Guardians of the garden

One of my favorite things to do is spend time in the garden, where I also photograph all of the jewelry I make for my Etsy shop. Maybe getting my hands in the dirt gets my head out of the clouds and brings me back down to Earth again. It also brings back very fond memories of my mom. During the great building renovation of 2008, my whole garden here was destroyed and had to be rebuilt. The landlady and I spent forever measuring and mixing cement and hauling soil around. At last, we finished the structural work and I got to planting.

Here are a couple photos of the guardians of my garden: my two cats and one trusty garden gnome. The photos are a bit dim since it was uncharacteristically cloudy the day I took them, but the essence is still there. The cats came with me during the initial move. The garden gnome I brought back a couple of years ago after visiting family and friends in the US. The ordeal he caused at the Cleveland airport was phenomenal. Due to the sheer weight (it is a wrought iron statue afterall) and some underlying guilt that it would somehow be wrong to check a garden gnome in my luggage, I decided to carry him on. After waiting an eternity in the security line, the solid outline of a garden gnome appeared on the luggage screener's monitor and set off red flags. It was actually quite hilarious to see the hooded figure on the screen, but they pulled me and my bag, then called over the head security guard. He conferred with his colleagues and after much deliberation, they agreed that it was "a blunt object that could be used for bludgeoning." I actually laughed. Not a wise thing to do in the presence of airport security, but I honestly couldn't help it. An innocent garden gnome had somehow become a vicious weapon, and I was the carrier of said weapon. My only options were to abandon him (ethically wrong, don't you think?), mail him to myself (with no packaging materials and no time to hunt for the post office), or run back through security to the front desk and beg someone to pull my bags, shove the gnome in and then run back through the endless security line again. Shoeless and silly, I opted for option three. Thank goodness one of the harried ladies at the ticket counter gave me permission to beg a baggage handler. She said if I could convince him, it was okay by her. I will never forget the kind man who went out of his way to help me. I stowed the gnome in one of my check-in bags, ran back through security and made it just in time!