This is not a very beautiful picture but it’s pretty Canadian, eh?  I remember one cold afternoon when Stevie next door, determined to perfect his slap shot, sent quite a few zingers over the fence into my garden.  I wisely abandoned my fall leaf raking, gave it up as a bad job and retired to a nice cup of tea.  As the snow has grudgingly melted I found an orange practice ball that I lobbed back over and now this.  April is the CBC Poetry competition month but try as I might, I cannot write anything very inspired about these rather anemic tulips( they were hidden under a plastic garden chair which I managed to pry out of a snow bank this morning). Poor readers you should know that my garden is a bit of a fetish and you must expect many more posts in future about its charms.  Unfortunately I am now dealing with the punishment due every good deed. My pity for a couple of homeless cats who I feared would freeze to death in our brutal winter has left me with more than hockey pucks to deal with this spring.  Well, at least I haven’t found any cat carcasses so I must consider my . . . goal . . . . ( sorry about that) accomplished.  Poor cats, having helped to keep them alive all winter, I am now contributing to their neuroses by shooing them away and even– yes, throwing basins of water over them.  Ah, what it is to live in the West and have such preoccupations.