Alexandersmap

    Category: Garden and Home

    • Leaf Day

      Spades take up leaves
      No better than spoons,
      And bags full of leaves
      Are light as balloons.

      I make a great noise
      Of rustling all day
      Like rabbit and deer
      Running away.

      But the mountains I raise
      Elude my embrace,
      Flowing over my arms
      And into my face.

      I may load and unload
      Again and again
      Till I fill the whole shed,
      And what have I then?

      Next to nothing for weight,
      And since they grew duller
      From contact with earth,
      Next to nothing for color.

      Next to nothing for use,
      But a crop is a crop,
      And who’s to say where
      The harvest shall stop?
      — Robert Frost, Gathering Leaves

      Every year around this time in mid-November, the oak leaves finally, grudgingly release their grip on mother oak and bed down in the yard. I’m that one person in the neighborhood who waits to clean up the yard until we reach peak optimization—meaning most leaves are down. All of the neighbors are out there with their heavy machinery mowing and blowing at the first sign of a leaf dropping. And with their eagerness, the neighborhood roars like a domesticated NASCAR track. No, thank you. I don’t subscribe to the theory that a lawn should be pristine green. It’s not a golf course, it’s a suburban yard! There’s beauty in fallen leaves too.

      Any homeowner in New England knows that once is never enough when it comes to cleaning up the leaves. If you wait long enough, some leaves will blow away onto those neighboring pristine lawns (you’re welcome), but most will pile up into an increasingly-heavy mass awaiting your attention. Yesterday was that day for my bride and me. The plan was to start early and go until the task was completed. Blow, rake onto tarps, drag said tarp into the welcoming embrace of the woods and repeat. Want a great workout? Join us next year.

      The thing is, I could have paid someone to do this work. They’d have arrived with a roar that would have delighted the neighbors, zipped around the yard for two hours and left nary a single leaf survivor. And I would have sipped my coffee, casually watched them and gone off to do a workout on the rowing ergometer or some such thing. To have done the work myself may not be a noble act, or even the best use of my time, but the ritual of yard cleanup has its own reward. I was reminded of this when I limped out of bed this morning. There’s poetry in labor, when the work is tangible and purposeful. Having completed it for another year, the season is almost complete. Yet even now, looking out on the lawn in the growing light of dawn, I see that it’s covered in the holdouts that watched amused at my industrious labor. No, the work is never truly done.

    • Of More and Enough

      “Our love of our neighbor—is it not a lust for new possessions? And likewise our love of knowledge, of truth, and altogether any lust for what is new? Gradually we become tired of the old, of what we safely possess, and we stretch out our hands again. Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some more distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: The Joyful Wisdom of Life, Love, and Art

      I’m currently managing the chaos that comes with some home improvement work. Every change has a price to be paid, and temporary chaos is our toll. The constant desire for improvement demands payment in one form or another. Today’s toll is tomorrow’s pleasure. At least that’s what we tell ourselves.

      There’s a reason why those house hunter and renovation programs are so popular. It’s the same reason some of us have an urge to travel to new places all the time, to try the latest trendy restaurant, to buy a bigger boat, to hike to new summits, or to day trade looking for that perfect stock to fall in love with. Divorce lawyers specialize in the consequences of unchecked avarice. Because we humans tend to lust for something beyond what we have. Even the pursuit of personal excellence (arete) is a pursuit of something more than what we possess now.

      As Nietzsche put it: to become tired of some possession means tiring of ourselves. Unchecked avarice is a weakness. To temper the unrelenting desire for more and realize that one has enough is a path to happiness. Good luck with that. Our consumer-driven world fuels a constant desire for more, different and better. It takes conscious willpower to unplug from that and appreciate exactly who we are, with what we have, right here and now.

      I’ve written about my wanderlust before. I’m chagrined by the single passport stamp I’ve gotten this year, compared to last year when I visited seven countries. I forget sometimes that I’ve traveled from coast-to-coast this year, seeing places and doing things that I’d once said I’d get to someday. Add in a few significant home improvement projects and the picture becomes clearer. It’s been a good year in more ways than it hasn’t.

