Alexandersmap

    Category: Garden and Home

    • The Air is Thick

      I’ve surrounded myself with friends who treat me kindly for forty-eight weeks of the year and then abuse me for four. They were here first, they tell me amidst their relentless attack. Who are you but our guest? I nod in reluctant acceptance of my fate.

      There are two times of year that are especially difficult to be a home owner surrounded by the forest. The first wave comes in the spring with pollen, catacombs and maple seed helicopters assaulting you from all sides. It’s pollinating season for the trees. This lasts for about two weeks. The second wave is the autumn return to earth of millions of leaves and acorns, seemingly all contained in my yard. Let’s call that another two weeks (I’m overly generous in my time estimates).

      The trees deserve their spring fun, and then earn their winter slumber. Who am I to complain? Shut your mouth and clean out the pool seven times a day like a good homeowner. Why am I whining about the puke yellow pollen coating everything when I knew what I was moving in to? I’m the keeper of the trees, the one who protects them for another generation. Despite the mess.

      The funny thing about being a New Englander is waiting all winter for the beautiful weather to arrive and then, just as it does, stay inside because of the pollen and black flies. It’s a waiting game, really, and each will subside over the next week. The trees will soon be settling into their most productive days, and we shall coexist peacefully for the rest of summer.

      You can place the timing of this blog by the moment I write about the trees again. Sure enough, it’s springtime again in New England. A time of celebration and massive, ongoing cleanup effort. Oh Joy! Oh Rapture!

      The air is thick with tree pollen and it’s raining debris. This is no time to relax poolside with a cool drink, for there’s work to be done. But this too shall pass. And it’s still way better than having no trees.

    • Links in a Chain

      The latest outdoor workout was renting a chainsaw and cutting up oak and maple tree logs into smaller bits that I will eventually split on some cold winter day. Or perhaps it will be someone else doing the splitting and enjoying the fruits of this labor. Yesterday I was just a link in the chain between tree and fire.

      The thing is, I don’t particularly care if I’m the one burning the wood. I’ll savor it should it be me, but the whole point was to embrace the task of taking a pile of logs and transforming them into a neat pile of firewood. To complete the task at hand was all that mattered. Chopping up firewood on a warm day is a workout, has an element of danger, and requires focused concentration on the elements of the work that can badly injure you. Done well, it’s a joyful expression of being alive.

      “Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” – Zen Kōan

      I finished the task and see the next one in line, awaiting my applied labor. And all of this is both satisfying and futile. The projects are endless, the output of money is constant, and the rewards are never guaranteed. But we do what we must to keep things going.

      The noise of the chainsaw doesn’t fully drown out the call of the road, the call of the mountains, or the call of the ocean. I’m fully aware of what I trade off in experience for this one. But I’m at peace with my choices. The work must be done. And what are we but links in a chain?

    • There’s a Tool for That

      Tool collections speak to me. You know what someone has done when they’ve got shelves full of well-used tools. If you’re observant, you can tell when they picked up a certain skill along the way too. I walked into the basement of an older gentleman I know who doesn’t get around much now to change out his dehumidifier. His tool collection was accumulated in the 1950’s through the 1970’s. And it could still do the job today.

      My own collection of tools grows with every to-do list. It took off when I began working construction jobs during college breaks. And then started rigging boats, maintained a temperamental F-150, pulled network cable and finally as a homeowner a few times over. I added an angle grinder last weekend because it’s the only good way to cut vinyl siding. How I’d gone so long without one is a mystery to me, but now it’s handy for the next odd project that requires that certain tool.

      There are some tools you buy in case you need it later. Those tend to grow lonely and still look new years later. Tools shouldn’t be bought on speculation. A tool is best acquired when you’re in need of it. The immediacy of the task demands a quick learning curve, and a lifetime of working towards mastery. Tools patiently wait for you to develop the skills to use it to its potential.

      I don’t ever worry about working, because I could leave my dress clothes behind today and start a small construction business. Or simply work for someone else. There’s always work in the trades, and never enough people willing to roll up their sleeves, grab their tools and get to it. What’s more permanent, the forecast I’m contemplating or the brick patio I laid down in 2006?

