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Friday Evening Floralude

jinb
 

When Autumn Leaves Start To Fall...

I'd love to say I got tons of work done, but my days off were pretty much what I thought they'd be - a lot of resting relaxing and recuperating away from the online grind (and I have the 900 backed up e-mails to show for it).

I also raked a lot of leaves.

Leaf raking is a chore, no doubt about it; but after a (dull) morning of political talk and catching up on my new obssession (USA's White Collar), I was ready for manual labor and a new project: clearing a plot to expand our garden and plant bulbs.

I'm no plant person... but gardens of colorful flowers... I can do. And I want to do. And that makes the leaves a necessary, not altogether unpleasant, step along the way.

Making the piles turned out to be surprisingly speedy and easy... it's the bagging, I realized that's the headache. When you get to bag 4, and still everything seems chaotic and undone... it's hard to see the endpoint. But I just kept bagging away, and reducing the piles one by one.

In the end, six bags total, it was worth it: the spot is identified, and the trip to get the bulbs, and the dirt, is next on my list. And without the ground cover, the beauty of our wild, untamed, fading garden as it moves from fall to winter is actually kind of striking. Fall's colors - the riches of gold and bronze and red - look especially nice against the expanse of uncovered lawn, itself dying away.

I don't love fall - or the fading light now that we've fallen back in time - because it symbolizes that moment when leaves fade, and fall and the cycle of death to rebirth moves to... well, death. I believe in love and life and light... and that's why "endless summer", or maybe "eternal spring,"  I think, may be the season I want most. But I like seasons, and the change of seasons... living in the Sun Belt, always warm, never a cold day or enough rain or the thrill of first snow... that just feels wrong. Always has.

Six bags, and a lovely back yard later, the autumn leaves continue to fall, the light fades, the days grow shorter and colder and the year moves to its conclusion. And as I resume my writer's journey, and plan a garden for next spring... it's nice to have the distractions of the rest of life, for a moment, to remind me - remind you and all of us - that we are more than our politics, our disputes, our national and world problems. And what we can do, when it seems like too much, is rest, recover... and rake. It's not the worst way to pass the time.

Friday Evening Floralude

jinb

The Haze of Summer Lawns

Yes, I took the weekend off - well, not exactly, since I sold coffee all weekend long, but I took a writing and thinking break... and I've been a little slow to get restarted.

The heat finally broke sometime last night, as Hurricane Bill finally pulled the hazy humidity out to sea behind it (after flooding rains on Saturday afternoon in Westchester County), and so I could finally do a regular task this morning... mow the lawn.

Like many weboys my age, I have a lifelong enmity with lawn care. We were the last generation, or so Ifind, of suburban youth where weekend awn mowing was the teenage version of slave labor: paid nothing, or possibly subsistence wages called "an allowance" we were forced for hours at a time, to plow fields of a half acre or more, strewn with vines, flower gardens and whatnot.

Opposition to lawn mowing was one of my real efforts at rebellion - I didn't have the temperament or the energy for it, and (as I try to explain to this day), my 16 year old girl mentality didn't see why "because you're a boy" answered my preferences for shopping, reading magazines and styling my hair.

I still have that girl in my head.

But I am older, the lawn is smaller, and now I find lawn mowing to be a surprisingly serene act: orderly rows fall beneath the blades, and a lush green carpet replaces an unruly field. My one weakness is that I like to have something to show for mowing the lawn... so it generally gets extremely overgrown before I can muster the will.

And then, too, I find myself  wondering why we need so much open lawn - I have been advocating a switch in the backyard to make it more of a garden, which I feel is what it wants to be - now that I've seen the lush, overgrown meadow that grows up where grass, generally, won't, I think the yard is teling us something... if we choose to listen. And in middle age, I find listening to nature, heeding its directives and not ours to tame the wild, to be the more compelling choice.

I also have to admit I am grateful that we have a lovely neighbor, just now, who lends her lawn mower for our use (in exchange for a cooperative arrangement where I hit her yard too). My mom will not relent in her belief that a small manual push-cutter can get the job done... though it can't. In my youth, I may have argued more but resentfully followed through with her wishes. These days, I find myself being just guy-ish enough to prefer the call of power tools with loud motors, after whicvh one can retire to watch the game in the den. Although we don't have a den. I get the appeal though, now. Just like I get the sense of accomplishment that comes, when the lawn is done, and I can smell the fresh scent of newly cut grass. Simple pleasures on a summer afternoon... in the haze of summer lawns.