SECOND THOUGHTS

By LYNNE HORNER, For The Maui News
Here’s my new favorite thing: bowling balls. Not bowling, God forbid, just the balls. The one time in my life I took to the lanes, I let go of the ball when my arm was extended behind me. Got me a strike, all right — on my date’s ankle. Not good. I’m equally skilled at golf.

But bowling balls themselves, now there’s something I can get behind. I’ve come to think of them as the poor gardener’s gazing balls, especially since they come in such a colorful array these days. And even if all you can find are the black ones, you can slather some mastic on them and poke in the crockery shards you’ve been saving in boxes that take up most of the available real estate in your snivelly shop that is also your laundry room for, like, 16 years. Well. If you’re me.

I have “planted” eight bowling balls in the garden beds, so far, to match the colors of the surrounding flowers. Purple ball in the same bed as the purple clematis and lavender. Blue ball among the forget-me-nots and lithodora. Yellow, with the day lilies and coreopsis. Bright green in the cleavage of a rock formation that is overgrown with moss. You get the idea.

Bowling ball as garden decor has the possibility of getting truly tacky, I will admit, so one needs to exercise some restraint when situating one’s balls. I mean, I’d think twice about putting more than one per bed, unless your beds are huge. I count on Mrs. Z (neighbor) to monitor the tacky factor, as she has no problem speaking her mind. None, whatsoever.

It goes like this:

“Oh my,” she’ll offer. “Just what are we trying to achieve here? Looks like some giant 6-year-old stomped through the tulips and dropped all his marbles.”

“Really? Not good,” I’ll have to say. “I was after the charm Victorian gazing balls might lend.”

“I’d say you were still after it.” Unh.

Yesterday, while on a mission for flea stuff for the cats, I happened on the plant stand set up every spring in the parking lot of a small grocery store just up the road from us. I confessed my new affinity for bowling balls to the woman staffing the tent. I thought she’d think I was nuts, but she said, “Me, too! I have about a dozen of them. Don’t you just love how they look? I call it my marble garden.”

No good idea goes unpublished, I guess.

Now I have another project, though not in the garden — at least not yet. His name is Jack, because while I was holding him and wondering what to call him, the phone rang.

“Hi, this is Jack from Edible Arrangements, and I’m in the neighborhood trying to deliver a Mother’s Day bouquet to Lynne. But I’m having trouble finding your house.”

Jack, then. And he’s temporarily housed in our guest room until he gets back on his feet. Baby Steller’s jay. Pitched out of his nest while I was watering the rhubarb. He’s got most of his feathers, but his wings are very short, and he could use more tail.

A part of me knows I should let Nature take its course, which is to say “pupu for the cats,” but I never do. Wild birds don’t rally, it’s been my experience, and trying to save them is a futile exercise, at best. I can keep them alive for a couple of hours, usually, but they’re always belly up in the morning. Except this feisty little fellow. He’s been hanging on for several days and, as of this morning, now thinks I’m his mother. Instead of making me chase him around his box with both hands, he looked up at me from his nest of grapevine wreath and layers of Kleenex, and opened wide while I shot a mush of dog kibble, Cheerios and peanut butter down his throat with a syringe. I almost cried.

“Jack!” I shouted.

SKRAWK!

“Good boy!”

SKRAWK!

Then I ran out of the house to tell Himself, who was mowing the yard, what just happened.

“I hope,“ warned he, “you’re not going to get too attached. It’s not like it’s legal to keep a wild bird.”

“I don’t want to keep him. I want him to grow a tail and fly away,” I said, and meant every word of it. Things with gills, things with wings, were designed like that for a reason. Gotta swim, gotta fly. But I do hope he’ll visit.

• Lynne Horner is a former Maui News features editor and writer who now lives in Springfield, Ore. Her “Second Thoughts” column appears every Tuesday. Send e-mail to her at lynnenhorner@yahoo.com.