Yesterday I continued putting my garden to bed, planting whimsical giant alliums that are straight out of a Dr. Seuss book, transplanting some lavender, and spreading compost throughout the beds. When the sun was too far gone to see anything properly, and the chill was finally starting to set in after a sublime autumn day, I got on my bike and began to ride home. Continue reading
Tonight was perfect for ruminating and riding. As a bone moon rose my heart was in my stomach, sitting there yearning with two eggrolls. The arboretum at dusk teemed with crickets and katydids and whatever else croaks and chirps as the sun goes down. Continue reading
Dearest reader, I write you from a table full of birthday flowers and vitamins, a teapot and plants, crabapples and tomatoes and peaches. Spearmint is hung from window to window, fully dried. We got through the storm. We’re getting ready for supper.
The lack of new entries may suggest a lack of concern for this little blog, but I’ve in fact been thinking often of writing, often of ecology. There are, however, only pittances of time for the actual writing of city life and psuedo-urban homsteading, and I am reminded that these very full august weeks, so ripe and fraught with anticipation and deeply colored blooms, are perhaps the most inauspicious days for starting and keeping up with public writing. These days, filled with bike grease and electricity and dirt and ball jars, leave little space for essays but instead the smallest of vignettes.
Everything is in sketches, with summer seeming like it’s moving just past that tautness of dog days and making way to spread seed. The winds of Irene only intensified this sense of near-urgency, filling Hyde Park and Boston and all the Eastern Seaboard with winds that change seasons.
Most of my time is spent working and riding. I pedal down Cummins Highway, from Washington Street to Hyde Park Ave, my eyes lost in evening primrose that rises five feet high before parasoling into a sturdy canopy of soft yellow flowers and leaves. For money I prune the stately rhododendrons and tricky holly at a woman’s house on a hill. And at the Arboretum, where my internship is quickly dwindling, where I won’t work another full week, I continue to water and tend to very small trees and the larger, stronger ones in the nurseries, admiring the deepened green of their leaves, the slowly growing trunks, the first fruits born to develop and briefly foster the beginning of a new generation.
When we find ourselves at home we’ve been doing a bit of food preservation – plum jam and nectarine butter, pickles and frozen elderberries, blueberries, marigolds and dyer’s coreopsis (not for eating, but to be used in the late fall for wool-dying). I will write more on these things later, but for now I’ll leave you with a feast for the eyes, all the product of a very pleasant Saturday.
See you soon!
Spokes & Petals 