While we were away, cold rains pounded San Diego, stranding my parents inside with the kids and washing away most of our carrot seedlings. The radishes and lettuces survived the floods and are looking sprightlier than ever. The blueberries dropped a lot of blossoms but I think we’ll get a few berries, at least. The flowers are lusher than ever, fresh-faced now that I’ve picked off the spent, rain-battered blossoms.
We miss our bird feeder. Last summer, it attracted rats, so we emptied it. I’m aching to try again. When we moved from New York to Virginia in the winter of 2002, the very first box I unpacked was the one marked BIRD FEEDERS. True story. In our Long Island backyard, we had downy woodpeckers, nuthatches, and titmice at the feeders every day. I can still feel the cold glass of the sliding door that tiny Jane and I use to lean against as we watched our birds. In Virginia, we had cardinals, juncoes, and my favorite, the wee chickadees. A pair of bluebirds nested in a box under our deck, right outside my office window. I wrote Across the Puddingstone Dam between bouts of peeking at those bluebirds from between the blinds.
In this yard, we mostly only see sparrows and finches, and the imperious crows. There’s a lone phoebe, junco-gray and tufted like a cardinal, who perches on the fence, watching warily as I putter in the garden. There are the hummingbirds, of course, flashing low overhead like little green comets, perching on the slender branches of the cape honeysuckle. They adore those trumpety orange flowers, as do the bees. I haven’t seen the scrub jay in a while. All last summer he called outside our bedroom window at a minute past sunrise every morning. The kids named him Peanut, after his favorite food.
I just googled my own blog to see when I’ve posted about the flock of parrots in years past. January and February is when they swirl through our neighborhood, it seems. But I don’t think I’ve heard them this year! Any other San Diegans know the whereabouts of those rowdy green squawkers right now?
We spent most of yesterday morning laughing our fool heads off over my pathetic drawings in round after round of Draw Something. It’s like Pictionary on your phone or iPad. Years ago, gosh, maybe as long as TEN years ago, I used to play a lot of iSketch with a group of friends—that too was like Pictionary, but you drew with your mouse. Very tricky. Drawing with my finger in Draw Something is only marginally easier. But oh such fun.
One of the friends I’m playing with happens to be a professional comic book artist. His pictures are, as you can imagine, quite wonderful: comical works of art. I draw stick figures; he produces fully colored masterpieces. One of the game’s best features is that you watch your opponent’s (partner’s? it’s not a competitive game) drawing in real time. I’m sure this becomes tedious for my partners, as they watch me begin and delete attempt after attempt to produce a recognizable “butcher” or “runway” or “Angelina Jolie.” For my kids and me, watching the replay on our end, this game provides a spectacular peek into the mind of an artist.
Speaking of: here’s a clip Scott shared on Facebook today. Delightful and rather dazzling: Chuck Jones demonstrates how to draw Bugs Bunny. “If you’re going to draw Bugs, the best way is to learn how to draw a carrot, and then you can just hook a rabbit onto it. Simplicity itself.” Oh, so THAT’S how you do it.
“Fairy lilies—the pink, the white, and also the yellow—are the rain lilies, the little zephyranthes that spring up after showers. B. Y. Morrison said they should always be grown in quantity, as they grow in the hills of Mexico, in meadows in parts of the South, or in his own garden at Pass Christian. ‘The lawns have been mowed,’ he wrote early one June, ‘and the late azaleas are in bloom with sheets of Habranthus tubispathus and all the zephyranthes in sheets of pink. We have one zephyranthus that sows itself freely in patches of solid color. It came from the USDA years ago, without a name.’ In my own garden there is room for only a few of each kind, but I like to have them surprise me with their small and sudden flowers; they make no demands, and take up so little space. When I find one of the delicately colored flowers in bloom, I pick it, put it in a little glass bottle, and take it from room to room in order not to lose a moment of its brief and fragile existence.”
“It’s light, sweet, and crisp-crunchy, with just a frill of cabbage flavor for interest, like an apple that put on cabbage’s hat at a party to delight everyone with the effect. “
Beauty, tangled and blurred: this is pretty much my life these days. Feverishly working, then wandering out to the garden where I’ll find myself kneeling, gazing, actually watching seeds grow. The radishes, especially. We’ll mark their height and one hour later, they’re taller.
But this morning something had eaten three of them to nubby stems. So. Well. I’m in suspense about tomorrow. Will there be anything left?
“Mommy,” Rilla said earlier this week, “what’s that word for what we do in the garden? I think it starts with a P.”
“Um…putter?” I guess.
“Yes! Putter. Can we go out and putter together? In the garden?”
Can we ever! Music to my ears, little girl. We slip outside together almost every morning and crouch and study. Carrots, sprouted. Lettuces, thriving. Blueberry bushes, loaded with white bells. They were my Mother’s Day present from Scott last year—the year before that, it was my milkweed; he takes hints very well—and when we bought the two small bushes they were covered with blossoms, but almost every last one fell off from transplant shock. Or something. We got exactly three blueberries last year. This year, the plants have acclimated nicely and we have high hopes: perhaps we’ll get a bowlful. They’re little fairy bushes, after all, still tiny.
Rose talks to the mourning doves and they talk back. Me, I’ve got a relationship with a couple of wary crows. I toss bread crusts onto the patio roof and they eye me, heads cocked, from the telephone wire or the enormous Moreton Bay fig on the other side of the schoolyard fence. They wait until I walk away and busy myself in the opposite corner of the yard, and then they swoop. Mornings I neglect my part, they clack at me from the neighbor’s wall.
I’m teaching Wonderboy to fingerknit. It’s slow going; this fine motor work is difficult for him. That’s part of why we’re doing it, to help his fingers become more nimble. But also for the cuddle-up-close time, and the chatter. I’m greedy as a crow about moments like that.
But these beauties had to be captured. Happened upon this patch of color springing up between sidewalk and street in Normal Heights, San Diego. Picture these flowers times four—a glorious strip of color.
City gardeners, I adore you.
(I see gaillardia, snapdragon, and some kind of brown-eyed susan. Working on IDing the rest. The pink fringy ones in the middle photo look like a bit echinacea in the photo, but aren’t.)
Read to Huck & Rilla: Henry Hikes to Fitchburg; Chloe, Instead; Big Hungry Bear; Madeline; Anna Banana (book of jump rope rhymes). Notes on those to follow (Chloe in particular, since it’s new, and both kids loved it; had to read it three times in a row).
Handed out poetry books today (volumes in the Poetry for Young People series, which we’ve collected over the years) and asked the girls to scatter, read, come back to tell something about the poet (time and place) and share a poem. We sat outside in the sunshine and they read or recited their choices. Great fun, we’ll have to make a habit of this. Jane chose Dickinson’s “I Dwell in Possibility,” Rose picked Theseus’s imagination speech from Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Beanie selected Robert Frost’s “A Patch of Old Snow.”
Everyone learned C, F, and G on the ukulele (those who didn’t already know them).
Wonderboy got a haircut the other day and looks quite spiffy.
Rose invented a board game.
The freesia is incredible this year, and between it and the jasmine, the whole yard is fragrant. And I have irises about to bloom.
I don’t remember planting them!
Aphids all over the rosebush, and rumor has it all 1500 ladybugs have decamped to the tall grasses on the other side of our back fence.