      A guy I worked for a long time ago once told me that there was nothing to any profession but learning the tricks of the trade. Every trick is now easily found on YouTube. Mastery is a different story, but you can make that up with time and patience (and a few do-overs). Those projects just need a willing apprentice to tackle them. And, of course, the right tool.

    • Present

      “No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them, we may forget altogether to live them.” – Alan Watts

      “For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.” – Alan Watts

      There’s no moment to reflect on the present quite like a Monday morning. It informs where you are in meeting the expectations you have for yourself. Looking ahead at the work that must be done, and looking back at where you’ve just been. So how does that symphony sound?

      The last two days flew right by as I worked on my garage doors. If spending your entire weekend in your garage sounds off-putting, I understand. It’s not Paris or a beach in the Caribbean, but mix the focused work of crafting something of lasting value with a greatest hits playlist and suddenly the garage wasn’t such a bad place to linger after all.

      A weekend of accomplishment meets the quiet reset of another week. When you come off the glow of building something of substance, what do you do the next morning? Hidden in that Monday morning to-do list is our purpose and direction (sometimes its really well-hidden).

      Weekends are great, but 72% of our lives is lived between Monday morning and Friday night. Life presents us with a succession of Monday mornings, all asking the same question: How do you like me now? Love the tune or not, it’s your move.

    • The Parking Lot Pop-Up Exhibit

      The impact of the pandemic goes well beyond the health crisis. You can see it in the price and availability in a growing number of items in the store. You can see it in the awkwardness of once commonplace routines like whether to shake hands or have an actual face-to-face meeting with someone. And yesterday, you could see it scattered throughout the parking lot of an orange home improvement store.

      Committed as I was to spending the stack of gift cards on the latest project on the house, I’d foolishly arrived at the store on a Saturday morning thinking I might just get a lumber cart. It seems there is a distinct lack of lumber carts at this location, for as carts are damaged they aren’t repaired but retired permanently. And replacements are apparently hard to come by. So that left people wandering the parking lot like zombies in an apocalypse movie, looking in vain for the one or two lumber carts that might still be available.

      Stubbornly creative in such moments, after two laps of the parking lot and one through the inside of the store, I decided to grab an orange shopping cart and use it instead. I wasn’t getting heavy lumber, I was getting PVC trim boards, I figured. Since weight wasn’t an issue, it was all about balance. And who’s more balanced than me?

      Stacking eight foot PVC trim boards is a simple matter. Adding ten foot trim boards on top of those is also simple. I even positioned the boards in such a manner that the stickers were ready for easy scanning. Fitting them into a car was completely secondary, I’d achieved proper balance on the cart and glided effortlessly through the store. Lost souls still searching for lumber carts nodded in understanding. The laws of the jungle apply in adversity.

      As you might have guessed, this masterpiece worked perfectly on the poured concrete floor of the big box store but didn’t pass muster when I started rolling across the parking lot. Vibration became the primary factor, creating instability, and the entire pile slid gently but uncontrollably forward and right off the cart. I’ve learned not to catch the sliding stack, for there is where injuries occur. I simply waited for the sculpture to speak to me. Luckily a father and son quietly joined me in putting the masterpiece back together again (quiet, but I knew what they were thinking – Wow, this guy is a genius!).

      And then I got the stack to the small SUV and began the process of fitting all of this in. I enjoy a good puzzle now and then. But here is where I missed having a truck. I might get creative with a shopping cart in a store, but the public roads are a different story. Soon I was back in the store purchasing a saw to make it fit just so. You do what you must in this apocalyptic world.

    • Two Sides of the Coin

      The last year highlighted the value of a good home, with a good yard, with good Internet. Having all three was the trifecta. But the last year also reminded us of what we were missing, out there, waiting for quarantines to end.

      For all the bold claims of travel, I keep investing in new projects to fortify the homestead. In a time of amplified real estate frenzy, you either double down or cash out. I keep doubling down with new projects. You invest where you focus most. But always with an eye towards the future. Travel will have its time.

