hostas ovenbird By this time of year, many of the plants in my garden have transformed into dignified husks. Their stalks have dried into skeletal remains with their little skulls full of seeds, everything dry and grey, but beautiful, like a disembodied finger in a reliquary. The columbine and the sea holly and the meadow rue all freeze into a desiccated tableaux, rigid in the strengthening wind, and resolute against the dark. Not hostas. Hostas are all green and optimistic until the very first frost, then they give up overnight and collapse into a pile of goo. There is no warning. One day they’re waving their variegated leaves at the hummingbirds, the next they’re a soupy pile of ooze that no one has a chance in hell of cleaning up. Do you remember that early episode of Breaking_Bad where Walter and Jesse try to dissolve a body in hydrofluoric acid? Yeah, that’s what frost does to hostas. And since I didn’t cut mine back early enough this year I now have two patches of slimy gloop crawling with slugs and snails that I will somehow have to scoop into paper lawn bags before the next rain makes everything even worse. When it comes to how I will face my own decline and eventual demise I would like to think I’ll go out like the sea_holly, prickly but standing tall even as I mummify from the ground up, but it’s possible I’ll be more like a hosta. Here one minute, sludge the next. 251029 what's it to you? who go blather from