Thought I'd give you all an updated peek at our little house, which I have named Orange Blossom Cottage. This is the view, when you roll up and park in the spot out in front of our house as an overnight guest! Please, feel free to imagine....
And then this is looking to the right so you can see the whole little front yard and all the gorgeous roses along the fence. I think our little town is the perfect climate for tea roses and lemon trees. You wouldn't believe how lushly the roses are blooming, with no special care or encouragement beyond a heavy pruning this winter. Someone planted them long ago, the stems are bigger around than my wrist at the ground....and so covered with craggy, old bark that I'm not sure I'd identify them as a rose in a photo. There are pinks and yellows and reds and oranges and they smell wonderful too. I'm so lucky. On the front of the house there is a beautiful bougainvillea that I trimmed waaaaaaaay back with the help of a local landscaping man and arranged to no longer block the front window and instead to coil around the window on a trellis and also over onto the fence that leads to the backyard. This is a big change in yard space for us....this is our only "lawn" area with classic swathes of grass. We mostly have paved space and garden beds in the back. I am astonished by how freeing it is to have such a tiny area to mow. So lovely. Welcome to our cottage....consider booking a room soon!
I never really got camellias until I moved here. They are amazing. Here we are in winter (which okay, isn't exactly unpleasant) with the rainy and gray season leaning on us and the deciduous trees drop their leaves and most things stop blooming. And here come the camellias! All over town they are unfolding for months....giant teacup sized blooms that look like roses and fall luxuriantly onto sidewalks everywhere you walk. They last for at least a week in a bowl on the dining room table and are so incredible beautiful. No scent, all visual glamour. I see camellias in my future yard.
Today a poem about dandelions. Its high dandelion season here at our house, all the roadsides and wilder lawns dotted with yellow and the air heavy with their sweet nectar scent.
Weeds are in the eye of the beholder. I've never lived in a house with a manicured lawn so anything that flowered was allowed and maybe even encouraged. All things have their place, especially in a wilder kind of horticulture.
Dandelions are an exotic, invasive but they have taken hold in the hearts of all children. Who doesn't have heartwarming memories of playing with them as little tikes? I love watching my boys play with them and I wonder if my sisters think of me like I think of them when I see them start to bloom every spring.
So, Lockbox, Foxy, Song, and Doubleddog.....here's to the sisterhood! This one's for you.
Dandelion Season
As a girl I loved the scent of dandelions
A warm smell of sunshine in honey sauce.
Sniffing the blossoms was a kind of food
To my sisters and myself, a conjuror's dessert
We played that the milky sap was Elmer's
Our fingers tacky from the bitter, gloss.
We tore open innumerable flowers,
Beads of white swelling from the stems
We would squat in the sand on the driveway
And squint our eyes fiercely at each other
Smearing the flowers across our cheeks,
Leaving pale yellow racing strips behind.
We braided the stems into crowns to wear
And learned that dandelion stems are variable
Sometimes stiff and no longer than your thumb
Sometimes long and willowy and braid-able on and on
Around the head until your crown grows fat.
One time I left my diadem on the dashboard
Of our car and found the next day that magically
It had turned into a delicate, brittle circlet
Of wishing puffs....
Feeling a little low today so I started the day with a little meditation in my sunroom Mama-Space and then strapped a warm mug of tea to my side to keep my company while I dressed various short people and made breakfast.
But the real pick-me-up was some garden time. God, I miss being out in the garden. Right about the time February is arriving, I am starting to go crazy for a touch of something, anything that's green. The weather was incredibly warm and inviting this morning, a light, misty fog rolling down our hill and an inviting giant mud puddle by the back door waiting for the boys. I took the pruners and some stray yarn (for tying up raspberries), a trowel, some scissors, and a trowel out and I just did...ceaselessly for a little over three hours. Pom rode along on my back, sleeping peacefully through most of my work.
The smell of leaf mold, the damp earth on my knees, mud on my hands, and the sight of all those tiny green tips working their way out of the soil, promised me that this isn't forever...soon we'll be well again, soon there will be spring and soon we can cure our grumpy days with picnics.
Happy Poetry Friday everyone! Today I'm writing about a task I'm mostly not really doing these days but more fantasizing about. Our hedge desperately needs a good buzz and I am normally the woman for the job but at the moment the thought of expending all that energy is ultra-daunting and so it stands there in rabid neglect getting hairier by the hour. At least I can write about how it feels to trim it all up nicely, right?
Sometime soon I will take a good hack at it. Although "soon" may not actually come until about July. Boo! I am seriously considering a landscaping company taking a one-off drive-by at my house just to whack it into shape once before spring ends and I go crazy looking at it.
Clipping The Hedge
The vibrant hedge needs haircuts
Just as well as my crop of sons.
It has to be kept within bounds,
Snipping off the clouds of wagging
Shoots that hang down over its face
It will lose itself altogether if allowed
Bulging inappropriately in
Front of the whole neighborhood.
