I sit at the top of the stairs with a plateful of Italian plums after working in the garden. The harvest so far includes four squashes of variable sizes, one gigantic zucchini, a bucket of red and orange tomatoes, and a bowl of shelled beans, red and white. The red ones are plumper, according to lil’ boy, whom I half-buried in a dry pile of bean bushes for the purpose of shelling.
I pulled out bunches of overgrown red and golden dry grasses, disturbing the marigolds and causing a storm of fragrance to clutch to my nose. Their smell is strongly pushing its way into my memory, stomping on everything, leaving but my dad’s slender figure, crouched over weeds and marigolds in our garden. He would work and tell stories, or joke about this or that, or answer many of my many questions about the garden.
He’d find bugs and show them to me, his voice steady and pleasant. My mom would come and join us, standing on the stone path, her hands carrying traces of flour and delicious smells from the kitchen. Dinner was both a promise and a gift, wrapped in togetherness.
Fall, the smell of dirt and marigolds, my mom’s voice calling us to dinner, and the occasional buzzing of a lost and forgotten summer bug, the distant wailing of a train, they all surfaced today when I chased the summer out of our small garden.
I sit at the top of the stairs realizing, plum after plum, that I ache for those times of gardening with my parents. My sister is the only other keeper of these precious times… I sit and remember, plum by plum. It’s no use to get teary but I do. I miss fall gardening with faint smells of leaf smoke from the piles everyone gathered at the end of September.
I look at the pile of garden waste I made in the back yard next to the garden patch. There are the huge squash and zucchini vines, tired and sloppy-looking, the broken tomato plants, weeds, and the dry bean and pea plants. A pile as big and colourful as my pile of memories. The sky is a beautiful, dreamy blue, gossamer-like clouds spread all over the hills, softening thoughts and dulling the sharp edges of memories that are happy and sad at once.
It’s a progression of sorts, I know that much. Summer to fall to winter and spring again. This is where you get to try again next season. People transition to memories and to more memories. That is the part that leads to the inelegance of my gaze, all teary and bending under the weight of all that cannot be again. It’s the part I process by sitting at the top of our back stairs, looking over the dry hills poking into the blue, and, eating plum after plum, dusty hands and all, I make peace, once again, with the fall, the garden where my parents visit only as memories and my stubbornness to let go.
The afternoon air hugs me warm and fragrant. I walk through short, stubby grass back to the garden. There are still the thick, dark kale bushes to care for and a whole bunch of green tomatoes to ripen. There’s the rosemary and lavender bushes; they will survive the winter. As for marigolds… I’ll plant some again next spring.
I grew up with books. Our living room had tomes lined up in tall bookcases covering entire walls, floor to the ceiling almost. When you’re a kid, that is as close to infinity as it gets. I loved climbing to some of the highest shelves and reaching to the back row where old books hid both enticing adventures and that smell of old paper that to this day is one of the most comforting smells there is.
If light could be song, this morning’s bright appearance was a symphony, loud and overwhelming. The green is exploding everywhere, soft and decidedly stubborn, hijacking the desert’s brownish, dry demeanour for a few weeks from now.
That is the feeling of plenty that awaits on the side of the trail every morning. That the dog jumps in the creek and then runs up the hill with all her might only helps with the fine touches.
Today is the mouse, yesterday her uphill playing took us to a patch of newly blossomed shooting stars. I lingered more over the flowers than I do over the mouse, which is where our interests part ways. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Mouse gone, friend gone home too, we follow the trail towards ours. Above us, the resident hawk flies above a magpie. There’s air tumbles, black and white feathers swooping under the wide-winged brown hunter, then above, stumbling in a desperate attempt to escape. The high-speed pursuit is enveloped in sunshine so bright it hurts my eyes. I’ll never know who prevailed. So it is. There’s as much mystery to life as there is clarity.
‘Mom, should I leave the dandelion patch standing? They are so pretty…’ Yes please, thanks for asking. Half of the yard will be, for now, bumblebee and butterfly playground. I can hear the sun laughing.
It was as if someone lowered pup and I into a glass of milk. We were walking on the dirt trail up on the ranch in the rain. It was foggy but it became so dense the trees were but ghosts guarding a world of chirping and dripping.
Delicate stems of grasses that might as well be invisible for how little we know of what they are and why they’re there, wildflowers so pretty that we perhaps take photos of but do not take the thought far enough to learn their names… Trees with lives so mysteriously and beautifully intertwined with ours; trees that many (most?) of us call but trees, and go maybe as far as divide them into coniferous and deciduous, leaving way too much into the realm of ‘one day I will know more…’ because really, the day is today. That is all we have.
Save your sense of wonder. Save it from the daily rush, save it from careless gazing upon things you might not even notice after all, and save it from becoming uprooted in any way. We’re born with a sense of wonder; when we first touch the world our senses are steeped into all that the world has to offer, and then at some point – you’d be right to ask why and where, therein lies the trouble – we steer away from it.
Truth is, it’s still within, all of it. All it takes is silence punctuated with bird songs, rain dripping cold and soothing on your face, slipping on a patch of mud just enough to almost step on a delicate ring of flowers you then go and learn the name of… it’s all there. Pup and I keep finding that out. You do it too, why not?
I must’ve been 10 or so when I got that orange plaid dress for Easter. It had delicate lace around the pockets and a set of nice white buttons down the front. It had spring written all over it. The sun seemed to shine a tad brighter when I stepped outside wearing it.
It’s precisely at 7.30 in the morning that we make our way out. Every morning that is. Routines can come close to boring at times but not this one. Poppy and I take to the trails, each curious to see what’s changed since the day before. Yes, nighttime is a time of secrets and small miracles happening in the tall grasses that sing ever so softly as we walk along, parting them with each step.
The trails pup and I find tranquility on are but islands of wilderness in the midst of residential propriety, shaggy grasses and tall bushes attracting wildlife that used to call it home before any of us did. It is all different now but perhaps this is the compromise that can keep things in balance. For now.
The wild flax flowers are rarer these days as it gets hotter. Along wild-growing poppies, their blue is as convincing as the sky itself and just as addictive. My two most favourite. A few middle-aged red-eyed Susan flowers are staring into the morning sun, feeding on its brightness not realizing it will become the heat punishment of later.
There are purple daisy look-alikes that are part of a big family of wildflowers called asters. Shooting stars (also purple, as if that is the choice colour for the wildflowers here) and dandelions, and then, the surprise of a new apparition (yes, purple) delicate looking and of a kind I have yet to learn about.
We follow the path up into the forest patch. Bugs tasting pollen and sliding on grass stalks, a balancing worth stopping for, there is so much life to see other than where I step next… Mushrooms push out of the dirt in shady areas, making themselves visible to us and the occasional slug sliding its sticky way across the path looking for supper. The very definition of slow food.
We stop at the top to look around. Clouds gather over one side of the sky, hinting at the promised last night’s rain that never came close enough to here. We saw it in the distance, a drape of white steam covering part of the northern landscape, making its way across hills of brown and tired green… a big tease in all…
We stop to say hello to the traffic ladies, our friends on the road. They see Poppy grow, admire her foxy looks and laugh when I tell them that someone thought her a wolf the other day… We talk about the unfairness of killing wolves to rectify our wilderness-invading wrongs, about the absurdity of grizzly bear trophy hunts and there’s mentioning of bees and pesticides. How refreshing to not have political correctness stop relevant topics from unfolding.