Flags at half-mast, please–the Garden Monkey retires

Tear your hair and shriek, ladies; men, howl, and break your computer keyboards o’er your knees, for you won’t need them anymore: the Garden Monkey has retired from blogging. The announcement went up yesterday, and the garden blogging world is reeling.

I have not been reticent about my love of the Monkey, whose early and public support meant much to me, so early in my blogging career, and whose friendship has meant more in the months since. Truly, I go about town bragging that the Manic is one of the Monkey’s five “desert island blogs.” Now who else has a category like that?

Exercising every ounce of self-control I’ve got, I’ll refrain from pleading for a respite, and instead wish the wise and venerable Monkey a long and well-deserved rest.

If I had three Monkey-related wishes, though, they’d be these: to have the Monkey grace this site with a guest blog; to see, eventually, the Return of the Monkey to blogging; and to know, if not the Monkey’s identity, at least his/her gender, because writing about him/her with the awkward him/her pronouns popping up all over the place is a royal pain and a half.

Hats off to the Monkey!