This has been kind of a bummer year for me, book-wise. I’ve only read about five books that I’ve really liked, and otherwise I re-read a bunch of stuff because I just couldn’t find anything that got me excited to read. Seven of the 34 books I’ve read so far this year are books I’ve read before, and that makes me feel like I’m living in the past.
My hold list at the library has several books on it that I’m eager to read, if not truly excited to read, and I’ve been waiting for weeks for many of them. While I waited, I decided to read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye for a local book club, and of course as soon as I started reading it, four of my library holds became available. I delayed them so I could finish the book club book, which was fine but not great, and by the time I finished it, the hold that became available was one I’d been waiting on for something like 14 weeks. I couldn’t remember anything about the book or why I’d requested it, but I started it because it was there. It’s very long, and is a romantasy, which I didn’t realize when I started it, and sometimes I like that! but not right now. Now I’m in it, and I don’t really want to abandon it because I feel like I’ve already abandoned a bunch of other books this year, and besides, I don’t have another book lined up. It just feels like a placeholder.
I started listening to book reviews and the Book Riot podcast again as a replacement for actual books I feel are missing in my life. I’ve learned that Lauren Groff and Ann Patchett both have new novels out, and for the first time this year, I’m excited about what I get to read next.
The sky is overcast and all I want to do is sleep. Yesterday, I was in the garden from 7:30 to noon, breaking only for a peanut butter and banana smoothie, then again in the afternoon, after running to the hardware store to buy dirt to fill in all the holes I’d made.
Unlike other gardening days, when I’ll listen to podcasts I’ve saved up for the occasion, I didn’t plug in while I worked yesterday. I listened to wind in the leaves and birdsong, the scrape of the shovel in gritty and rocky soil, the metallic schwiff of shears as I cut back yarrow and salvia. I felt the breeze on my ears and relaxed into the quiet of the gray Sunday morning. I watched a worm wriggle on top of the mulch when I unearthed it to make a hole for a transplanted yarrow.
I arranged and rearranged the still-potted purple asters and deep red chrysanthemums I’d bought in the rain on Saturday. I couldn’t figure out where I wanted them. I placed the potted mounds in the flower bed, then walked out to the street to see how they looked, moved them, walked out to the street again, and decided I needed to cut back and tear out a bunch of other stuff to make it work. I moved yarrows from front to back, salvias from left to right, agastaches and lantanas, verbenas and veronicas from right to left, then watered them all in under low, looks-like-rain clouds. I moved yard waste and an old rotting chair to the curb.
At the end, when I finally stopped because I just couldn’t do any more, I took a pumpkin muffin out on the porch and sat on the table so I could look out over the garden and observe the fruits of my labor. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and looked down to see a shimmering, emerald hummingbird in the scarlet salvia. It zipped from flower to flower, abuzz with energy. I watched it until it drank its fill and flew away, a glittering green gem with wings.
Today, my body is worn out. I went for a swim that didn’t even register on my Fitbit because I moved so slowly. I am surprised I managed to get out of bed and over to the pool, but my body was sore and the water sounded nice to stretch out in, and it was.
Now I have to figure out how to turn my brain on for work. Coffee is helping. The cat that just laid down on my arms and the gloomy sky are not.
Some years our oak makes acorns, and some years it doesn’t. When I mowed the other day, I saw a round green nut with a little brown cap on the ground, and I knew this was an acorn year.
Last week, I took a few minutes to explore under our oak tree. I wanted to find an acorn, and I did. I had planned to take it up to the deck with my journal, but instead I sat down in the grass in the dappled sunlight. In our eight years of living here, I’d never sat in the grass there on that little hill under the oak, never seen our house or the tree or the neighborhood from that perspective.
The breeze was cool, and the sun warm in the places it reached me through the leaves. On my drive home from the pool that day, I saw maples tinged with red and pink. Just a touch. Like acorns on the ground, pink-tinged maples portend the coming cool crispness of fall.
After I’d sat for a few minutes in the quiet, I heard the flutter of wings above me as a bird lighted on the bird feeder. As soon as I turned my head to see it, I heard a flutter again as the bird darted back into the tree. I looked up, and a little black-capped chickadee perched alert on a swaying limb above me, just a few feet away.
The ground around me was littered with empty acorn cups. This must be what the squirrels are so busy with. I picked up an acorn they hadn’t gotten to yet, a plump green one. In my hand, I held the potential for an oak. This little green nut, smaller than the pad of my thumb and nestled in its cute brown cup, could grow a tree twice as tall as our house.
These trees make hundreds, maybe thousands of acorns in the hope that at least a few will be buried and take root. Then, on water and sunlight and nutrients in the soil, they’ll grow. They’ll make leaves that turn light into food. That never fails to blow my mind. Sunlight! Into food! It’s magical to me. They’ll take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and release clean oxygen for us to breathe. The oaks that these acorns will become, buried by squirrels and forgotten until they sprout, these oaks will clean the air, and provide us shade, and make leaves that rustle prettily in the breeze. They’ll make shelter for birds and food for squirrels. They’ll stabilize the earth if we give them space to.
