Alexandersmap

    Category: Garden and Home

    • An Infinite Expectation of the Dawn

      In the dimmest of early morning light I watched a deer slowly work its way through the fallen branches, stones and muck out beyond the fence. White tail flickered and drew attention, just as a squirrel’s tail does, and I wondered at the similarities of these mammals who coexist in these woods. Each are seeking the same food – an abundance of acorns that relentlessly fell last fall. Each are prey for carnivores. The tail draws attention, but you could also say it distracts a carnivore long enough that perhaps the prey might get away. The deer feels my presence just as I felt hers. We coexist in these woods too, and I silently nod and leave her to her travels.

      “The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour.  Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers the rest of the day and night…. To be awake is to be alive.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      How quickly the morning progresses now. The birds erupt early, filling the woods with their chorus of song. New voices appear frequently now as the migration continues in earnest. At least the birds can travel. Were this a normal time I might be traveling now too. But then I wouldn’t be here rapt in the audience listening to the symphony. There’s a silver lining in everything, should we look for it.

      “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.  I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      In a few weeks the trees will start blooming in earnest while the perennials slowly climb from the cold earth to the sky. I welcome the time of year, even as I dread the pollen that accompanies it. Small price to pay for flowers and fresh herbs growing in the garden and the return of the bees and hummingbirds. I think about these things as I walk in the cold early spring garden. I’ll be barefoot out here then without the creeping cold that prods me back inside. Warm days and cold nights. Sap weather. I glance at the maple trees and down at the red buds they’ve shed on the yard. I ought to charge them a toll of syrup for their messy habit, but I realize the folly of me boiling sap for a few ounces of maple syrup. No, the trees remain untapped.

      I remain transfixed by the world around me, and the writing helps draw it out of me like cold sap boiled to something sweet and digestible. Well, you’ll be the judge of that. But I’m the better for the process, and for these journeys out into the awakening hour. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor… these words echo in my mind, as they have for years. And maybe my time out here in the earliest moments of the day spark something deeper inside me than I previously realized.

    • February Tomatoes

      February is when I really start missing the smell of tomatoes. Ripe tomatoes for sure, but also the smell of the vines as you tie them off on stakes. Market tomatoes have never captured the essence of fresh summer tomatoes. Better than nothing? Sometimes nothing is better. This was all triggered by a Caprese salad, with the basil dominating the senses, the olive oil and balsamic drizzle playing complimentary roles, but the tomato was a silent partner; like white bread it had no soul. Such is February in New England: the senses get shorted.

      A mild winter so far doesn’t translate into the garden. There’s still 3 inches of frozen snow clamped down in the lawn, the garden and the pool, like a hand over the mouth whispering ominously; not yet. Precipitation forecasted for the day includes the “wintry mix” we all hate. Rain or snow? We’ll deal with that. Wintry mix? Make up your mind already!

      But there’s light at the end of the tunnel. The days are longer, there are lawn mowers and seeds on display in hardware stores, and the first day of Spring is four weeks away. February is flying right by, the way the rest of life does. It’s only a matter of time before the soil warms up and unlocks the smells of spring. In the meantime, there’s always a greenhouse or two to explore to get that flower fix. But tomatoes are going to be awhile here in New England. Part of living here, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it.

    • Bury the Bright Edge Deep

      “The cold smell of potato mould, the

      squelch and slap

      Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

      Through living roots awaken in my head.

      But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

      Between my finger and my thumb

      The squat pen rests.

      I’ll dig with it.” – Seamus Heaney, Digging

      Jim Rohn said that we are the average of the five people we associate with the most. I tend to agree with that, not just in people but in authors, media, podcasters… etc. Influencers on our outlook should be scrutinized regularly at minimum, and wholly changed over now and then just to keep your mind sharp. There’s nothing like a different perspective to floss the brain. And lately I’ve been sprinkling in more Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver and Robert Frost. When life throws political chaos, war and social media trolls at you, turn to the poets to re-set the sail.

      The garden is done for the year, other than a few mums and asters and one lone fuchsia blossom that stubbornly holds out hope for company. But harder frosts are coming, and with it the growing season ends. Heaney’s words sprinkle memories of planting in my mind, of burying the bright edge of a spade deep to turn the soil, and I smile at the thought. There’ll be no planting for six months to come. But Seamus points to another digging tool in writing, and that seems a good place to spend my time as well. Pull out the weeds that work to root in your mind, turn over the fertile ground to aerate it, and plant some new ideas to grow and ripen.

    • Frogs and Acorns and Autumn Joy

      I’m not going to sugarcoat it, the garden is fading fast.  Sure, there’s crisp fall air to appreciate if you must.  Autumn is my favorite season, and particularly this year I’m excited about an upcoming trip to London and Scotland.  But this year summer ended abruptly with two events changing the backyard paradise I worked all spring for.

