And the wild mustard stalks the land

In this part of the world, there so many wild flowers that, with the right amounts of rain and the right ranges of temperature and the right locations, simply burst upon the landscape in spring, with fall bringing its own varieties.  But what happens in spring is so significant simply because after winter, particularly some difficult winters, all these swaths of color which present themselves absolutely free and glorious. 

Right now the wild mustard seems to be everywhere.  Driving along a freeway access road this morning, I glanced over at the freeway embankment on the other side and there was this glowing yellow from top to bottom for quite a long distance, absolutely startlingly brilliant.  And that same color, that same glory, is showing up everywhere a wildling can go.

 

Sometimes I write because I am overcome with concerns or serious thoughts, but sometimes it just seems necessary to describe something really very ordinary that is simply no less spectacular and welcome just because it’s ‘only wild flowers’.

WHERE STAR TREK WENT

As a young mother, dealing with the demands of a toddler and an infant while their father worked full-time and also went to college, I found so much comfort and pleasure in the stories of the original Star Trek series.  When I had to defend my appreciation for these stories, I simply found the words:  “They explore the human condition.”  Many people looked at the strange aliens and the strange alien environments and the strange alien situations, and did not realize that there were many metaphors for the way that we as humans interact with each other.  Everything was explored in those stories, from religion to lifestyles to gender attitudes, but that exploration was done in a way that taught, for those who would learn.  And one of the most interesting aspects of all the explorations, for me, was Spock’s logic, particularly as he was half-Vulcan and half-human, and therefore had the dubious pleasure of having human emotions and Vulcan requirement for logic.    And over and over, it seemed to me that human emotions were shown to be both blessing and curse and that pure logic was shown to be blessing and curse as well.  As Mr. Spock said many times, “Fascinating.”

 

And here is something that Leonard Nimoy, the wonderful human who gave Mr. Spock a type of reality, said:  “A life is like a garden.  Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.”

TOO MANY POTS

There is a tendency I have to try to grow too many things in pots.  First there are the pots of plants such as crinum that are simply too vigorous to find a place in the garden beds, and the pots help to restrain them.  Then there are the plants which are not winter-hardy in our area:  ixoras and a lemon tree, and wax begonias and pelargoniums, all of which grow happily outside in all but the coldest winter months.   Then there are the agapanthus, plural, which I have found do so much better with winter shelter in our unheated garden room.  And the many (too many) amaryllis for which we do not yet have garden bed space.  Finally there are the small pots of various plants that were looking poorly and were either lifted and potted and kept where they could get special attention, or the bits and pieces that have remained when plants were trimmed back and which were potted because I could not bear to simply discard what would be excellent future plants.

 

Every year I promise myself, and my mate, that there will be fewer pots to winter over, to either move into what is a fairly small garden room or to pull up close to the house on the patio and cover for protection.  That is the promise I make, but the reality is that there seem to be more, not fewer, pots, and it gets more and more exhausting to move plants around, to water and feed the inside pots and to cover and uncover the outside pots when our winter temperatures go down and up and down again.

Ah, but my resolve seems to be strengthening.  I have managed to find homes for four of the five pots of butterfly amaryllis, and already I am looking squinty-eyed at the many small pots of plants, planning to squeeze them in amongst the spring bulbs of daffodils and tulips and crocus.  There’s got to be some more room out there somewhere!

I MUST REMEMBER

Sometimes, at the end of the year, the holidays occur with busy times and fun and the pleasures of making cookies and decorating with old ornaments from many years ago and getting together with friends and family for renewal of old memories and the making of new ones. 

In other Decembers, the weather persists in being dark and cold and gray, and too many times it seems, this is exactly when all sorts of stresses and difficulties and worries appear, and the two together, the dark cold and the worry, conspire to make shadows that even decorations and all the other holiday traditions cannot banish.

This is when I find that I am helped once again by our garden.  The garden is, of course, a mess at this time of year, strewn with leaves and the tops of dried summer flowers, and at the same time the bright green of winter weeds which apparently thrive with the same conditions that cause other plants to die back.  On the other hand, there is now blooming an early jonquil that found itself in just the right sheltered place to send up its bloom stalk and give us delight.  And other bulbs are sending up their leaves; the Dutch iris always come up in the late fall, at least around here.  And newly transplanted iris are sending up tentative new leaves.  The blueberry bushes, which gave little to nothing in the way of berries this last year, are nevertheless giving us some garden color, with yellow and gold leaves.

