It's funny how thinking of one thing will take us down memory lane. Today we set out some columbine plants from the nursery. We have a lot of columbines around here that come up every year, but these are pink, and I didn't have that color.

Columbines will plant themselves in the most surprising places. We've got one growing out of the corner of a flagstone stop, and another where a rock wall meets flagstones.

Back in 1985 my folks hadn't lived in this house very long, and my mother wanted to get some columbines started from seed. I'm not sure where she got the seeds, but she had a lot of them.

My dad at that time had a home business repackaging collectible used postage stamps and selling them to wholesaler buyers who then sold them to collectors. Every so often he noticed that some of the stamps weren't cancelled, so he'd soak them off the paper and re-use them. And then he saw some article somewhere about how some cancelled stamps could be bleached. He tried that, and it worked, but then he was busted by the postal inspectors.

My mother was very paranoid about it, thought the feds were watching the house and opening their mail. Maybe they were. Anyhow, one time she mailed me a letter and enclosed a whole bunch of loose columbine seeds so if they were opening the mail, they would have a mess on their hands.

My dad ended up with probation for some period of time, and community service hours. The postal inspectors at first thought he might be part of some big ring of stamp re-users, but eventually figured out it was just him making a bad decision to save on postage.

And all that is what came to mind today when I thought about planting some columbines.