I grind the big shears a pass or two
Warming up the jaws before bites.
With my head on the side I chop
First, the few, high snips to level out
The leafy green table-top above.
Then I advance with my weapon
A cheek pressed against the wall
My sword arm deftly slicing off
The extra limbs and stray parts
As the flanks appear again, decently
A rain of tender stems and leaf bits
Sifts foot-ward leaving a bright,
Lush runner down the driveway.
Sticky green juice edges the blade lips
As they snip hungrily along the wall.
Sometimes I reach a hand up
To feather the cut edges of the hedge
As though it were my husband's hair
Knocking loose the bits of snipped green
Tenderly, brushing it off a brow or a cheek.
As a final touch I must squint down
The line of the shorn wall, my nose nestled
In the bright smell of chloryphyll
Sighting out any stray, missed bit
And when I finally have it perfect
Inhale the bright scent and run an arm
Down the fluttering length of green on my
Way to the garage for my favorite rake.
Our Poetry Friday host this week is TeacherDance. Click your way over and have another helping or two of poetry to send you off into the weekend.
The world is greening, the lawn wants mowing already and our new baby guinea pigs are living high on boy offerings of dandelions and grass blades by the fistful. We have been spending a lot of time outdoors. The garden is in, all but the tomatoes, the corn and the possible melon plants which I am waiting on just a little, little while. I feel quite accomplished....as long as I don't think too hard about my spring cleaning plans.
Spring Cleaning is hard. It's grueling, back-breaking, mind-bending, knee throbbing work by design...that's why it's only done once or twice a year. We can't really put out this sort of effort very often and when we do we go all out. I'm not sure how much pressure to put myself under while pregnant.
There's a piece of me that says:
"You better push hard now girl! You think its hard to clean this house when you're shaped like a beach ball and everything aches? Just wait till you're trying to heal up from birth and nurse in all your waking hours. This is the time. Don't whine. Just get it done."
And then there's the voice that says:
"Heh. Right. You're enormous, everything hurts, and who really spring cleans anymore anyway. All your friends think you're insane! Just mop the floors and give yourself gold stars for even attempting the job. There's always later."
Which little shoulder voice to obey....what to do, what to do? At the moment I am weakly still claiming to be cleaning and making tiny, little feeble stabs at the list every day now for the second freaking week running. Am I duping myself or am I a Spartan of a woman, fierce in my stubborn desire to make it through, even if it means accomplishing it all at a crawl? I'm not sure. Maybe I'll still give up. It remains to be seen.
In other news, A is off work this week...he took some time for sanity segue before his new job he's starting (cue confetti!) so we have him around the house all week in varying measures which has been super productive and quite fun. His new position will be similarly geeky (programming extraordinaire) but at a local company a little closer to our house, right in our own city no less. He just breezed into the house from a test run rollerblading to the new job site....30 minutes by blade from our front door. Not bad....honestly its exactly the same by car minus the exercise credits.
We have teeny, tiny radish babies...the first of our homegrown veggies to step toes out of the soil.
Or maybe just wee green faces...not so much big pink toes yet.
Is there anything better than that first zippy shot of new-seedling-chartreuse?
Here we are on the 21st day of March and we have all kinds of veggies in our beds: bok choi, kale, lettuces, peas, carrots and our dear radish seedlings. Some of them are six pack veggies that I couldn't resist at the nursery and some are hidden seeds, waiting under the soil for enough rain or warm to sploing up. The radishes win the race!
Nothing quite as fulfilling as plucking yourself the world's tallest stalk of grass and marching around the yard with it. Love the big, fat grin on my middle boy's face from earlier today. Such great triumph over a "little thing."
This morning we went out and had an early family work bee in the yard. A has started "working out" two mornings a week in our own yard: moving wheelbarrow loads of garden goods, hoisting stones, digging holes for me, hacking bushes apart and other little homeownery, outdoor chores. It is so fun to have him chip in and the boys and I always try to put on our garden gloves and outdoor boots and join in. I am sure the neighbors must think we're crazy, all out there in the yard together at 7 AM but we're having fun, we're actually getting the outdoor work done and there's something so very seasonal about being out in the thick of it like that.
We've seen the first frost and the first leaf color firsthand, noticing all the tiny changes as they come because we're out there, saturated in it on those work mornings, breathing clouds of frosty steam and kicking through the first falling leaves. Another great bonus? When we finally come in, peeling off work gloves and stamping our feet, we bring our heartiest appetites to the breakfast table. Oatmeal never tasted so good!
Lately we've: dug the ephemeral summer bulbs and put them into the basement for storage, finished stacking the stone wall along the back property line, given the hedge one last trim for the year, and now the boys and A are busily stacking up a big pile of wintery kindling to heap into a cardboard box in the basement where it will dry out thoroughly waiting its turn by the fireside. I am thinking about tying them into little bundles with garden twine, would make transport easier and also look really cute.
