Lizkdc Dislocation

Accidently in Love (More Photos and Flowery Things)

Saturday I accidentally discovered the glory of the Arboretum at dawn in May.

This is an idea that has existed somewhere in the theory zone of my brain ("someday I'll get up and visit the park at the height of its glory--at sunrise"), but very comfortably shelved in the "unspecified future" overflow parking lot quite aways off,  and never in the "this morning,  ass leaving bed"  parking space right out front of the cerebral cortex.

But that morning the fricking 4 AM birdsong reached some sort of ecstatic, nonsensical, brain-penetrating height and I had late coffee the previous night and things on my mind and somehow, boom, I was wide wide awake at quarter to five in the morning with a complete conviction that sleep was never coming back. And somehow this translated into my feet hitting the floor and stumbling out the door at 5 AM on a Saturday.

I found:

• the Rhododendron Path lined with towering, ridiculous beauties with their petal balls of purple and pink and white, beside a quiet, dark stream, and the shadowy Hemlock Hill rising behind as backdrop
• secret dells of shadowy ferns
• great spiraling fountains of ivory spirea
• glades of tangerine azaleas
• cliche-perfect dew-beaded white roses
• purple and yellow irises reflected in a dawn-colored pond, and leaping frogs that kept startling me with a plop and nearly landing me in said pond
• blackbirds crying deetle donk and songbirds galore
• last of the lilacs falling gently to pieces into deep green meadows

It was a feeling almost of intoxication.

A Damp and Fertile Post

This time of year,  gardeners will stare at you with glazed and unseeing eyes.  They may look like they're present, but they're not.  Their heads are filled with a drama taking place a foot underground. There is mud under their fingernails and they are fingering seed packets in their pockets and there is compost in their socks.

It's a hundred times more severe here in New England this year because of the Rain. The rain which fell and fell and fell until the folks at the Blue Hill Observatory said it was the wettest March in a hundred years and just as they were about to show you their lovely charts, their spouses called and said the basement was flooded so they had to go.

It rained for a solid month until the entire state was soggy and grey and anxious.  The roads became edged with new miniature ponds, and the ponds expanded boastfully into lakes, and the chilly little rivers staged takeovers of the surrounding fields and all around the water knocked at the doors and windows and in many cases moved straight into the house without waiting for a key or an invite.

Snowflakes and Insufficiency

The camera--well, as wielded by me, right now--can't do justice to what the eyeball can see. 

The Arboretum's collection of evergreens from everywhere mean that in this small corner of Boston you have a winding Japanese pine and a towering Serbian spruce and a stand of skinny hemlock and some dense English gardeny ornamental shrubs all living together on a few hillsides, wound through by the original little brooks that shaped this neighborhood.

And then an especially clinging snow sifts down on it all and traces out all the detail -- long needles and short, small, personable little Christmas trees and 100 foot towers, evergreens with shapes that are dense, opaque and watchful, and others with open, swooping boughs like candelabra.  And it's so amazing?

It would be more admirable if I could truthfully write that I walked about this scene full of virtuous and clever thoughts about the natural world, its transformation in winter, and the oncoming New Year.

However, I did not.  I walked about it simultaneously overcome by a sense of sense-swamping beauty and complexity,  and my utter inability to *make* something of it. Each time I reach one level of satisfaction with picture taking, I seem to pass right into a sense of just how far down the learning scale I am with my camera, and get overcome with something very much like a nine year old child'lump-in-the-throat "WHO CARES ANYWAY!"

October Gets It In Gear

I'm looking at the row of tiny dark clouds lining up in the weather box on my home page. And I'm reminded that October throws a lens of its own on the weather.  Suddenly, blue sky and bright sunshine, while still on offer, become more precious.  No more of the overgenerous, profligate sun, sun, sun, sun, thunderstorm for an hour, sun of July and August. No more of the freshmen-misleading gentility and slight, polite cooling of September.

In October, you have the gorgeous sunny day and gilded leaves beloved of postcards, then windy, chilly grey for two days, then suddenly, another helping of sun.  The rain rains all day long, when is happens, filling the gutter and weighing down browning garden wreckage. 

At night, the temperature drops become precipitous, no longer just playing around, and when I come out on the front step in the morning to get the paper, the chrysanthemums look at me like "DUDE what just happened?" 

In October, your paper will be due.  Baseball will end. The geese are exercising their exit strategy.  Get the bulbs in the ground before it's too late.  The light will lessen.
You have to grab one of those perfect October days outside when it happens. Because after comes November, and you know what he's like.  Bastard.

July, July

The Stargazer, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Stargazer lily in my garden

Things about July to love:

It's easier to find a bunch of musicians in colonial hats and mandolins singing sea shanties. In Boston, anyway.

Stargazer lilies.

Blueberry pie. My mother bought one from the Dominican nuns, who are financing their good works $5.50 at a time with pie. 

To the Aggressive Mockingbird in My Shadberry Tree

IMG_2345.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Rain drop on shadberry: Yay It Finally Rained

Listen, I appreciate your company.  When you are actually enjoying the fruit of our Amelanchier alnifolia,  posing jauntily with one pale ripening berry in your mouth and quirking your long tail, you are rather fetching in an Audobonesque type of way.

But I have a problem with your habit of bullying the other birds, making a great fuss and noise when they approach the tree, alarming and driving off the finches and such like, and generally appearing to try to appropriate the entire berry-filled tree to yourself.

I would bring it to your attention that you are, at best, six inches in height, sitting atop a tree that is at least ten feet high and contains several hundred berries.  You have no pockets, and  your entire methodology for berry transport is limited to flying away with a single berry in your beak.