Small mercies

 

This morning, my first day home after almost a month away at the shore...my travel treat for this year...I got out first thing to give the garden a good watering and pick up the yard.  It's Thursday, so tomorrow early the yard trash people come; I wanted to be ready.  It took me a few hours to make at least a start, but I was glad to spend them in the breezy, still cool(ish) morning.  Between what the wind threw down from the trees and what spiked out from the elianthus and other untidy shrubs, the bin overflowed.  

My yard is mostly shade, except at the end of the driveway where Joseph has a raised bed of greens and beets.  They were glad for the water then, for now it's 91 degrees and climbing, the sun beating down on it as well as on a strange crop of purple weeds growing up through the gravel. 

They are pretty weeds, so I haven't pulled them yet.  They seem to be impervious to heat, drought, and tramping.  I might want to transplant some of them into a pot whose once pretty blue flowers are shredded and brown.  Neglect for a month exacts its toll.

Actually, there are bigger and sadder losses:  the japanese maple and the blue spruce I planted earlier in the spring are gone.  I thought they had had enough water and enough time to settle roots in, but shade or not the heat must have been too much for them.  I might be able to save the maple by cutting it down and transplanting it, but the spruce, despite gallons of water this morning, didn't respond.  The spiders had made veils among its drooping branches from which, when touched, needles fell.

Its demise made me wonder whether planting things too far from their native soil just asks for such loss.  (It reminded me of a line of Eudora Welty..."It's not good to get too far from where you are known and all...") The spruce was a lovely blue/grey tree I hoped would add some exotic flavor to the new spot I'd made in the ivy spread in back.  The arborvitae, on the other hand, planted at the same time not far from the spruce, though for more pedestrian reasons, are more common in this area and seem to be thriving.  Except for two plants on the front slope, so dead as to be unidentifiable, everything there, in shade, watered by rain and by my young neighbor across the street during my absence, also thrives.

l enjoy my morning's watering and picking up, so I haven't done what I should have...put in an irrigation system.  It's hard to do in my uncoordinated yard, but clearly I've got to tackle it before I go away again.

I am glad that among the saved was the great bush of hydrangea, planted when I first moved here, this year flowering lavender, pink and blue.  Its roots must be deep enough to reach unsuspected wells.  

There were a few other small mercies worthy of gratitude this week.  On my way home from the shore I stopped to visit my sister and brother-in-law in the western part of the state, and while there got to spend time with friends as well.  Even before the pandemic's isolation, it had been a few years since we met, and each encounter reflected the way such friends are able, nonetheless, to pick up and go on from where we left off.   Anne noted that she felt lucky in other ways, too.  "We live," she said, gratefully, "mostly peaceful, gracious and healthy days."  Yes.  I hold my breath sometimes thinking of that.