Mentons- A Nineteen-Year Procrastination

Menton Tulip

Nineteen years is as long as from the time I slipped out-of-the-womb and lost my first tooth, fell from a bike sans training wheels and mastered parallel parking.

 Nineteen years is as long the first day of college orientation, when I moved into a dorm wearing what I hoped was a cool-enough shirt, had my first job interview for the real world and began an IRA and mortgage payments.

 Nineteen years is as long as from the pregnancy test, elementary school volunteering to the FAFSA college-funding application for my child.

 Nineteen years is a long time to procrastinate.  But I did.    

My Mentons

Nineteen years ago, when I saw Menton tulips in a front yard a few blocks away, I knew who owned the house and tracked down the owner to get the name of the flowers.  I intended to buy a few of the bulbs and to plant them in the front yard of the house, that I had just purchased.

Tulips are planted in the fall.  And fall was always one of the busiest times of year for me at school.  By spring when tulips began appearing- the usual red and early yellow ones, I would remember the intention to plant Mentons.  Sometimes mid-year, I’d be thumbing a catalog of plants and run across them.  They were rare enough that they had to be ordered from somewhere from a catalog.  But winter was too late and, at the same time, too early for the next year.  So I would forget again or be too busy.  I somehow continued to recall that they were salmon pink inside and some sort of soft pink and yellow outside.

Retired now, last fall I put “Find Mentons” on my list of intentions.  I wasn’t even sure that they were still sold.  But they were.  Purchased from a catalog they arrived in a brown cardboard box last October. 

 Nineteen years is a long time to wait for something.  It was so worth it.  Find Mentons.  Put them on your list and hopefully don’t procrastinate nineteen years.

My summer intention is to strip and varnish those molding boards, which I had pulled from a house that was being demolished nineteen years ago.  My house has been waiting for them.  No more procrastination for me.  Nineteen is my magic number.  I wonder now if I have nineteen boards to strip.  Hmmm.