I needed a bucket. I know it’s not the greatest excuse, but it’s the only one that I have. We have five-gallon buckets laying around everywhere, and they’re incredibly useful except for when you are tripping over them.

I needed a bucket to dig compost, so I went into the garage to look. I noticed that my hostas under the overhang of the porch looked awfully dry, so I made a mental note to water them. Soon.

In the garage, I found a bucket with about four inches of water in it. “Perfect,” I thought, and dumped it out on my poor, dry hostas. I got a bucket, and the hostas got their water. Everyone was happy, right? Right.

OK, wrong. That’s when I smelled kerosene. Yep! My dad had drained some kerosene into a bucket that morning, and I didn’t know he’d left it in the bucket. Too late! It had already soaked into the ground. And, yes, the hostas died. Oh, well. Hostas don’t grow well for me, anyway. Maybe because I water them with kerosene.

But, hey, you don’t always know the reason why. ❖