      The first affront to summer was having the roof done.  A new roof is a lovely thing indeed, but the damage done to the summer garden was catastrophic.  Some of it was my own doing of course – strategic weed wacker work through the faded bee balm and daisies to carve a path for the inevitable tarps and plywood needed to catch the roof debris.  But alas, a few prized perennials caught errant shingles as well.  The garden will rebound next year, but it may hold a grudge.

      Second, the pool is covered over for winter weeks earlier than normal.  I can hear the condensation drips splashing into the pool now, saying “What happened to the sky?” while frogs circle the perimeter wondering where the trendy amphibious nightclub went.  I expect I’ve ruined a lot of frog dates closing shop so early.  Sorry frogs.  Not seeing the water hurts me too, but not as much as watching acorns ricochet off the deck, bounce across the patio and splash into the pool to serve as beach balls for coy frog daters.  Autumn is called fall for a reason, and we’ve got some serious fall happening.  Something had to give and this year it was pool season.

      So what we’re left with is a few survivors dancing in the garden, faded potted tropicals wondering where they went wrong in life, and the extraordinary Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ standing proudly amongst the destruction in the garden; a miracle of color in an otherwise sad garden.  Even the roofers seemed to be rooting for it, and I appreciate their protective efforts as so many of her neighbors fell.

      So here we are.  Autumn in New Hampshire.  A bit different this year, but autumn nonetheless. September eases you into it, with apples and pumpkins and outdoor evening fires.  October will bring the foliage and then the leaves grudgingly join the acorns scattered throughout the yard (there’s no walking barefoot at night in September when you have oak trees).  Autumn joy indeed.

       

    • Sassafras

      Serendipity placed me in front of sassafras twice in almost exactly 24 hours. Yesterday I was with a friend and expert forager who saw it on the edge of the woods. He pointed out each of the three unique leaves of the sassafras tree and pulled out a small root for me to smell.

      Today I visited the Aptucxet Trading Post Museum in Bourne, Massachusetts and what do I see but a sassafras tree! The museum guide pointed out the leaves, scratched the root to have me smell and it was déjà vu all over again.

      The original tea that settlers in North America drank and exported was made from the root of the sassafras tree. Sassafras was used for other things ranging from shipbuilding to toothbrushes, but when you smell it you probably think of root beer. And of course you’d be right; the oil from sassafras root gives flavor and the name to root beer. That was my favorite soft drink growing up. I don’t drink it sugary drinks anymore, but at the moment I’m craving some root beer. Instead, I purchased some sassafras tea from the gift store at the Aptucxet Trading Post Museum and will make a sugar-free sassafras drink. And toast the tree it came from.

    • Great is Today

      If you want to fully feel the urgency of “now” watch a veteran roofing crew begin work on a house. There’s no time to get in touch with their feelings, they pull up, assess and get on with it. Get it done ASAP, and move on to the next house tomorrow.

      It’s the first Tuesday in September, and the first day of school pictures will be snapped all over Massachusetts. New Hampshire went back last week, but really that’s just to get a head start on snow days to come. School begins in earnest this week from kindergarten to college. And so [unofficially] summer ends, Autumn begins, and there’s a heightened sense of the moment.

      I read Leaves of Grass last week. More precisely I finished Leaves of Grass last week. Walt Whitman has some brilliant prose, and some sprinkled liberally throughout this work, but there’s a lot of chewing to get this one down. Lot of Walt getting in touch with his sensuality stuff in there that proved controversial for the time, but this isn’t going to be a post about the work as a whole. Instead, this line jumped out at me:

      “Great is today, and beautiful, It is good to live in this age… there never was any better.” – Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

      Whitman wrote that sometime between 1850 and 1855, when Leaves of Grass was published. It was before the Civil War and other dark days in Whitman’s life. But there are always dark days, and always vibrant days throughout history. Life is the ebb and flow. Don’t bury your head in the sand when darkness reigns, but don’t ignore the extraordinary gift of now we’ve been given either.

      “Look around. Look around. How lucky we are to be alive right now.” – The Schuyler Sisters, Hamilton

      Be alive, right now. That’s all there is. We can’t time travel backwards, and we can’t hit fast-forward.  We all know Aesop’s fable about the ants and the grasshopper, but he wasn’t saying there’s no time for play, he was saying that we need to harvest first, then dance and sing.  So by all means work, and build that nest egg, but don’t lose sight of this magic moment along the way. 

      “Do not be concerned with the fruit of your action – just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord.” – Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

      I’m weighing that fable as roofers strip the roof over my head and I contemplate Whitman. The irony isn’t lost on me, I’ve been on construction crews and know their world. They don’t stop to smell the roses for very long, but sometimes a moment appears. As I spoke with them before they started I pointed to the ripe grapes they would soon cover over to protect them from debris and told them to help themselves. They savored the sweetness of the grapes with audible pleasure, even as they got on with the work at hand. The fruit came of it’s own accord, then it was time to get back to work.