This family-work is a new thing for us, we've historically been pretty thin on genuine group-efforts but somehow we've hit the right sort of activities and time-slot. It feels good to work together, not just play together...and it feels really right to be working as a group to manage and maintain our little plot of land....even if it is just a little farm in the city.
We're into the real stuff now....hot nights when we lie on top of our beds listening to the fan whir away without even untucking the sheets, epic salads for dinner served in our big wooden salad bowl, days that stretch out longer than they have any right to be. Real summer.
Mango lemonade with mint
I have a window-box of fresh herbs on the back porch and its getting a lot of use. I drop snipped bits into our dinner salads, and snip them over all our meats and every glass of whatever we're drinking is better with a sprig of mint, right? I love fresh herb season. Next year I have to remember to make sure cilantro and thyme make it in. (Help me remember that, will you?)
Our corn went from this....
To this!
And here come the tassels...the male parts of the plant!
The corn/lawn experiment, in which I planted corn right in our turf grass and then mulched over the top once there were rows of green leaves..... is going well. I have never grown corn. My parents always did when I was growing up, but I've never done it myself. Fun to have the space and the sun. My dad always planted our corn when I was a kid, it was his special garden project, he pounded in stakes with taut string between to be sure of perfectly straight plantings, and then he put in the corn. I remember that we always planted from little paper bags full of seed that we got at the feed-store. Not a feed-store in sight here and I still seem to be managing to pull of my own tiny corn patch! Hooray!
The apples on our apple tree are swelling and starting to show just the barest hint of a blush...still wondering what color they'll end up, how big they'll be and if they'll taste good enough for eating. A few weeks ago I ate a jar of applesauce my aunt made, thinking wistfully that I hoped this fall we'd be eating our own. And apple pies, and dried apple rings and maybe a few apple turnovers for autumn picnics to boot! The boughs are starting to bend downwards with the weight of the fruit which makes me smile.
And the bees are happy about summer. They're buzzing around pollinating our cucumbers and tomatoes, and zooming over the hedge, to yards beyond our range of vision. I have been into the hive a couple of times since introducing the bees to their new digs. They're building beautiful comb and filling it with all kinds of good things, and I am hopeful that they'll find enough fodder in the neighborhood to make sure they are all lardered up for the winter. I have plans to build a small fence, with climbing, flowering vines planted on it, to enclose the area where the hive is, and create a little protected bee yard. We're working on teaching Dee to stay away from the hive but he did recently discover it and is now on closely monitored probation to ensure that he never get out of eye-sight. Time for a little landscaping to solve the problem. I'm thinking a short fence of some kind with honeysuckle on it, and maybe pots of jasmine in the summer to make it really highly scented. Mmmmm!!!! I'd like a barrier like that around my house, wouldn't you?
Closing with this song which is humming in my mind, on perpetual repeat, Sumer Is Icumen In, sometimes also called The Cuckoo Song. Can't remember where I first heard it but I know it was a long time ago and I know rings in my mind merrily and makes me smile. Its a very old song, one of the oldest written songs we have in English, written about 1260 or so....a little ode to "sumer." It says "Summer is a comin' in, loudly sing cuckoo, groweth seed and bloometh meadow and springs the wood anew..." Summer is a pretty timeless affair.
The wisteria is in bloom here on our Connecticut roadsides. I cannot resist foraging when I run into a cache and abundant wild flowers are no exception. In many parts of the country wisteria is considered invasive so there's no big concern about picking an armful of blossoms as the muscular vines can bulge and flex and pull over a house if they wish. Even if it a dizzy hellion of a vine, it is breathtaking.
One of my very favorite flowers. I can't really resist it. I tried to pretend that I wasn't going to plant one here but then I got over it when I pulled over to the side of the highway, in the mighty shade of a massive wisteria, laden with soft ropes of blossom dripping all over the entire backside of a some nameless big box store. That single vine where I stopped to fill my arms must have been 30 feet or more across and about 20 feet high....thick with sweet, pendulous clusters.
There's a potted wisteria sitting in our driveway now, waiting for just the right spot. I am waffling about where exactly I will plant it, my third wisteria at a dwelling of ours. I planted a wisteria vine at our first house, we bought a house with a lush wisteria pergola and then sold it after just one season of ripe blooms and now, here we are again. New beginnings.
Wisteria is a good flower for us. It will help encourage us to make sure to build that imaginary pergola over the imaginary stone patio in our back yard, a little bit an anchor tying us to plans we dreamed up. It also makes me think of our wedding in my great-grandparents vineyard all draped with gold and purple and is a good tie between our mutual interest in The East and our origin in The West. A flower held in great traditional esteem in China and Japan and then "discovered", named and affectionately adopted in England. Just about exactly right.
And you have to admit. Even if you're not a "flower person" that it is spectacular. Right? Tell I'm right.
