So far so good in this hard-fought battle between deer and day lily. A battle in which the day lily does nothing except bloom and be beautiful. A battle waged by the human on the day lily’s behalf. A human with a spray can of Invisible Fence.
Let us now praise the human and the spray can. Let us now praise the beauty that is the result.
It’s midsummer. The rain has stopped. The lilles are blooming. It’s a flowery bower.
Linger on paths, on beaches and on slopes. Soak in all sunlight, turn not a ray away. It’s the day we have longed for since Christmas. The longest day.
I plan to spend mine on the deck. The work will be done, but al fresco.
Plus, in the current living room configuration, the couch overlooks the backyard. From my morning perch I see sun-dappled oaks, potted begonias and, in the distance, the trampoline and hammock. These are the counterweights, what pulls me through the hours.
There are a lot of hours this longest day. But I can tell they will pass quickly, like water in a rushing stream. All leading to those final golden ones, the ones we have reclaimed from the night.
It’s retractable, and when you extend it as far as it will go and latch it to the closest sapling it barely holds a light kitchen towel. But it’s there, our clothesline, something I’ve always wanted, albeit a crazy anachronistic desire.
Maybe it’s harkening back to my childhood, to hanging sheets on the line, seeing them billow in the breeze, bringing them back in the house, inhaling their perfume of sunshine and fresh air.
Or maybe it goes even farther back in time, to some ancestral past, pounding clothes with a rock in the stream, drying them on grass or shrubbery.
Mostly it’s just a foolish romantic notion. I appreciate modern conveniences as much as the next person. But on a hot July afternoon, when laundry dries more quickly outside than in, surely there is something to love about a clothesline.
I have a complicated relationship with mulch.
When we first moved here 24 years ago, I saw in mulch all the suburban ills — the false tidiness, the compulsive behavior of gardeners who seemed to have nothing better to do than spread the stuff halfway up their tree trunks.
These were days of high complaint for me. I missed the small New England village we’d just left. A place where houses sat right on the side of small lanes — and mulching, when it did occur, was done discretely out back.
Flash forward almost a quarter of a century. The small town idyll mourned and missed but ultimately abandoned. And the years that passed have not been kind to our yard. It’s obvious we have used no lawn service, no chemicals, either — unless you count lime.
Mulch covers a multitude of sins. Also, of course, it keeps weeds at bay.
Now I walk past yards aromatic with the stuff, gardens darkened with the best, shredded kind. And I wish not for a mulch-free yard, just the opposite. I wish for a yard already mulched. For mulch that doesn’t lie in bags in the driveway, for mulch that’s already been spread.
Lo, how the mighty have fallen.
I used to think of trampoline bouncing as a warm weather activity, something best done barefoot in summer. But this year (maybe because it’s been warm, maybe because I have a greater need to move to music), I’ve been doing it all fall and winter, too.
Last week I ventured out in the snow. It was a light dusting, and the stuff was powdery enough to sift right through the pad onto the ground. Yesterday I bounced after the sleet had stopped and the day had cleared.
If I bounce long enough, the backyard starts to look pretty good: the brush no longer needs chipping; the trees no longer need trimming. They are shaggy friends now, these trees, with long, spindly arms that touch the sky.
Halfway through October, our witch hazel is the most colorful tree in the garden. I never think of it as an autumn showpiece — it’s best in late winter, blooming in the snow. Yet this year I notice that it’s mellowing to a muted, green-veined yellow that is the soul of the season — when the season is seen as a gentle winding down rather than a last, flaming hurrah.
Though witch hazel leaves begin as squiggly yellow flowers, they end as bigger, plate-like foliage and then, sometimes, there is a second flowering, an autumn bloom. After reading about this today I tiptoed out into our dark backyard to see if I could find evidence of it.
There is some debate about whether the witch hazel is a shrub or a tree, but our specimen is most definitely the latter. Tall, straight-limbed, arching, generous. Even in the dark I felt its presence. And reaching up to touch the limbs I felt along the stem and found the beginnings of those same squiggly flowers that are the harbingers of spring. Perhaps to bloom soon, perhaps in a few months. Or perhaps, it doesn’t matter.
The point is: the flowers will come again.
It’s raining this morning. Not a quick summer thunderstorm, but a steady, autumn-like rain that reminds me summer won’t last forever. In spite of the heat and dryness, I’m in no hurry for the season to end. On days I’m at home I try to spend as much time as possible outside.
That’s not hard to do, given that our backyard has several “rooms”: the deck, the hammock, the trampoline, the garden, and (when we’re set up for it) the fire pit. Each one with its separate functions and moods. The deck is where we hang out most, eating dinner or breakfast at the table under the pergola. It stays shady most of the day and is where I worked for several hours yesterday with Sid and Dominique beside me, taking in the air.
The garden is more a viewing spot than a sitting spot. But if you’re weeding or planting you might spend an hour there happily occupied.
The hammock and the trampoline are the rooms I’ve used the most this summer. Nothing decompresses better than a half hour on the tramp, music in the ear, sun lowering in the sky, striking gold on the trunks of the trees, all of this viewed with a grateful blurring that comes from movement.
And when I’m too tired to bounce anymore I can flop in the hammock with a good book or the Sunday paper.
The fire pit is for those congenial evenings when one or two of the girls are at home. The flames create unfamiliar shadows and transform our ordinary yard into a place of mystery and awe. Which it is, to some extent, all the time.
Yesterday I looked up from page proofs long enough to notice how the hole in the sky left open when a large tree fell three years ago has grow a shaggy green border, enough to make a verdant frame for a patch of blue.
I stared at the “picture” inside that frame. It wasn’t a static one, of course, because high up in the canopy a faint breeze was stirring and white clouds bobbed across the blue, like so many duck targets at a state fair booth. I watched long enough until I saw a hawk glide across the frame. At night I do the same thing with bats, sit in the gloaming and watch for them to dart through the air. They’re more visible when they cross our patch of sky.
It was a sad day when the great oak fell. But in the years since, I’ve grown fond of the space it left behind. Because of it, my eyes are more often drawn to the sky.
Above: a frame of a different sort.
Here in the leafy suburbs, when a storm whips through it leaves a trail of sticks behind. This is in addition to crushed roofs, smashed cars and downed trees. Compared with these, of course, twigs and leaf clumps mean little to nothing. Think of them as the comic relief of cleanup. What you do after you’ve drug the large limbs out of the garden.
And yet, once I started picking up sticks, I found I could do little else. There is the Zen-like rhythm of bending and grabbing and stuffing them in a bag. There is the way that spotting them trains one’s eye on what’s just ahead, nothing more, nothing less.
But there is also, yes, the obsessiveness of the hunt. I no sooner rid the yard of sticks of one diameter than I notice the next largest sort. Before long I realize that I’m grabbing what usually lies undisturbed in our yard, that I have long since rid our lawn of anything that could clog a mower. That I have, in short, become a bit compulsive about the task.
That’s when I stop dutifully bundling and tying the sticks with twine, or stashing them in recycling bags — and instead dump them in the trash with the rest of the garbage. It’s my own little clean-up rebellion.
