garden confessions

Living in a high, dry city, we've had the windows open all day and night for months. The screens usually keep out the occasional night-time mosquito. 

The problem is the flowers. In the morning, the dainty 5-petal white flowers smell faintly of honeysuckle. At night, they are nauseating, and no I'm not pregnant. They look like lovely decorative barrettes on a huge tangle of vines across the front wall of the house. But they reek of lilies or worse, old roses. The smell of them can wake me up, on the other side of the house.

We had no idea that the back garden was full of fruit trees until the spring came. Two lemon, two plum, four olive, two peach, and two enormous grape vines that cover the 10x10' trellis. How wonderful! A regular garden of eden! We'll eat them, I thought. What a lovely lesson for the children.

Then the fruit started growing. I had no idea that peaches grow along the branches like giant insect eggs. There were hundreds of them on the little trees. I missed the window for picking them. The weekends I put in the effort to climb and pick were too early and they were impossibly sour. Then they started rotting and falling while I was at work. Then the ants came. And the peaches from the hard-to-reach branches fell and blackened the tables and chairs and tiles with over-sweetness. We abandoned the back garden for a week or more to avoid the carnage.