The messier the garden gets with dried out perennials long past the point of being attractive, the more likely I am to find monarch chrysalises in the debris. I mowed earlier this week in the shadows of the late day, and when I pushed the mower past the compost pile, I saw a chrysalis hanging off a desiccated, composting stem. I saw one hanging from the underside of the birdbath bowl. There’s one hanging off an upright post on the stair railing. There were three hanging from tomato cages stored on their sides under the porch stairs.
This time of year, I become desperate to tidy the garden. The beds that were so lush and green in the spring and summer now look ramshackle and abandoned. The once vibrant rudbeckia, with its emerald foliage and sunshine yellow flowers, looks like someone took a blowtorch to its blossoms; black stems stand in a sea of brown-spotted, crispy leaves. The goldenrod is no longer grassy-green and gold, tall, and swaying in the breeze, and the shasta daisies no longer bursts of dazzling white on proud stems. Instead, the two have fallen over, exhausted from reaching for the sun, and are now tangled up together in a thicket of brown brush. The underleaves of the yarrow and lavender are musty silver-black instead of the fresh silver-green of spring, and the Joe Pye weed, which now reaches my shoulders, looks like the remanants of flower stems that have been left in a vase too long: the bottom leaves are rotting, and the stalks a dusty brown.
Once the flowers are done, and their petals curl to crispies, the plants transition to making seeds. It’s not a pretty process. I know this, and yet I struggle every year. I want to cut things back because I can’t stand the mess, but I also want to leave it because the joy of my garden is not just the greenery and pretty flowers, it’s that it surrounds our house with a little wildlife preserve. I garden because I like the birds and the insects, the chipmunks and bunnies and squirrels. I love watching them all, and I am delighted that they come hang out in our yard. The garden is intentionally full of botanicals for butterflies and birds because they’re what’s interesting about plants to me: I don’t want a sterile garden that just has pretty flowers, I want a garden that invites all the creatures.
This time of year, when the garden is its messiest, and every instinct in me screams to clean it up, is harvest time for the birds, and shelter time for the work caterpillars need to do. As soon as I think I can’t take it anymore, and I’m ready to cut it all down, a goldfinch will land on a crunchy echinacea cone and start eating the seeds. It’ll bob there, a burst of happy yellow brightness atop the black stem, and I decide, okay, I can leave the echinacea a little longer. But just the echinacea. Everything else must go.
Then I mow the lawn and see a chrysalis on the compost pile. I remember the chrysalises under the stairs, under the birdbath, in the nepeta and pineapple sage, the rue and the Russian sage last year. I look across the swaths of spent stems and brown withered leaves in the garden, and I know there are likely a dozen chrysalises tucked away in that mess. And I know I won’t cut it back. I can’t bear to. What if I kill a poor caterpillar on its way to becoming a butterfly?
I set today aside to garden and to tidy at least some stuff so I don’t have as much work to do in spring. I can cut some stuff back and still leave plenty for the animals. But wouldn’t you know it, it’s raining. Maybe it’ll ease up and I can take advantage of the hydration to put some stuff in the ground instead of cutting stuff back. I’ve been wanting mums and a couple of shrubs…
I ate lunch outside atop our white wooden table yesterday. I dangled my feet over the porch railing and watched a monarch butterfly float from flower to flower. It drank deeply from a magenta zinnia, pirouetted into the air, then dropped down onto a fiery orange blossom to drink again. I wondered if the butterfly is fresh from a chrysalis I’ve been watching. One of the three under the porch stairs looked ready the day before: instead of the bright green translucence of a new chrysalis, the sheath was transparent, and I could see the folded orange and black wings of the butterfly within it.
The mums are a deep brick red, and the sedums like blushing cauliflowers. I love these rusty hues after the bright yellow and cool lavender flowers of summer.
I’ve hardly sat on the deck since spring. The weather is finally perfect for it now. I wore short sleeves yesterday, jeans, and bare feet. Wind rustled the leaves of trees all around me, and the breeze was cool on my arms while the sun on my back was warm. I couldn’t see the bird feeder because the oak is still heavy with foliage that obscures it. I see a few red-tipped leaves, though. Soon the branches will be bare, and the birds will come to eat, and I will lunch with them.
I sat in my chair by the window last night with a glass of wine, and when I looked up from my book, I saw the moon hanging low in the blackness. It would set soon. I went out in my bare feet after dark, gingerly feeling my way out of fear of stepping on dying yellow jackets — we had a nest under the stairs that we exterminated — so I could see the moon in the full of the sky, without walls around me. The air was cool and crisp, the night air of late summer, soon to be fall. Insects chirred their song in the darkness, and I wondered how much longer the evening will be filled with their sounds.
To the west, over the shadowy tops of deciduous trees that will soon lose their leaves, in a valley of sky between mountain domes, the tilted crescent nestled in a light pillow of clouds. It felt cozy. I felt invited to climb under the covers in my own bed and snuggle in with a good book.
I felt moved somehow, like the moon is different and more accessible, and maybe a little more magical, as we enter the fall season. It says I’m here for your quiet, your going within. Night will be crisp and clear and dark, and there will be more of it; I’ll be here shining, a sliver or a sickle or a full glowing globe in an inky sky. Walk with me.
Butterfly Mind 