Fire in the Morning

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As I do every morning, I sit on the bench in the garden and drink my coffee and smoke a fag. I look around me; the garden, at this point of spring, is an unholy mess: seeding flats everywhere; empty plastic flowerpots everywhere; lumber everywhere; the fire bowl heaped with cleared out branches and bits of lumber. 

The fire bowl, I decide, holds the detritus that's making the whole garden a mess, so I light the fire.

The yard, the garden, the bench, the disarray, the fire

The fire. It's gold, and the lavender morning light together, priceless.

When this beautiful fire dies down, the garden's still a mess, but I care much less. I get my trowel to plant the cosmos and morning glories my friend R gave to me yesterday.

Leek

I have grown them in flats. 

I have lain on the ground and tweezed the tiny seeds from a dish to the earth. 

I have danced frenzied fandangos over their patch of ground, sprinkling the seeds from a sieve waved high in the air.

Yet I have never even once enjoyed a crop of stout, hearty leeks, their succulent white bulbs crowned with the frosty blue sword blades.

Here is a mighty leek fresh from its seedling tray this morning:

As well, I transplanted a handful of these to the garden about a month ago, and they look just the same: single shafts of faerie hair.

Surfeits Rock

M. lives down the hill from us, in an old gray Victorian house. In all M. does, he has the unswerving drive of the stock, tunnel-visioned character in a farce. He applies this drive to the maintenance and improvement of many properties in the neighborhood. Most famously, when retained to remove one side of a forked trunk from a tree that shaded my garden for many hours each day, he pressed on and cut down the two largest trees on the property. (This precipitated family blood baths and sieges of terror, but that's another story.)

This week I commissioned him to go with me to [the loathed] Home Depot to buy dirt, manure, and peat moss for the afore-discussed straw house's roof beds. We set out in his giant new Ford truck, but before we'd left the driveway, he told me he knows where to get compost cheaper.

When he came back, his truck was filled with enough compost for all the gardens at Versailles. It was black, and hot, and steam gushed from it and up into the sky. He filled the roof beds:

And then he distributed big mounds of it around the garden.  I don't know why they look so small in the picture below, because they are very large.

When I felt we'd exceeded the point of overkill, I slyly told him to give the rest to my neighbor, S. He said he was actually on his way over to her house, because--inscrutably-- "she wants me to put a door in a tree."  And off he went.

Sweet Pea Ploy

The seeds wrapped in dirt, paper towl, plastic, and, finally, ice

In the four years I've lived here, I've planted sweet peas every spring. Not a seed has sprouted. I plant them nice and early because they love to germinate in the frosty earth. I've tried everything except playing violin sonatas for them as they brood upon themselves underground, but nothing.  This year their obduracy finally pissed me off enough to take them on big time. And I've won!

OK, so they want it cold?  I soaked the littled bastards overnight in a cupful of water in the refrigerator. I took a sheet of paper towel and put a tasty rill of potting soil down the center of it. I sprinkled a line of seeds down the rill and rolled up the towel so they were swaddled in a sausage of soil, sealed it up in a plastic bag, and put the whole thing into a gratinee dish, where I piled on a couple of trays of ice cubes. For a week I've changed the ice cubes often, and today I allowed myself a peek in the dirt. Ha! Several miniscule, pallid prongs have elbowed their way out of their casings!

I love the feelings of shifting gears into determination that leads to victory.

Mutable Fate

From the stars at my birth to my socioeconomic bracket, it was written that I would end up a cranky old lady, notably spindly of build and plump of stock coupons, who teetered about in red Converse high tops with the aid of a slender ebony cane, making the lives of others deliciously, endearingly miserable.

My center of operations would be a mossy and moldering Arts and Crafts mansion, like this one in Rockland County, designed, hand built, and lived in by Henry Varnum Poor [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Varnum_Poor]:

The main house

The art studio in the main house

The potter's shed

Corner of the kitchen

Instead, I am living in a raised ranch basement apartment. 

. . . And, to make matters worse, This outrage to my socio-aesthetic sensibility is contaminated by the fact that I'm happy here. Hence the natural segue to issues of entitlement, bitterness, rage, and depression is ruptured.  Furthermore, I no longer suffer any of them (all so very much very often), so our visit to this terrain is over.

It's bracing to grow up.  At any age.

(As if it suffuses my genes, though, there remains a part of me that wholeheartedly knows I crave my own house--my own terraine, my own timbers--a mossy old house where the rooms are suffused with the scent of wood smoke;where at night the peacocks and peahens shriek on the roof; where the chickens peck and cluck around the door; where the canes of the bamboo grove clack in the wind; where border collies follow me about the property and snooze at my feet while I write. (Along with my actual present fellow, Wolsey the Cairn.))

So what has this to do with mutable fate.  Well, three years ago, when I was still getting my garden here into some fundamental order, I piled seven bails of straw into a little alcove behind the bean vines. My hands and coordinate body parts did it. It wasn't clear to me why, really, so I decided to dub it my meditation nook. I did, in fact, meditate in it twice, and it was good. I especially liked it as a place to get out of the hot sun and hide. 

The thing of straw

 (from the outside, bean vines climbing it)

I decided sometime this winter that the nook occupied a patch of garden that would serve well as a part of the garden, as it receives a lot of sunshine.  This spring I piled on eight more bails and bought lumber to make a green roof to set atop it all.  I've lined pocket beds of the roof with chicken wire and that black, unwoven cloth you use to suppress weeds. I've so far filled one corner of it with garden soil, vermiculite, and manure.  Now I'm taking a brief rest.  

Heirloom tomato plants, which are, after all, vines, will hang down from all around the edge of the roof. Leeks shall sprout up around the cupulla, or turret. Inside, the old bamboo love seat is already in place, for taking in an unsullied view of the woods. And for planning construction of the cob stove for baking bread, which will also warm the dear hovel in the winter. . . .

Mutable, mutable, mutable fate.