      Comparison is the death of joy, as the saying goes. Simply enjoying the abundance of all that one has and have experienced ought to be enough. When we compare we turn our attention from all we have to what we don’t have. The math will never work in our favor when we compare, because what we don’t possess will always outnumber what we do have.

      Still, there’s so much more to see and do and be. And time is ticking away so very quickly. Is it any wonder that we have this urge for more, now, before it’s too late? We are growing beings, living a brief life before we slip into infinity. We ought to seek growth for growth’s sake. To learn and experience and build is how our species has made it this far. But we’ve also made it this far by eventually settling down and growing roots. A sense of place is uniquely gifted to those who stick around for awhile. The hunger for more is our blessing and our curse, depending on how much we control it.

      That quiet desperation Thoreau spoke of is as real as any possession we have. Desperation comes from not feeling control over one’s destiny. Not following one’s dream to it’s natural conclusion. We grow frustrated and seek relief in the fresh and new, buying impulsively, renovating relentlessly, comparing even when we know it’s a fool’s game. We each deal with the same old avarice within, while trying to be grateful for all that we have in our lives.

      As with everything, balance is the key to a joyful life. We must necessarily seek growth, knowledge and experience to fulfill our potential before the music stops, but we must also learn when we’ve been satiated. To keep consuming after we’ve had enough is gluttonous. To keep wanting bigger and better and different is avarice, unchecked. The gods don’t seek arete, they already have it. It’s we humans who are always seeking more. What is enough in this lifetime? Finding our way to that place may lead us to what we’ve been searching for all along.

    • As and Always

      As now can’t reveal the mystery of tomorrow
      But in passing will grow older every day
      Just as all that’s born is new
      You know what I say is true
      That I’ll be loving you always
      — Stevie Wonder, As

      I’m feeling older today with yesterday’s passing. Sore all over, mentally tired, wondering why I didn’t hire someone to put new shingles on the shed. I know the answer: Because I can do it myself. And so I pay the price and won’t complain.

      For me, As is Stevie Wonder at his creative peak. It’s been a long time since I listed favorite songs from any artist. I won’t be doing it today. I’ll simply recognize the sparkle in this gem. It was part of the soundtrack played on repeat yesterday that carried me through the challenging stages. Music lifts us in such moments.

      The thing about roofing that shed is I know if I do it right I will never do it again. In 20 or 30 years, I will not be climbing up a ladder with a handful of shingles. Like planting a tree, it’s a gift to a future I may not see. We should move through every day as if we are leaving a gift for our children’s grandchildren. For we will not always be here, but we may offer something to always.

    • Of Blossoms and Stars

      Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
      Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
      — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

      Here’s to the stargazers among us. We tend to walk with tilted heads, with eyes towards the infinite. Time is marked by the celestial dance. We are but brief witnesses—spectators watching the play unfold and yet knowing we are a part of it just the same. The masses are busily scurrying about, thinking the universe wraps around them. Look up on a crisp September night to find the truth of the matter. We are nothing but fireflies to the universe. And yet we burn brightly for our brief moment.

      The garden is fading rapidly, but some of its stars rise just in time to save the season. Sedum autumn joy blushes for all the attention it receives from the bees. Chrysanthemums, top-heavy with blooms, positively glow even as their neighbors bow with fatigue. The Montauk daisies (Nipponanthemum nipponicum) are just now budding, promising their own show in days to come. These are days we’ll remember, the garden reminds us, in the long nights of winter coming soon enough.

      Isn’t it strange how we feel most alive as the days grow shorter? Is it heightened attention or a building sense of urgency to squeeze more awareness into this brief fling with the sun? I think it’s appreciation for the beautiful dance and gratefulness for being a dancer ourself. To mourn the season coming to a close is to miss the sparkling rise of the next. We must be active gardeners in this life, no matter the season at hand. Look around, for magic is all around us.

    • A Quiet State of Being

      If I had another life
      I would want to spend it all on some
      unstinting happiness.

      I would be a fox, or a tree
      full of waving branches.
      I wouldn’t mind being a rose
      in a field full of roses.

      Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
      Reason they have not yet thought of.
      Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
      Or any foolish question.
      — Mary Oliver, Roses, Late Summer

      The heat of summer has propelled the growth of the Musa zebrina (blood banana) plants. Bananas have no business growing in Zone 5 New Hampshire, but they don’t follow the rules layed down by zones any more than I do. I’ve had these blood bananas for more than a decade. I bring them out after the danger of frost, patiently wait for signs of life, and watch them reach for the sky when the days grow long and hot. The season is too short for them to produce blossoms, but long enough for them to thrive in their time before I reluctantly drag them back to the cellar to winter over yet again.

      My bride and I were talking about everything that’s happened this summer, and everything that will happen if things go according to plan (we know how plans go, but we also know that some things never happen without a plan). Life is moving along thusly, and we are swept up in the current of being. We are where we are, doing what we believe we should be doing, one blessed day at a time. We may thrive in our time, or simply dance with the days as best we can while we have them. We determine what we can, and accept that whatever will be will be.

      So many people work so very hard to be happy. As if you could earn happiness by how much money you make or how many likes you have from your latest post on social media. Happiness is not an objective, it’s flows from us as a byproduct of purposeful, engaged living. Purposeful in turn is simply moving with awareness towards something. Those potted bananas are trapped in pots, reliant on my inclination to save them from dying of thirst or a killing frost. Yet they dance in the sun each summer day anyway. Are they happy? Or simply living a quiet state of being in the time that they are given?

    • The Best We Know

      Let dreamers dream what worlds they please
      Those edens can’t be found
      The sweetest flowers
      The fairest trees
      Are grown in solid ground
      We’re neither pure nor wise nor good
      We’ll do the best we know
      We’ll build our house and chop our wood
      And make our garden grow
      And make our garden grow
      — Leonard Bernstein, Make Our Garden Grow

      One of the many habits I’ve managed to keep going is to enter a daily line per day to log whatever it was that made the day unique in this string of days I’m blessed with in this mad sprint to infinity. We know the ending, we remember the highlight moments, but what of the everyday? What makes today, of all our days, special beyond ensuring that the string isn’t broken?

      Yesterday’s line per day entry filled the entire space. It will be a day I’ll remember for consequential events, but I shouldn’t let time rob me of the other moments wrapped around those events. Publishing a blog post, painting the pergola or evaluating the progress of the cucumber blossoms turning to fruit may not feel noteworthy, but they’re layers on our timeline just the same. Those layers are our life happening in real time—we ought to capture a few of them in words.

      We will remember these days for whatever we brought to them. So it follows that we should bring our very best even when we cannot control everything thrown at us by the universe. What do we want from this day? What will we give it in return? The best that we know is ours to offer. And usually, that’s enough.

    • The Time for Vigorous Pruning

      “I now consider exercise to be the most potent longevity ‘drug’ in our arsenal, in terms of lifespan and healthspan. The data are unambiguous: exercise not only delays actual death but also prevents both cognitive and physical decline, better than any other intervention.” ― Peter Attia, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

      It’s that time of the season where the first wave of roses have faded and the garden requires serious dead-heading. So yesterday, despite heat, humidity and the company we were keeping at the time, I excused myself to dead-head the roses at my in-laws. The fragrance was lovely, the thorns unforgiving, and the shear abundance time-consuming, but I pressed on anyway.

      Their health doesn’t allow them to even go out to smell the roses, let alone prune them. It’s a stage of life I hope to kick down the curb as long as possible myself. Which is why I’ve chosen to change my own comfortable routine to something decidedly more challenging.

      Like those roses, we all have our peak season and then we fade. But roses will continue to bloom as long as you maintain them. A vigorous pruning results in more abundant blooms, ignore them and they put all their energy into rose hips and the show is largely over.

      We too, benefit from a vigorous pruning in the form of habit change. Eating and drinking less, and exercising and sleeping more will each change the game for us. The game is health span, or extending the time when we can be enjoying our days instead of suffering through them in a precipitous decline. Who wants their golden years tainted by nagging pain and atrophy? The time to do that is now, friend. Forget about how busy we are in our lives. We must get pruning now.

      Life has a way of rolling a roque wave over us when we wanted nothing more than a casual sail through some stage of life or other. That’s why we must develop buoyancy—our inner strength and resilience that will hold us above when life tries to drag us under. We are building the foundation today to weather the storms of tomorrow.

