STOP The Flower Barrel Abuse!

FeetMeetStreet rarely goes serious and normally maintains
a rigidly anti-social stance. However, I interrupt my own dedicated lack
of decency to bring you this important community announcement.

I don’t know if you are experiencing this particular brand of garden terrorism in your area but here, in Michigan, we have an epidemic afoot.

People, or Serial Tippers, are mercilessly abusing innocent, decorative flower barrel buckets. Beautiful, fresh flowers have been tenderly planted in an oak, antique whiskey barrel bucket and placed by a curb, in a front yard, or, commonly, outside of a restaurant. At some point – WHAM! – a serial tipper knocks it right over half spilling the flowers out of the violated bucket.

Buckets that should look like this:

Instead, look like this (cover your eyes if the image of desecrated flowers offends you):

The humanity!

I’ve seen this many times on my runs. At first, I would stop, scrape the remains of the flowers and soil back in and upright the overturned bucket. While I enjoy hobbies such as orphanage robbing and kitten stomping, I have a certain tenderness for spilt flowers. The next day, the serial tippers had already knocked it back down again. The problem is so prevalent that I rarely see a flower barrel bucket that is NOT overturned.

Who are these animals? And why do they hate the flowers? Or is it the old, antique oak barrels? I have my own hard feelings with oak* but, c’mon, there’s a time and a place to confront oak.

My community is clearly frustrated and in deep despair. I once stopped mid stride to stand up the same oak bucket outside my neighbors home three days in a row. On the fourth day, the home owner screamed at me from his front window to “leave the bucket alone.” I almost wept tears of sorrow. They’ve given up. People are leaving the remains of their beautiful flower baskets as defeated effigies. The garden terrorists have won.

I’ve tried to ignore it. When running, I’ve turned the volume up on my mp3 player to drown out the shrieking wails from the raped blossoms and groaning oak baskets. Social Distortion is not distorting my eyes however. I can't just look the other way and remain colder than a pimp's hug. **

The running community has an advantage. We are out on the roads constantly like an unaffiliated Neighborhood Watch. We can make a difference. We must ban together. Keep our ears and eyes open. The serial tippers walk amongst us though we know not who they are.

If you see a wounded barrel basket, stand it up. Scoop the flowers gently back into place. If it’s down again the next day, fix it again. The tippers think they can outlast us but we will outlast them. No matter how many times it takes – or how many angry threats from frustrated home owners – we must endure.

Your community will thank you.

Let’s STOP THE FLOWER BARREL ABUSE.

Consider this your call to arms.

* Elm rules! Suck it Oak.
** From "Prison Bound" by Social Distortion.
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Let the Detroit Marathon training begin! And did I mention it is HOT out?

11.0 miles
1:16:44 time
6:58 mile/pace
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Xenia’s Wizards of Blogland is hilariously cutting well deserved folks down to size. And shamelessly cheap shots one person along the way.