Category: Gardens and Gardening
Sid Vicious Is Back!
Genuine April weather it was, air soft from yesterday’s rain and sunlight occasionally reaching through the clouds. I was at my desk, focused on the needs of students desperate to improve grades who were finally willing to invite my tutelage on the last paper of the semester. My Dear One tapped on my window, beckoned…
Lietuva 10: Random Thoughts
The fragrance of Lithuania in May is lilac with a hint of lily-of-the-valley. It is best not to start a two-week vacation with a fall and a sprained ankle. It is worse to start a two-week vacation with a fall and a broken ankle, so count your blessings. Wherever you are, locate the nearest Maxima…
Lietuva 8: Shaking the Family Tree
Well we traveled from Maryland to Lithuania to learn more about my Dear One’s progenitors and all we discovered was that his maternal great-grandmother’s name was “Prana” not “Orene” (as it appeared to my eye in a scribble on a ship’s manifest). Apparent that “O” was a Cyrillic “P.” Anyway, it makes perfect sense: great-granny…
Lietuva 1: Finding Our Feet
Note to self: pay attention when walking, especially when on steps and curbstones. At the main post office in Kaunas, the last step ends with an extra bump, an inch-and-a-half drop to the paving stones. Didn’t see it. Fell on my face. Thank heavens the camera is okay. My left ankle supports my weight but…
Patience, My Dogwood
Our dogwood has finally bloomed. She withstood the travails of flood, drought and blizzard, and constant cropping by deer, and this spring she blossomed, like some insecure girl crossing that seemingly impassable divide between challenged childhood and blessed womanhood. Her siblings, in a foster-child kind of way, were more precocious. I knew, however, that delayed…
Making a Green Velvet Carpet of Moss
When we signed on the dotted line and acquired the key to our new home in 2005—a new house in a new development—the rock-studded clay and steep slopes of our lot offered a tabula rasa. The woods beyond, a non-tidal wetland protected by the state Department of Natural Resources, would ring with birdsong as soon…
Honey, there’s a fawn in the astilbe!
This morning was no different from most. I woke at 6:30, rose and dressed; sleeping was over and there was much to do to prepare for Father’s Day forty-eight hours away. Morning tasks are always the same. I started the coffee, mixed my morning yogurt with something (today it was muesli), and hung the suet…
The Green, Green Green of Home
I suspect that it may be true that chocolate milk comes from chocolate cows. It has been a miraculous few days of pleasant temperatures, light winds, and sky and clouds as brightly blue and white as Delft pottery. Last week temperatures rose on the shoulders of humidity and for me at least, leaving the shadowy…
Westminster Quarters
Theo was not pleased. She parked herself in the doorway to the office, as though following instructions about seeking safety during an earthquake. Her tail locked around her legs and her yellow eyes gleamed disapproval. I wasn’t quite sure what the noise was. It sounded like an industrial-weight vacuum cleaner but the roar—not that I…
Endings
There are two snowy clematis on the fence that guards the edge of the retaining wall, twin blossoms turning their faces toward the sky. They caught me somewhat by surprise. In the spring I was thrilled by their glossy leaves and cluster of blooms waving at me. It seemed that the almost-dead plant I had…