      Many of us are fully vaccinated now and waiting for the world to pivot towards open borders, silently listing the destinations and the vehicles with which to get there. For 2021 I’m contemplating drives across the country instead of flights to the international bucket list. Local mountain peaks and waterfalls remain a priority, with more overnight hiking sprinkled in. Hopefully more time exploring the world from the water. And perhaps, this year, under it.

      In the void, the projects continue. New garage doors sparkle! And point out the requirement for new trim. And of course now something must be done with that front door. The fence project of last year was a beautiful addition! And highlighted where it should have gone to, demanding extension. The garden, the pool, the appliances… everything calls for attention.

      Always time and money. Travel and home each demand the same currencies. And this is the two sides of the coin that I find myself flipping. The coin keeps landing on home at the moment. But things have a way of leveling out… Right?

    • Good Fences

      There where it is we do not need the wall:
      He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
      My apple trees will never get across
      And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
      He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
      Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
      If I could put a notion in his head:
      ‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
      Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
      Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
      What I was walling in or walling out,
      And to whom I was like to give offense.
      – Robert Frost, Mending Wall

      It happened once, and it seemed awkward at the time. The neighbor walked between his fence and my fence to retrieve golf balls he’d been chipping beyond his fence. He quietly picked them up, we waved at each other and the moment ended. Except that it didn’t really end. The neighbor now works from home in a pandemic on conference calls all day, head set on, chipping golf balls back and forth in his yard. And so this scene is repeated several times a day.

      You might be wondering why there are two fences up. Well, that’s a good question with a reasonable answer. The folks that originally put up the neighbor’s fence put it up four feet inside the property line, and had it curved slightly to follow the tree line. A few years later we got a black lab who liked to explore the neighborhood on his terms. We installed a black chain link fence around the perimeter of our yard to discourage this, thinking it blended in with the woods beyond. The dog was mostly contained, the trees between the fences obscured the unusual nature of two fences running parallel to each other. Mission accomplished! Who thinks of Arnold Palmer straying into your personal space at moments like that?

      Fast forward fifteen years and the brush and small trees are cleared out. The neighbors have changed over twice. The dog has since passed. All that remains is the cold reality of a pair of fences quietly marking time. And the frequent moments of the golfer gathering his golf balls while on his conference calls on the edge of our back yard. A back yard that for twenty years offered the illusion of privacy with the woods beyond.

      It’s my own fault, really. I mentioned in passing one day that the land between was his, and Kilroy has since taken great pains to stake his claim to it with errant golf balls and purposeful walks to scoop them up. It seems passive aggressive to me, like running a lawn tractor in your driveway when your neighbor is having a birthday party. Wait, that’s him too…

      If this seems like a justification for building a taller fence, well, it may be. Wouldn’t that be something, two privacy fences running parallel to each other along the yard? Frost’s old neighbor would say good fences make good neighbors. And Frost would rightly question, just what are we walling in and walling out?

    • Charming Gardeners

      “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” – Marcel Proust

      Spring in New England is a tricky thing. We pivot from beautiful warm days to snow squalls and bitter wind, often within a few minutes of each other. But the days grow longer and we quietly grow more confident about putting the lawn furniture back out and maybe planting some seeds in starter soil. Basil, cilantro and parsley are each growing in sunny windowsills as I write this, and I’m considering getting the dahlia bulbs going soon. Such is the mind of a gardener.

      Proust writes of a different kind of gardener, of course, but they’re generally one and the same. The people who light us up in social interaction are quiet observers of humanity, readers of eyes and solicitors of smiles. In this particular time when social interaction has been elusive, we haven’t had as much interaction like this, and we’ve never needed it more.

      Spring brings hope to the gardener, and vaccines bring hope for time with those people who make us happy. I’m as ready for a gathering of celebration with friends and family as I am for the smell of fresh cut grass and tomato vines. Confident hugs and hand squeezes and shoulder leans are just around the corner.

