Spring has
finally arrived in Melbourne! Some days are absolutely wonderful and some days
are rainy and windy. Everything is growing and blossoming, trees, plants, grass
and especially weed. I try my very best to keep up with the weeding and keep
the flower bed outside our house neat and tidy, not only because I want it to
look nice outside our house, but also because we get fined by the management
where we live if the plantations outside the house are not looked after properly.
I have mentioned our less-than-tidy neighbors before, the ones how throw their
used tissues in their own bushes, never removes their mail and to add insult to
injury – they always walk around in their intimates at night time and we are so
unlucky to have our living room windows facing their living room. Not surprisingly
the plantation in front of their house is one big, overgrown weed-patch and a
real eye-sore for more fastidious neighbors – like myself.
One night I
became acutely aware that I am not the only one who is sincerely irritated by
the weed jungle. As I looked out my kitchen window one evening I saw one of the
neighbors doing a bit of moonlight weeding: she was pulling weeds from said
urban jungle and throwing at the Vegetation Culprits’ front door. I was both
chocked and amused by what I was witnessing. She didn’t notice that she had an
audience and after the weed attack on the Chinese front door, she moved further
down the street and smuggled her rubbish into other people’s bins.
Unfortunately her shadowy acts were not left undiscovered. One of the bin-owners
found her rubbish bin filled to the top the next morning. She was furious of
course, why should she have somebody else’s garbage in her bin? She put on
gloves and collected all the trash that belonged to the Shady Lady and simply
dropped it all on the woman’s doorstep. One got their weed on their doorstep,
this one got her garbage back. It is as they say ”what goes around, comes
around”. There is never a dull moment in this Melburnian suburb.
A penguin hiding in the weedy grass at Phillip Island
