Differences

This morning broke bright and early and loud with birds. It is spring in my little town despite the thirty something degrees with spitting snow that hit us Saturday. And today it got up to sixty something with a cloudless sky and a strong willed breeze.

I spent the morning luxuriating my way through pork and cooked apples with brown sugar, played a few senseless games on the computer and rejoiced in the fact that after a rather lengthy period of being sick and weak, I was enjoying nourishing food made by my own hand, once again.

Around one o'clock I decided that I was bored enough to make work sound like fun. I put on my cap and some good work clothes, grabbed a water bottle and headed out into the glare of sunlight. It was perfectly pleasant and I put my back into digging up, raking, molding and reshaping my small vegetable garden; tossing out the stones, collecting the clay, making it ready for the planting that should happen late April/early May.

When I stopped to grab a sip of water I would turn toward the house and see my three-year-old, black furred monster staring at me with vibrant yellow eyes, meowing through the glass. I worked until the main plot was done and my trenches dug.

 

 



It looks a little like badly dug grave. I was tempted to put up a grave stone. "Here lies the garden, which will rise from its rest sometime in August." Or maybe just a cross made of sticks, and let the obnoxious neighbor kids wonder.

But I had other fish to fry.

Last year I planted the beginnings of a flower garden behind our garage. Long, long ago that prime sunlit space was reserved for an herb garden and a stone path and several other niceties. We even had a pond. In point of fact this garden space above used to be part of a waterfall that started at the red pump and cascaded into a small pool of its own. But I like it better as a garden. Easier to take care of.

So, too, is my 'flower garden' in the back. It needed some weeding and sorting so I worked my way back there and first tackled the bent over, sagging, broken backed mess that used to be a lattice supporting morning glories.

They do well in the summer...

But by the time windy fall and snow heavy winter has passed, they are a dried crumpled heap leaning over and breaking apart the lattice.

This year they were heavy enough to topple the cinder block that I was using to support the post that was tied to the lattice.

All winter I have been pondering a better way of letting them climb, while not spending money and having it be..."me".

I'm so proud of this thing. I made it! I sunk the feet of it about three inches into the ground and I'm hoping that the tri-pod-esque base will distribute the weight of the plant and maybe make some interesting photos once the flowers bloom.

A good friend of mine, after seeing this photo, has determined that the 'evil' morning glories will take it down without a problem. I'd like to the think the amount of time I spent pounding crooked nails in with a hatchet will count for something.

I couldn't find a hammer.

So after my Morning Glory Oil Derek went up I tore the weeds out of a patch of nothing then played a game of find the lilies.

I planted these Asiatic lilies last year and they bloomed right about the start of July. A month later the blooms had fallen off and all I had was tall, beheaded stalks. But here they are, all five, growing away. I could swear that some of them have migrated since last year...

I had planted some other things back here the year before but I didn't see anything else that looked more like flower and less like weed. I was tired and about ready to call it a day anyway so I began to clean up the yard.

After a quick run to the store I was able to put spinach leaves, frozen berries and soy milk into the blender and I took my yummy smoothie (not a health freak, just happen to appreciate smoothies, as they save time) out into the yard.

I walked around a bit admiring the plants and trees, some of which have been in our yard since my mother and father planted them over thirty years ago. We have a patch of pine trees and a giant honeysuckle bush/tree. A few oaks and one maple tree. In the back I was pleased to find my rhubarb growing strong after the last few days of rain. A few more of those days and I'll have my first harvest.

I stood under the old white pine, enjoying its shade and the natural wind chimes of the breeze in the needles and the wind coming in off the farmer's field that backs up right against our property.

My next door neighbor had been out all day too, which is his routine on any day that ends in 'y'. My neighbor, Mr. Forester, is the Mr. Monk of lawn care. On hands and knees with scissors going after crab grass. Cuts the bushes with level in hand to get perfectly straight lines every time. He has two dogwood trees, precisely eight feet apart, with trunks centered in a perfect square of grassless dirt. His garden is a rectangle in which he plants the same crops, in perfect straight rows, every year.

He has bushes and some flowers around the front of his house, and one large shade tree, and grass. Thick, green, manicured, rolled, weed free grass.

There are none of these in his lawn...

I can remember Mom telling us expressly not to mow over these for fear that they wouldn't come back up. Not that I intentionally mowed over them, but on the rare occasions that I accidentally did, they clearly didn't seem bothered at all. And they only grow under the shade of the maple tree.

A little splash of beauty in our slightly rustic yard that simply doesn't exist next door.

I stood at the back of our property, peering around the end of our neighbor's wooden slat fence, staring at his squared, over treated, boring yard eternally grateful for the dappled, dirt worn, crooked, stick strewn, patchy glory of my back yard.

The more I stared at his geometrical landscaping the more I realized that, in total opposition to my own feelings, he probably LIKED his yard that way. After all he spent every waking hour out caring for it.

I would be perfectly unbothered by his peculiarities and be able, even, to enjoy them a little if it weren't for the fact that he had been forcing his yard care beliefs on my family for decades. But a small amount of the old bitterness was wiped away by two things. First...I don't care what he says, I like my home, outside and inside, and I will improve it as I see fit. And second...though I've never felt envy for his yard, ever, I did feel sorta sorry for its dullness today.

