Today I’m reflecting on the fact that sometimes bad shit happens for no reason.  You know the song lyric “You don’t know what you got ’till it’s gone..” It keeps replaying in my head over and over again, because that’s how I feel today.  I have to admit, what happened to me is STUPID.  It’s so lame.. I feel like I shouldn’t care.  I will be fine, I will be resilient to it, but the initial pain still hurts.  It goes like this:

I’ve never had a great green thumb. And by “not great” I mean I’ve killed every plant I’ve ever owned.  Then I got this cat who loves to eat plants, so things got even worse.  I can’t even have a bouquet of flowers in a vase without the petals or leaves getting all chewed up.  NO BIG DEAL. I’ll live. I like my cat a lot more than I like bouquets.

Ironically, I run a small flower selling operation.  On Easter and Mother’s Day weekends I set up about 4-5 flower stands around my city.  You may have some of these in your town.  They are mostly tents set up in a parking lot with tables and lots of flowers.  They look similar to those tents that sell fireworks all summer.  Anyways, at the end of these weekends I usually take a bunch of flowers for myself, because I can.  It’s nice to get these large hardy flowers as a reward for putting in the hard work to run the stands.

So, for the past few years I’ve practiced keeping these flowers alive.  I’ve watered them on the front porch all summer long, and planted a few here and there in hopes they would pop back up in the years to come.  Here’s where the story starts to unravel.

My current home is a nice small house.  It has 2 bedrooms, a basement, and a nice yard.  It’s rented.  Here’s what the house looks like:

The thing that really bothered me when I moved in was that I realized the two flower beds that sit one on either side of the front door had absolutely nothing in them except tall grasses. It was such an eyesore I went and weeded them completely.  I also couldn’t stand that there were 2 nice big flower beds all landscaped out with NOTHING in them! So, what did I do?  I planted my hardy plants right after Easter and Mother’s Day weekends.  I watered them every day and got new soil for them.  I didn’t get much flowers out of them last year, but when they started coming up this spring I was overjoyed.  I grew something!!  Plus it was contributing to the future renters of this place! They would have nice flowers to look at too.  The Hydrangeas were sprouting up viciously, and the Azalea leaves were already turning back to green.  I watered them everyday this spring.  Until yesterday.  Yesterday, I came home to find out that my landlord had driven onto my lawn, and dumped a MOUND of dirt and rocks on top of all my growing flowers.  Why? I have no idea….but it feels shitty.  They are completely destroyed.  I tried to dig them out, and saved maybe one.

Yes, this is my problem.  My flowers that I didn’t really care about that much (or so I thought) are destroyed.  They were just growing and they were beautiful, but then someone decided to destroy them for no reason at all.  I didn’t even get to enjoy them for 1 whole summer.  The point of this story is not flowers.  It’s about dealing with the fact that sometimes life hurts in stupid ways.  Even if it’s something you didn’t know you cared about, once it’s gone or destroyed for no reason at all, you suddenly feel a loss. I think it’s the fact that I put effort into something.  It was enjoyable to me to plant those flowers, and nice to come home and water them every evening.   It was the fact that I was succeeding at something I thought I sucked at. Even though I thought I was succeeding, life had a different plan, and now I have to deal with it.

It just makes me sad that someone destroyed something for no reason. Granted this is the guy who cut down the tree last Earth Day too.  ((What a douche.))

This makes me realize that if I cared this much about losing a FLOWER BED that I watered for all of one summer, how insanely devastated people who lose something so much larger in life, like a CHILD must feel.  It’s not like their child died for any reason at all – and that’s what hurts the most.  The flowers were here, they were growing and they were beautiful, and now they are gone.  RIP little flowers.

Here’s the positives I’m trying to focus: now I know that I can grow plants and flowers.  I’m not as terrible as I thought.  Also, now there’s a lot of dirt to plant new flowers in…. too much dirt actually….

Being sad is not who I am.  I am actually a very intrinsically happy person, so it hurts me a lot when I’m down.  I hate being disappointed, and it’s hard when there’s nothing you can do about it.  I’m going to call my landlord today and let him know (politely) how disappointed I am that he destroyed my stuff, but in the end, it’s his yard.  All I can do is smile, move on with my life, keep trying, and know that one day I will have a garden that I love.

Do you have any advice or experience dealing with unexpected frustration and disappointment?