Especially since you've never had a reliable swing thought for a 390-yard shot from the rough alongside the tee-box ball washer.
Ticking time bombs all over the place: a box ball going brown here, a bay tree ailing there; leaves falling off a magnolia somewhere else.
From the lowliest box ball to the cloud-clipped bonsai-style Pinus sylvestris, anything is possible; there are thousands of options available.
The block shimmered with street games: ring-o-levio, running bases, stick ball, box ball, hot-peas-and-butter, stoop-ball, red-rover, and, most of all — or so it seems now — touch football.
They spoke of a life long ago on 116th Street and Pleasant Avenue in Manhattan, when stick ball and box ball were the diversions of the day and the sister and brother lived with two other siblings and their parents.
The other tree trend is pines, from the pitch pine (Pinus rigida) in Catherine MacDonald and Susannah Hunter's Massachusetts garden to first-timers Auderset Fischer's twist on the box ball using Pinus mugo 'Mops'.
Then he explained the rules that went with each surface when he was growing up in Coney Island, Brooklyn and South Jamaica, Queens -- all the sacred rites of stoopball, stickball and box ball, invented and handed down like state secrets by New York children on the sidewalks since before World War II.
Plant something out of character If you are a messy gardener, explore formality: proper paving and box balls.
The Chelsea Flower Show this year promises the return of topiary, so doubtless there will be a scramble for sharply trimmed box balls and conifer pyramids.
So what is a poor struggling financial institution to do? Keep smiling with a big budget display of box balls and peonies (the perfect antidote to economic doom and gloom)?
