it was a warm rain and I stayed out in it, continuing the garden clean-up.

The roses, in all their thorniness, had trapped lots of brown oak leaves among their canes so it was a good thing I was wearing my leather work gloves as I pulled the leaves away.



Part of the clean-up involved cutting back ugly dead stuff like the Echinacea stems. The birds and weather had pretty much stripped them of most of their seeds and I didn't want to look at their brown selves anymore anyway. So I grabbed the stems in my left hand and snipped them off with the Felco pruners in my right.

And that's when The Accident happened.

The only good thing I have to say about this is that I'm glad my finger wasn't all the way in the end.