For the Love of Okra

So, for those of you who are out of the loop, my mother lives with us. She had a medical situation two years ago that rendered her unable to live on her own anymore. Now, she's almost fully back to normal (a relative term for anyone who actually knows my family members), but we've decided it's best for her to stay here since lymphoma is a slippery little booger and can strike back suddenly.

My mother is a Worker. She has to be productive and needs multiple projects going to be a happy little bee. (Must be where I get it from.) We had some septic work and fill line work done behind the house in early spring, and the men from church who were working on that deal let all of that dug up yard over the poopy patch, aka greatest fertilizer ever, sit there one day too long for my mother. She stared and stared at that fertile ground and simply HAD to plant something in the bare area.

But being my mother, instead of marking it off and making rows, she just flung seed everywhere. Well, that may be a little exaggeration, she did fling the okra in one spot and the cucumber and watermelon and peppers in another, but basically, I've got this random growth of vegetables in the middle of my back yard. It's classic Mother.

As ordered and organized as I am as a human being, my mother is the polar opposite. She's also Martha Stewart Lite (half the skills with twice the drive). It makes for an interesting home life. I come home to things like a garden in the dead center of my back yard (in between the play house and the trampoline. Naturally.) Or all of my closets reorganized (if anyone stumbles across my sleeping bags or ponchos when they are visiting, that'd be great).

Mother has gone to her sister's house for the week and she left me A List of Things to Accomplish including "cut the okra or it will stop producing". Hmm. Quite the conundrum, since one has to assume that I actually want the okra to keep producing, thereby making it where I have to cut it. The fact that I've gone out there in the heat and cut that blasted okra every morning and watered it every evening is a testimony to how much I actually love my mother, not how much I love okra. It's the same reason she cleans out my closets, I guess. Ahhh...the things we do for love.