A Birthday Poem

Ted Kooser

Just past dawn, the sun stands
with its heavy red head
in a black stanchion of trees,
waiting for someone to come
with his bucket
for the foamy white light,
and then a long day in the pasture.
I too spend my days grazing,
feasting on every green moment
till darkness calls,
and with the others
I walk away into the night,
swinging the little tin bell
of my name.

Vine Spell

My ancestry is of the northern European variety and, as such,  I'd guess that it's not surprising that garden tools fit so naturally into my hands.  I come from a long line of workhorse women who didn't mind getting dirty and when, at 21, I had my first house and piece of earth, I got down on my knees and started to dig.

I've been digging ever since.  For many years I stuck to flowers.  Each house I've owned came with a few lilacs and a few irises and I took it from there.  I've built all sorts of gardens.   I had a shade gardens with a little stream bed running through the center and, to my very great delight, a toad came to live there.  I once had border gardens that graduated from dainty blossoms along the edge, to towering giants at the back--euphorbium and great delphiniums that held their own heads well above my own.  I only reluctantly gave up the idea of a poisonous garden, a la Rappaccini's Daughter, for fear of taking out the children of visiting friends.

I've been in love with English cottage gardens since first I saw them decades ago and for many years, I worked very hard to create them under the hard sun and in the poor soil of Colorado.  It can be done if you have lots of money to spend on water and soil amendments and you're willing to devote all your free time to the endeavor.

The house that stood amid those English gardens of mine was a Craftsman gem with a few features I hated--namely a newly remodeled kitchen that featured high gloss cranberry tile counters with bright white grout with an abundance of expensive cabinetry finished in brilliant, glossy white. I disliked them very much and tried very much to play them down with my own far-more neutral decor.  It took me a couple of years to realize that I minded them much less when I let what was there dictate the decor instead of fighting it.  Eventually, I saw that I'd fought the same sort of battle in the garden.  In the end, the entire property was an exercise in trying to achieve a particular vision in a medium that would never allow me to quite bring it off.

The echinacea sea

It was a lesson learned and when I came at last to this house on the top of a hill, I spent a year watching the play of light on the ground before I did anything at all.  I still remember how scandalized the elderly neighbors were as the existing yard died under applications of Round Up, to be replaced with xeric plants and mulch.


"Weeds," the old woman called my vision and, though she didn't live to see it, (and no poisonous plants figured in her demise) this is what the weeds became.  On this hilltop, these plants that "belong" are thriving--and looking ironically English in their riotous abundance.  Funny how that's worked.

The arbor in high summer

I've never grown much fruit.  Two of my houses came with cherry trees so beloved by birds that I might have eaten a handful in all the years I spent with them.  I planted strawberries here but they were soon eaten--ripped entirely out of the ground--by the herd of deer that watches over this garden.

And then it seemed like it would be fun to grow grapes and, with little knowledge of their ways, I dug holes, planted them in this sandy earth, and the spell was cast.

That was a dozen years and I've put up several hundred quarts of juice since my love for vines began.  It's snowing today and the grapes and the garden are fast asleep.  The window beyond my desk looks out at the arbor, where the vines are stiff and brown.  Against a palette of white, brittle tendrils curl and strips of outer bark hang like Spanish moss and move in the wind like bits of rag.  This is what dormancy looks like; cold on the eye, chilling to the heart.  The days when I sat on top of a ladder in the green light of the leaf canopy seem like a memory from another life.  A flicker digs in the frozen mulch for the raisins that remain of last summer's bounty.  I know more about grapes than I knew there was to know and yet there is more to study than I will manage in a lifetime.  Of this, though, I am sure: my life and the life of grapes are somehow entwined.  I remain unsure of what my life after my working career will look like, but I know that vines will be in it.  Everything I've ever grown seems to have led to this.  I watch and plan from this side of the window, while on the other the mercury falls with the snow.

Road Signs

This evening a friend--about to embark on a journey that will involve moving her life to the other side of the world--blogged about destiny.  The things that have happened to her in the last 6 months do seem full of signs, guiding her down some heretofore unknown path.  I, too, have lived through times when the universe seemed friendly and well-lit and my path was plain before me.  How clear the guideposts are on such a path, their messages so unmistakable that, even after the passage of many years, no other possible interpretation comes to mind.

Who can say if the arcs of our lives are fated or fluid?  My experiences thus far have offered suggestions of each.  Since I was a small child, I've had a sense of my life as a long walk on a road that extends great distances behind me as well as before me.  It's good when it's purposeful and I'm working toward something with dedication and intent.  But I'm most aware of my trajectory when I've profoundly wished to stop time, even to turn around.  It's very plain at those moments that there are aspects of the journey that have little to do with free will and everything to do with a kind of current on which we're both passengers and prisoners.  We are going somewhere.  We can rush toward it with confidence or resist to the point of brokenness, but we are going.  

In the 1950s, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote the oft-quoted "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings have a human experience."  
I believe we have destinies with other souls.  We may have histories with them as well, but of this I'm less sure.  It's plain to me, though, that there are, scattered across the world and across time, others with whom we are meant to keep company.  Perhaps when we're powerfully drawn to places, it's because of the presence there of our kindred souls. We give ourselves to the journey.  We find our kind; we find our countries.

Between Solstice and Equinox

This evening I worked a while in what still seems like acres of garden.  It's not so large really--just a standard city lot--but in summer, when walking beneath the grape arbor is like stepping into the shade of a venerable tree, it expands into a little realm with boundaries somewhere out beyond the reaches of my sight. 

I noticed tonight that the grapes have lost the vivid green of early summer and their skins have grown faintly translucent, a prelude to darkening into the inky, purple-blue of ripeness.  It won't be long until I'll be on ladders in the evenings.  I'll bring the Mason jars down from the attic, and the harvest into the house.

All across the garden, summer's finishing its work.  New squash and tomatoes are ready to pick each evening and cucumbers that were surely fingerlings yesterday are as big around as my wrist tonight.  But there are, too, other things less appealing: the first signs of powdery mildew on squash leaves, white leafhoppers investigating the grape canopy,  hoof-prints of night-feeding deer, deep in the loam.  In late summer, ruin lurks, always, on the edge of bounty. 

In another month, the afternoon sun will go syrupy, its rays golden and viscous, its warmth mellowing as the hours it lights the sky each day grow fewer. The lushness of the garden will dwindle down into drowsy autumn and the house will seem nearer to the alley hedge than it's been for months.  But not yet.  Tonight there are still little bats around the streetlight, and a tracery of moth-dust on the other side of my lighted
 window.  The old fountain spills water from tier to tier in the darkness under the arbor as it does each year, from last frost to first.  I'm glad it has a while longer left to run.