      Imagine the days ahead, as a gardener imagines them – life blossoming anew, hope in the air, warm sun on our backs. Breathe in the fresh warm air, turn towards friends old and new, and smile. They could use it – and so could you.

    • Determining the Age of a Tree

      I’ve been wondering about the age of a large white oak tree guarding the edge of the forest for years. Not enough to actually do something about it, mind you, but wondering nonetheless. Then a hike with old growth trees last Sunday triggered a burning curiosity in me about the age of the trees we hiked amongst, and by extension, the age of the trees in my own backyard. I found myself having to know.

      There’s an easy way to gauge the age of a tree: you count the rings. The problem with that method is you’re really measuring the age of death of the tree. I prefer to keep them around, especially when they’re my elders. But rest assured, there’s another method for estimating the age of a tree, and that’s doing some basic math and adding a bit of educated guessing. All of this is searchable online, of course, but I found the instructions from Purdue University to be particularly helpful.

      Step one is to measure the DBH of the tree. What’s this? Another acronym in a world of acronyms? Sorry! But this one is easy to remember. DBH stands for Diameter at Breast Height. Take a flexible tape out to your tree of interest, measure 4 1/2 feet up from the base of the tree and there’s your DBH. Now anchor the end of the tape measure (or have someone hold it) and walk around the tree back to your starting point. This is the circumference of the tree. Convert this to total inches. In the case of my stately white oak, it measures 92 inches in circumference.

      The next step is to determine the diameter of the tree, which simply means dividing the circumference by 3.14. For the white oak, this was 29.29. So far, so good. And now we rely on something called the growth factor to figure out the rest. This is where science meets estimation. For a tree on the edge of the forest in optimal growing conditions, the growth factor is pretty straightforward. For a tree on a sidewalk in downtown Boston or near the summit of Mount Jackson in New Hampshire, well, that tree’s growth factor is going to be pretty compromised by the stress of everyday living. You’ll need to factor that in to the equation at some point.

      Back in my backyard, our white oak is happy as a tree can possibly be in this crazy world. The growth factor for a white oak in this happy situation is 5. You multiply the diameter by the growth factor and my favorite white oak tree turns out to be around 146 years old! And those old growth trees I saw hiking? They’re roughly 300 years old, which is about how long a healthy white oak typically lives. I hope they beat the odds with that good clean living.

      So around 1875 when the fields were no longer being farmed or grazed in this patch of Southern New Hampshire land an acorn sprouted and grew in the sun. It witnessed the forest grow around it, protecting it from the worst of the winds and the whims of humans looking for firewood and lumber. And then I became its neighbor and guardian at age 124. And we became fast friends.

    • Muscle Memory

      I grab the newel post with my left hand in the dark, pivot slightly and feel the stair rail with my right. Twenty-two years of early morning flights and workouts and pouring thoughts into piles of words adds up to the kind of muscle memory that allows you to navigate a house in the dark. So much has changed in that time in the concentric rings of relationships that circle closer and closer to the brain between these ears. But this act, grab left and pivot to right, hasn’t changed at all.

      When you’re in a new relationship everything is discovery and revelation. Hopes and dreams. The small endearing habits, the smell of shampoo, the imperceptible twitch of an eyebrow or shift of a glance that betrays a belief you’ll learn over time.

      Relationships with place are similar, but the friction is different. You get to know the creaks and tendencies in a house, the way it breathes when the furnace turning on, how it reacts to frigid cold and gusty wind, the appliance working to survive another cycle, and the sleep cycles of fellow inhabitants. What sounds right and what seems off.

      A house wears like a pair of jeans, faded and stretched in some places. Lived in. Pets come and go. Children bridge the time between new house and familiar abode. A crayon mark or that chip in the tile from the oldest banging a fireplace poker that you don’t even see anymore. Memories of earlier days flood in; bringing the youngest home for the first time, birthday parties, celebrations and holidays.

      Twenty-two years. For all the talk of travel and downsizing and the encroaching habits of the neighbors, there’s something to be said for the familiar. For muscle memory in dark times.