yard gargoyle.

I was driving through the country, amusing myself with my own commentary. I was looking specifically for dogwood trees, easy to recognize this time of year with their white flowers. We have a dogwood tree in the backyard. It's a sad and spindly tree, with only a smattering of blossoms on its puny branches. Our dogwood loses the battle for sun up against the oaks and maples. Josh said it was because dogwoods are all scrawny, and I felt it my duty to find all the dogwoods in a two hour drive that were actually quite sturdy, thank you very much.

I found that an awful lot of dogwoods are pretty scrawny. We'll just chalk that up to being able to survive, no matter how dimly, in disadvantageous circumstances. I did find a few that were showing just a dogwood could do, but Josh was reading and I felt pretty stupid pointing at every other white-flowered tree I saw.

Somewhere about three-quarters in, I saw a concrete statue of a rooster. "Chicken statue!" I called out, as if we were playing a game where you get points for finding chicken statues and flowering trees of a certain girth. I noticed then that the statue was perched on top of a lidded cylinder made of cement. Having a similar structure at my own house, I recognized it as the well. What a great idea! A chicken statue on top of the well!

There are a variety of ways to disguise your well, as if you should be ashamed to get free water right out of the ground. I think the city folks out to buy fake wells so they can look like they drink fresh clean water from the spring, but whatever. There are those fake rocks, which, no offense to anyone who might own them, are not fooling anyone. Even before they became popular and instantly recognizable, they were ugly. You'd be better off with the regular old cement cylinder. A neighbor down the street has a wishing well sort of structure around his, which is nice, but a little bit fancy and expensive for my tastes.

But! If you set a statue on top of the well, it would look like a pedestal for the statue. You could even put up a plaque, like it was a piece of art at the museum. Here, I call this one "The Well." It's a metaphor, you probably wouldn't get it.

Josh said he didn't want a chicken statue. Some other kind of statue, then. Last month, I had seen a gargoyle statue at a quirky bar in Chapel Hill It was a dragon-type creature with a raised paw and open mouth. I sighed, because now I really, really wanted a gargoyle, when five seconds before my life had been serene because I hadn't known I could have such a thing. You can never go back to not wanting a gargoyle. You can only obtain one.

And see, now I even have the perfect perch for a gargoyle. I am ready for yard art. Some other neighbors, not the classy wishing well people, have a sea serpent in their yard (yard serpent?). Of course, I really would like to have a yard serpent, but two in the neighborhood would be silly, and if I stole theirs, well, it would be pretty obvious. So we'll just have to up the tacky yard art game. There is a yard art place across the street from the farmer's market that I've always been curious about, so maybe someday soon we'll go have a look at their stock. We may yet drive the fake rock right out of the well-embellishment business.