I think I should sneak in some night and plant something. Smack in the middle of the yard. Like a cactus. But a nice flowering cactus. See what he does.

As the beautiful day continued I took pity on the monster and allowed him a little time outside, keeping very close tabs on my otherwise 'inside' cat. He explored for a frolicking ten minutes before signalling he was ready to go back in. And of course five minutes of 'in' time and he was meowing to go back out again.

Didn't happen.

I was delighted though and I'm looking forward to more great planting days in the future. In the meantime I'm still thinking about my neighbor and his infatuation with his yard and wondering...is there some way to bond the rift that has existed between him and my family since before I can remember?

Maybe a friendship cactus isn't so far fetched an idea?

I may be grinning impishly now but, if they were a way to make peace between our two households, I hope it comes during the growing season.

Fire

I lit a fire today. It's been a rough, tough couple of months and someone that I am tertiarally familiar with passed away. Work has been less and less desirable and in the meantime I've basically been without energy and sick in some way or other since January.

Today was especially tiring and after taking a long nap or two I decided to enjoy our first spring storm with a cheery fire.

On the one hand, bad idea. Part of my on going health battle has been a week and a half old headache that makes my eyes especially sensitive to light. I couldn't do a disco, I barely managed the fire.

But while I was squinting painfully into its homey light it reminded me of a bunch of fires.

The Snowman Island Fire

My little sister and I, back around the time of middle school, would often end up at the college campus where my father taught, on dreary and boring summer afternoons. We played in the classrooms drawing on every black board, pretending that the room was a submarine, or the USS Enterprise. Or explore the campus and the woods surrounding it.

One particular afternoon we had a bag of apples, some matches, and a pocket knife. We headed out down the creek that runs through the campus, clomping over familiar rocks and deer trails and hopping across small runs of water that collected either side of sandbars. Each of those sandbars were islands, and of course we named them.  One of those sand bars was a large patch of stone and sand that looked suspiciously like a giant snowman.

We were hungry by the time we reached it. We hunted for sticks and pine needles and dry weeds and piled it all up on the sand bar and found sticks for the apples and lit the fire, then ate roasted apples all alone out in the wilderness.

A 12 year old and a 9 year old. I'd like to see a 9 year old do that these days!

The Mohican Trail Fire

Some time in the middle of college, after I had started to save the stipend I was receiving, and after the roommate that disgusted me and the old friend that delighted me became girlfriend and boyfriend, I suggested a hiking trip. We were meant to go about two hours south of campus but ended up two hours west. I was driving, the lovers were napping in the back.  I pulled the smoothest redirect that I could and went north and we ended up, four hours later, at a state park that should have only taken thirty minutes to reach.

But we made it.

Then I got us lost by leaving the trails. We walked briefly down some back country roads and trespassed in a couple of fields, headed down a steep and slippery valley full of giant granite boulders, then finally found our way back to the trails.

Then we built a fire! I had bought some food and we worked together to gather sticks. But we really didn't have a good starter. So I burned a shoe box that was in amongst the junk in my trunk.

Then soaked to the bone we all went back to my roommate's house and my old friend burned a sock on her wood burning stove.

The Underpass Fire

When things at school became too much to handle, I had many less-than-constructive bad habits to turn to. But, one of the good habits, involved walking off campus (at all hours...) and up to the overpass that spanned more of the same river.

Sometimes I brought food with me. One time when I went with a friend, we scarfed some of the corn that was lying in a plowed field just behind the college.

The rocky decline on one side was perfectly shielded. I don't know how many bikes, footballs, tennis balls, socks, hoodies and beer bottles I saw there. But the underpass also captured organic material and there was always an excellent collection of drift wood.

When my friend and I went down we roasted the field corn. On my own I might have a can of spaghettios or beans. I would sit and smoke a cigar, or write something, or just listen to music. I would listen to the cars whispering by underneath and just take a step back into time.

The Bad News Fire

I was sixteen, getting ready a week in advance for the trip I would be going on once school ended. I was headed for Cali to join up with a song and dance tour exploring the South Western United States. I was in the back yard, burning old paper trash from my room when I heard some cars pull up in the driveway.

I was mad, for some reason or another. Or maybe just melancholy from watching old reports and drawings and story starts burn up. But for whatever reason I had no interest whatsoever in going to see who had just arrived.

Ten minutes passed before two of the ladies from my church ventured back to the burn barrel. They were acting like someone had died. They wanted me to come inside. They said, "Your father needs you."

I knew I didn't want to have anything to do with the hands on powwow they were preparing me for. It couldn't possibly be good news. And to this day it sorta irks me that Dad couldn't have just told me the news instead of 'inviting' someone I barely knew to do it.

But that afternoon I was told that my mother had left, she had disappeared over night leaving only a note on Dad's pillow. She wanted a divorce.

The minute I could get out of the house I ran up to my (then) best friend's house. We talked, I was upset but I didn't cry. And on the way home there was a thunder storm.

Other Fires

At camps, at reenactments, in other parks or on trails, at home, at my uncle's home, once using steel and flint, even fake fires!

It has always been a part of my life, a talent that worked hard to earn, and bright beacon leading to many, many memories. Shame I couldn't enjoy today's memory.