By the end of August those nothing doing days of sunshine and blue skies had moved along to something else and that something sure felt like fall. No longer was I reclining on my chaise after dinner, multi-tasking between reading my book, watching the sky change and contemplating my good fortune. By 8:00 it’s dark. No longer was it constant clear blue skies, sunshine and watering cans, “another lousy day in paradise”. Along came the fall-type weather – it rains, it shines, it clouds, all in a single morning. And for further proof positive that summer was slipping away, one day in the garden I looked down at my feet to see that socks and muck boots had reappeared, leaving a multi-colored pile of flip flops abandoned inside the patio door.
August was great, a time of visitors and exploring. Old friends from Virginia we hadn’t seen in years and years came to stay in The Bunkie and as always, it is with slight surprise and a lot of joy to find that no one has changed in the slightest, and we slip into old ways seamlessly, with smiles and chatter and laughter. As we day tripped around our part of the world, showing our friends the sights and scenes, I discovered once again what I have come to love about our new home. Two years in, and it’s still new.
As August waned and the first days of September arrived, the fall-like weather brought a sense of despair. “Too soon, too soon”, I cried. I was not yet ready for summer’s warmth, long days and glorious idleness to fade. I wanted more.
Now we’re well into September and this week the warmth and sunshine have returned in spades. A reprieve from the inevitable. I’m back outside beach walking and forest walking a lot more, with camera and binoculars always at hand. I observe the light patterns shift as the sun’s angle changes and notice the beginnings of leaves changing color. I pay attention to the tide tables and become aware of the moon’s phases. This truly has been a summer of being still and observing our natural world and I have loved every minute of it.
Garden chores continue of course for this full-time gardener. Now that the dog days are over shrubs and perennials are being dug up and moved around sending some under performers to compost. I’ve cleaned out the GreenHouse in preparation for its winter role. The fuchsias were not happy during the constant heat and dry weather of July – or should I say, the spider mites were much too happy, so I’ve spent much time trimming, checking for fuchsia rust and in some cases, discarding entire plants. Many of those that remain have perked up again now that the weather has changed more to their liking (cooler, shadier, dewier (new word?)) and are back in full second bloom. Soon it will be time to prepare them for the winter nap, when they’ll be cut back hard, all greenery removed, and stored under the GreenHouse benches until they start to show the first signs of beginning to leaf out again, late January early February. Once they’re settled and tucked in, in October it will be time for a break for me too and we’ll be off on another extended trip (no, not to Asia this time).
Later this fall we have another build planned – a 12’ x 20’ pergola and new gate along the west side of the house, a space to be recaptured from its current function as a parking space, all concrete and hard edges, to be turned into a new garden room. I’ve spent a lot of time poring over images to come up with the final design and finding a contractor to put the dream in motion. Forget the multiple interviews and estimates. Once again I find that around here, sometimes finding a contractor is as simple as seeing who shows up. I’m still waiting for one guy who made an appointment to come and quote on an earlier fence project – 2 years ago!
Recently I took the following picture from my neighbor’s house directly opposite ours, backing up and zooming out to show the huge cedar in its entirety, a view that is new to me and really quite bizarre. This is not my usual view. What I usually see is its base, where the fairies reside, and the lower part of the trunk , occasionally looking upward into the branches or sometimes seeing an angled larger, taller view as I approach the house from the side, along the road. I see from this that I only see a fraction of the tree. Our little ranch house looks like a fairy house itself, at the foot of this giant which once upon a time, before the humans cut them all down, was part of a huge forest, the remnants of which are to be found in the preserved Heritage Forest at the end of our road, 2 houses away. (See my earlier post about the Heritage Forest).
The property on the left is where last year the builder clear cut the 28+ similar sized trees to make way for 3 houses for the humans, completely out of scale of the existing small, low ranchers that are the common architecture of the road. You can see clearly how they changed the grade of the landscape, raising it well above what it used to be, looming above us and in doing so, caused me so much grief, which I’ve written about earlier. And still, I might add, have yet to get over. To this day, when I leave my house, I turn left away from it (to the right in this image) – I never drive or walk past, to my eyes, the blight on our road. If I never look, perhaps it doesn’t exist.
Yesterday another across the road neighbor called in the tree people to remove a tree from her backyard. My camera and I watched the action as the young man worked his way up the tree, limbing the branches, then worked his way back down, cutting off chunks of the trunk, wielding his chain saw as if it was one of those old-fashioned electric carving knives, until the tree vanished from sight. Down below the chipper cracked and whined as his compadres fed the felled branches into the machine. The whole process didn’t take long at all. As I watched the tree guy way way up there, I decided it would definitely not be a good idea to send these images to his mother. I should know. Once in awhile, #1 Son, Carpenter Steve, sends along a picture or two of him framing a house, way up on the roof, proud of his work as I am of him. But nonetheless it also serves to yank my chain. “Get down off there you’ll break your neck!”