It is all a perfect definition of the cycle of rest and renewal that is simply the design of life and seeing all those renewals in the midst of the winter garden are so welcome and so very needed.

IT'S WHY THEY CALL IT FALL

It’s raining leaves today, our annual festival of falling color.  Out every window we can see vivid fall colors, across the road, down the street, beyond the next door neighbors.  Because it has been a different weather pattern year, the crape myrtles, which are usually glorious this time of year with red and yellow and gold leaves, mostly just dried up and dropped after an early freeze.  But the oaks and the sweetgums and the Bradford pears and many others, whose names I do not know, are more beautiful every day.  

 

 

 

We have a kind of love-hate relationship with the leaves.  When the trees are green and it is hot weather, they give us wonderful shade and shelter and make all the difference to our comfort inside and out.  When the leaves turn, they make a kind of visual poem to autumn and simply lift our hearts with their beauty.  When they are raked and chopped and composted, the leaves turn into mulch and eventually compost, a type of home-grown plant food for the garden.   But in between the time the leaves start turning and the time they are all raked and chopped and stacked, the leaves become rather difficult playmates, because they ride wind currents right into our garden room, if we sweep them off the patio they simply seem to blow right back toward us, they hitch a ride on our cat’s fur, and they create for us a lot of work. 

 

Today I vacuumed up all the leaves on the patio, then I raked some that were damp into a pile too wet to vacuum and pushed and pulled the pile around the corner to the south side of the house, because today we have a south wind and they would just come back.  Tonight we are due what is called a cold spell and the wind will change around to the north.  Either way, hopefully that leaf pile will  not come back toward our back door, and either way our cat will likely make a joyful nest there.

MAYBE LIFE IS LIKE AN INTERSECTION

It occurred to me, as I was driving down the road this morning and thinking about our much-beloved granddaughter, who recently got a ticket for driving through a red light, that getting that ticket was a good preparation for life for her, because of all the amazing considerations one must deal with in simply going through an intersection, even in a quiet neighborhood.

 

For instance, as we approach an intersection, are we in the correct lane; are we turning here or going forward; if turning, which way and are we in the proper lane for that turn?  Is there a traffic light, and if so, at what position is it:  is it green or red or yellow – go or stop or wait?  Is our approaching speed appropriate or not?  How far away are the people behind us?  In front of us?  To either side of us?  And are there any pedestrians?  If there is a stop sign, is it four-way or two-way, and what is the order of process – who goes next?  Because stop signs really require attention as to taking turns.

An automobile is a very powerful machine, even a very ordinary model such as we drive.  It is bigger than a bread box, very heavy, very capable of being a problem if we put it in the wrong place, particularly if we are going at the wrong speed for the situation.

Almost every element from our position to speed to where everyone else is has to be assessed and re-assessed constantly and it is simply not easy.  And if we are not careful, we could suffer injury to ourselves or we could cause injury to someone else. 

And if all of that doesn’t also apply to all our other activities in navigating through life, what would?

IF IT'S NOT ONE THING

My mother used to say, when some problem or ‘challenge’ came along, that “If it’s not one thing, it’s twenty-four.”  Meaning, at least to my understanding, that something was just always going to come along, and sometimes lots of ‘somethings’.

Which pretty well applies to today’s many difficult situations.  We say that we not only have the Enterovirus, Ebola, terrorists in the middle east and problematic weather patterns, we also have Republicans!  Republicans would probably rephrase the statement a bit.

But here’s the thing we must all keep in mind:  times have never been easy.  Oh, there have been intervals of peace and prosperity, of course, over the long history of mankind, but interspersed among those intervals have been so many wars, so many plagues, so many periods of poverty and suffering.  And yet, mankind has, so far at least, as a species and as individuals, managed to find ways to deal with whatever comes along. 

 

Maybe, sooner or later, we’ll get really serious about looking out for each other, such as making sure that there are decent basic living conditions in areas such as West Africa, where Ebola comes from and where it gets out of hand so quickly in part because of lack of clean water and practical toilet facilities.  Maybe we’ll work as hard at helping the impoverished as we do in following the latest technical trends and the latest celebrities. 

Oh, even then, there would be problems to come along, but maybe they would come along one at a time, instead of ‘twenty-four.’