      This must be the season of moving more and consuming less. It’s a fascinating process of self-pruning with an eye towards a better health span in the long term, with more vibrancy and vigor in the present. We must prune away that which is no longer sustaining us, that we may thrive again and again, whatever our current season. And don’t forget to smell the roses we’ve worked so hard to maintain. That longer health span must be fully enjoyed.

    • Tomato Days

      These are the early days of summer, even if it feels like it hasn’t started in the northeast United States, where I live. And June is the beginning of tomato days. I grow them as much for the smell of the vines as for the fruit I may or may not harvest, depending on the tomato-loving wildlife and the fickle weather. What I grow we’ll eat, and what I can’t grow I’ll pick up at the local farm stand. Tomato days are the very best days of summer.

      Lately I’ve introduced more tomatoes into my daily routine no matter the season. My PSA score was higher than it should be, not dangerous levels but still make some changes in your life levels. It seems that the abundant levels of lycopene in tomatoes is an excellent way to help protect cells in the body from damage caused by free radicals. Lycopene is an antioxidant ally in a world full of bad stuff trying to mess with our happy lives. So eating tomatoes every day is an easy and logical way to increase our health span.

      And health span is everything! If we hope to have a long and active life, versus a life tempered by assisted living and lowered expectations about what is possible in a day, we must build and maintain a healthy and fit body that can help kick atrophy and disease down the curb. Exercise and good nutrition are building blocks for a better future, while helping us feel more energized and focused today. So have a tomato. Just save some for me.

    • The Ecstasy

      “There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
      This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.”
      — Jack London, The Call of the Wild

      I witnessed the ecstasy on the face of a two year old mutt with mascara eyes turned shrewd hunter. My carefully-planted garden was no match for the hunter, nor was the fence—designed to keep rabbits out but not the chipmunks, and not the joyful leap of youthful hunter, straining after the food that was alive. And so I scolded her without success. I barred entry only to have her run to the other side. And finally I brought her in, if only as a reprieve until the fence could be raised.

      The ecstasy isn’t something we’re aware of nearly enough when we’re riding that high. When we’re in peak form it feels like it will always will be so, if we ponder such things at all. Nowadays I hunt for moments in the zone, where I may perform at my personal peak, striving for arete even as I understand how evasive that level of personal excellence will always be. The writing offers a taste of that hunter’s zeal, and sometimes work offers it too. And I realized, placing fence pieces atop the garden fence between paragraphs of a blog post, that the garden has offered its own version of complete forgetfulness. At least before it was shredded by youthful vigor.

    • A Series of Projects

      If life is a series of projects in various stages of completion, then I’m in the midst of another stage of life. The problem with living in a home for a quarter century is that what was once new feels a bit dated. A series of projects ensue, the free moments fill up with tasks, and time seems to fly by in the seemingly never-ending pursuit of incremental improvement. Like Sisyphus with his rock, we finish one climb only to descend back to begin all over again.

      I thought we were done after the last project, but then the washing machine needed to be replaced and that started a series of observations from my bride about the things she hated about the laundry room. We’d modernized it during the pandemic, but had missed a few key things she wanted resolved. She knew just the person to talk to about it. You know the old expression, “Happy wife, happy life”? Some may view that with a negative connotation, but not me. If I can make my life partner happy by simply doing work I usually enjoy doing, then sign me up for the mission! Chasing happiness is folly, but it’s a dividend we find together on the journey to better.

      I know people who have never painted a room in their home, never mowed their own lawn or done fall cleanup, never done more than swap out a picture or two on the walls. I envy the free time they’ve carved out to pursue other things. Indeed, the tax on projects is time, and we all need to decide if that tax is worth paying. That time and the money used to complete every project could surely be going towards a trip or dinner out, couldn’t it?

      My response is that incremental improvement of the environment we spend all our time in makes our time in that environment incrementally better. Over time, project-by-project, we may create a place far beyond what we walked into on that day we first got the keys. The point of all these projects isn’t to get rid of the old, it’s continual transformation of dreams into reality. That is part of our overall pursuit of personal excellence (arete). That series of projects is a lifetime pursuit of our potential, expressed in the form of sawdust and paint.