“What could be bad?’”

That’s what someone answered, when I said, “Have a great walk,” as they were leaving my garden yesterday. Indeed, the point is well taken. What could be bad about strolling from garden to garden, meeting friends, talking about plants, and enjoying the beauty of a perfect July weekend?

There is no dark side to Garden Walk. Maybe a very few gray areas, like:
•People in the Walk area having yard sales. Tacky, folks.
•People selling merchandise and food from nearby properties, without permits, for their own profit. That’s more than tacky.
•The problem of getting around the now-gigantic Garden Walk area. Someone suggested a shuttle, and that’s not a bad idea. It could have scheduled stops and would help people who want to get from, say, the Cottage District to Johnson Park quickly. This could work, especially for those who aren’t up to much walking.

All mere quibbling. However, it wouldn’t be GWI if I didn’t mention a few personal incidents that occurred, mainly as a result of my need to combine gardening with other recreational activities. I won’t use the phrase “garden party” because that brings to mind people in frilly dresses and big picture hats sitting in front of a huge Jane Austenesque lawn. That’s not what we’re talking about here.

So. I had a party Saturday right after the Walk was done. All seemed well; many of my neighbors were ensconced in and around the patio and friends from farther afield were beginning to arrive. I had just finished making the pomegranate margaritas. When, crash! (Actually, I did not hear this; I was very focused on the punch bowl, admiring my ice ring, in which I had embedded lime slices and clematis blooms—hope they are edible, I was thinking.) But everybody else on the street heard and was standing out there (their glasses filled to the brim with tequila, wine, or whatever—some had forty-ouncers of Smirnoff Ice). Apparently, a guest was trying to park in a fenced-in lot, hit the gas, not the brake, and went through the chain link, driving a parked car into the easeway across the street. There was no impairment, just a momentary lapse of whatever. No one was hurt, thank god.

So much for that. The party continued, until, well, pretty late. The next day, after we’d been open a couple hours, and I’m beginning to perk up from coffee, my husband comes around the corner and asks, “What’s that black thing chained to our front railing?” I hasten to look and, much to my horror, someone has padlocked a wooden silhouette of a smoking cowboy (I know you have seen these; the bent-over farm wife is also popular) to our front railing, next to the “No Casino” sign. In our haste to get bolt cutters and take the thing down, I didn’t get a picture of it in situ, but this is it:



Later that day, we found out who did it—two of our oh-so-witty-and-amusing friends. It was quite funny. Maybe I was just a tad embarrassed to think that quite a number of Walkers must have thought I was out of my mind. It’s not really the type of thing you see in an urban garden on a street of Italianate Victorian residences.

I don’t know what to do with it. Anybody need a black wooden silhouette of a smoking cowboy?