    • Hummingbirds Squeak under a Waning Moon… and Other Observations

      Cool enough for a fleece this morning. It seems summer is tilting away faster by the day. The white noise buzz of crickets fills in. Other sounds penetrate. Cars in the distance getting an early start. Birds like my old friend the Brown Thrasher announce their presence, if further away than in July.

      The mornings are especially active now. The bees and hummingbirds flitter from honeysuckle to basil gone to flower and on to the next. Each have a unique sound; not shockingly bees buzz and hummingbirds, well, their wings hum as they zip by you. I smile when the hummingbirds squeak at each other, a chorus of animated bird banter filling the yard. They largely ignore me as I sip coffee and take in the show. As if to mirror them, the squirrels are jumping tree to tree dropping acorns and hickory nuts that thump to the ground for collection later. Two scratch around my favorite white oak tree on the planet, chasing each other in young squirrel frivolity with their own chirping chorus.

      Looking up, the Waning Crescent moon greets me in a crisp blue sky. This is September blue, always embedded on my mind these last 18 years, a reference point anyone around here that day will understand. A reference point from New England to New Jersey. That day remembered in random moments like this, then gently put aside. There’s a collective joy about September in New England, with an undercurrent of sadness for the summer fading away and change in the air. But it’s still August, even if it feels like we’ve crossed. Seasons come and go, and it feels time for summer to move along too.

      Back on earth, there are a few more tomatoes to harvest, a thriving and ironic grape harvest after my public shaming in the spring, fading flowers and herbs to contend with. Like the squirrels I’ve got to get my act together and do some work to prepare for the cooler days and changes ahead. My fingers are cold from sitting outside a layer short of comfortable. Time to move. So much to do and it stirs a restlessness inside of me. But first another coffee.

    • Groundhog Day

      The signs were there.  Half-eaten tomatoes still hanging from the vines.  I knew you were back.  Still, I was optimistic there might be a few left for me.  Alas, after being away for a week almost all of my tomatoes were wiped out.  All that remains are the cherry tomatoes, which apparently you aren’t interested in, and a few small beefsteak tomatoes too high for you to reach.  And this morning you didn’t even try to hide your face, but looked right at me as if to say “What are you gonna do about it?”  Yeah, I know that look buddy.  At least your chipmunk friend looked a little afraid as he skittered off with a cherry tomato, dropped it in horror when he saw me, then timidly ran back and picked it up before running away.  Not you.  You just stand there, as if waiting for me to plant more tomatoes for you.

      This is my version of Groundhog Day.  Plant tomatoes, leave them unfenced for aesthetic reasons.  Lose most of the crop to mocking mammals.  Repeat.  It’s what I get for sticking vegetables in a flower garden and leaving them to fate.  I swear I’ll learn from this next spring.  Next year will be different.

    • Karma’s Gonna Get You

      This morning I was inspecting the grapes, which seem to be thriving this year, when I felt  a familiar stinging sensation on my hand.  Looking down quickly I saw the reason, I’d grabbed the fence right at the spot where a hornet had built a nest in the cavity made by the U-shaped metal top rail.  And there was the hornet flying about still annoyed with me.

      Wasps and hornets offer value to the garden, hunting pests that would otherwise damage your plants.  But they also tend to build nests in places inconvenient to humans trying to live in the same space.  I’ve seen a couple of other hornet nests in the fence but this one was a surprise for me.  Unfortunately it’s right next to the gate to the backyard and a safety concern, so I’ll have to spray this one.  I don’t mind coexisting with hornets but not when they endanger my family and guests.  They aren’t my favorite neighbors but they are a sign of a healthy ecosystem.  In a year when the bee population seems to be lower in my garden, I’ll take any positive I can find.

      That said, I view this entire incident as karma, as last night I finally got around to destroying a nest of yellow jackets in my grill.  They built a nest the size of a Nerf football right behind the propane tank.  That would qualify as unacceptable risk for me and anyone else that uses the grill or opens the cabinet door for the grill brush.  Nope, they had to go.  And karma came in the form of a sting this morning.  As I type this the sting still throbs a bit to remind me that it’s best to look carefully before grabbing hold of anything.  Another lesson from the garden…

    • Tigers and Time Travel

      This is the time of year when the orange time machines announce they’re back. Along old stone walls, foundations of farmhouses and in places random today but logical once upon a time. The tiger lilies are back.

      The land whispers to us of those who came before us. Tiger lilies were planted generations ago, divided and planted again at the next generation’s homes, and so on. Tiger lilies came out of China in the middle of the 18th century, made their way to England in the early 19th century and then to the United States. Tiger lilies are entirely edible, from the bulbs that supposedly taste like potatoes to the flowers. But most people plant them as ornamentals.

      Tiger lilies are a common sight in New England’s summer. On a 3 1/2 mile walk around the block I passed maybe a hundred of them. Time machines of orange and green, whispering the names of generations of people long gone who brought them to this place.