There are new annuals in our flower beds this year. The colors of yellow, purple, pink, maroon, white and red are still prominent. We expanded our garden to include more space for vegetables and lettuce, beets, beans, cauliflower, carrots, potato, squash and cucumbers, garlic, peas and tomatoes are all soaking in the sunshine and growing inches overnight. Our pink peonies, iris and day lilies have bloomed and gone for the year like they usually do around Independence Day. On the edges of it all the milkweed that has been patiently waiting underneath the soil has now surfaced into half a dozen hearty plants that the Monarchs have begun to notice.
We’ve had rhubarb, and still have giant bushes of it, for a while now. Our strawberries have been producing handfuls every couple of days or a few each afternoon still. The raspberries and black raspberries are full of bees and the tiny green fruit is getting bigger by the second. Our two different grapevines are full of clusters. My favorite Thai basil plant is growing new pungent green and purple leaves. Man do they smell fantastic.
Two days ago, our first red poppy bloomed and now there’s over a dozen of them waking up early with me on this rather gray Wednesday. They brighten up the corner and my morning. I snapped this picture a few days ago of the shadow of my Poirot cat sitting on the porch bannister against our white storm door. He’s watching a couple of larger birds and listening attentively to the new cache of song sparrows and chipping sparrows that chirp incessantly every morning seemingly at him and his sister.
There’s a pair or more of brown thrashers and the large northern flickers come each morning now. Accompanying them is the occasional recurrence of the albino squirrel whose pure white appearance confuses the cats and Mr. David Byrne. No one is used to the brown rabbit that sprints through the neighbor’s yard and occasionally noses up to the galvanized edges of the small diamond spaces in our fence. Minnow is nearly a match for his color with her tabby pattern and acts very calm as though they might be distant cousins without the alarm bells that ring when a visiting cat ventures nearby.
In the late afternoon before it cools off, the robins come and use the drinking water pan as a bird bath. The cats are always napping inside when this takes place. Poirot prefers to spend the warmest part of any day buried under a quilt on our bed. This from a cat who will literally lay on the couch as near as possible to the air conditioner and stick his face right in front of the vents later in the evening if it is running. He’s an enigma. Even his shadow is interesting. He’s a stark reminder of my summer hopes and dreams from the last summers of the 80s and early 90s. Crisp and defined, they remained in stark contrast to future possibilities that I wanted to avoid. I’d wanted to be a writer from probably the age of five and I was becoming one. I felt that my own definition was less blurry.
What I couldn’t understand then, but have come to figure out, is that life tends to blur out around the edges. The contents of the garden change from year to year and shift around.
That makes for a better crop, just like a larger field. It keeps things interesting and even if your home remains the same for three decades and more, the details define themselves in new and more interesting ways. If you have children or help raise children and or you are married, your life becomes about your family, the possible rotation of pets, etc. Your story writes itself differently. It defines you. Though unexpected, these things are more than good. There’s no way I could’ve expected how rewarding they would turn out to be.
My story or stories have done that. On their own. They continue to, in ways that I never would have imagined during that summer I worked in our old antique shop back in Illinois. Stripping everything back to the beginnings, just like I did that summer, only with chemicals and wood, I can begin to see the original paths my grain was taking. As I try to finish some of my written creations, it is important for me to be able to do this and to follow the branches shooting off. To trace some things back to their roots. To uproot some things and migrate them elsewhere.
