Seasons Change and So Do We

            I cut down the hard, bare, skeletal branches of an apparently dead butterfly bush last weekend. The plant made purple flowers (top photo left), attracted butterflies, and was one of our first plantings, so I felt bad about losing it.

            I used the two-handed manual hedge clipper to do the job. We have no hedges to clip, but I keep the hedge clipper around to prune individual shrubs. Last fall, when our butterfly bushes were all growing too tall, I cut them back significantly. Apparently I picked the wrong year to do it; after a winter of long cold spells all four bushes persisted in looking dead and leafless. Three of them eventually produced some green. The oldest of the four, tall and temperamental against a bamboo fence, the first of our shrubs to rise above the fence line, wasn't making any leaves by the first week in June. It was the skeleton at the feast. I thought it was time to pull the plug.

            Sunday was a warm blue day, close enough to the approaching solstice for a long, sunny-summer-day feeling. I felt hot for the first time this year working in the garden, digging things up that had got too big or spread too wide, and replanting them somewhere else. I'm moving tall phlox from areas where they crowd out other plants and pose a danger of spreading their late-season fungus infection to a  dogwood shrub we've been cutting dying branches off the last two years to save the rest from the spreading doom.

            When it was time to bring the grim reaper to the bare butterfly bush, I cut off each of the major canes as low as I could with the clipper. When I cut the last of the branching canes, I noticed -- a half-second after applying the coup de grace -- a single fresh green sprig growing straight out of the low end of a thick cane. Some last urge of vitality had pushed out a new green stem, catching my eye just a heartbeat too late. It hadn't grown tall enough for me to notice it, to distinguish it from the surrounding growth. (Pretty much everywhere in this back garden has "surrounding growth.") I had tried to give the shrub long enough to show some sign of life, but I hadn't kept my eyes open at the last moment.

            Life is tenuous. Inches and seconds make a difference.

            Unable to turn back the clock or make amends, I cut the green sprout from the thick apparently dead wood it was growing from and placed it in water. Odds on getting it to sprout? Between now and the solstice? A tiny cutting from a once sizable shrub?

            Meanwhile, not that far away, a new peony bush has bloomed its first light pink bloom under the lea of the large (Chinese native) tree-form peony. The tree blossoms in early May before the familiar peony shrubs do. Ah, I thought, so the big plant has produced an offspring.

            But if you look closely, it's not same variety as the tree peony. (Photo at left.) It's our regular, good old American backyard variety. How did it get there?

            Plants come and go.

            I'm hoping we can replicate that butterfly bush from the surviving sample. But if we can't, something else will take its place.

The Death of a Cat

            She was an unusual creature. She climbed up into your lap and sat there. We've had cats that followed you around the block when you took a walk, but this was an remarkably people-centered cat even by our standards.

            If you came to visit, she waited for you to settle into a comfortable spot, stay there for a while, and then jump into your lap. She was a bit promiscuous. She didn't have to know you very well. She was endearing, so we forgave her much. She had a temperamental stomach, threw up her catfood more often than was really necessary, never an appealing prospect to encounter before you stepped on it, or sat on it.

             We had decided, or rather Anne had decided, that she would be an indoors cat, and this put some stress on going in or out. On rare occasions she managed to get out, disappearing for hours if you tried to corral her. There was hardly any point calling her name into the night -- we'd never used it.Previous, outdoor cats ended up dying, after years of patrolling the neighborhood in the manner of cats immemorial; often it was some cat-born disease that laid them low. It was assumed, further, that if she didn't got out, she wouldn't get fleas. She got them anyway. 

             After Kitty (the only name we actually used for her; her official name Sasquatch just never caught on) returned from her longest adventure, we rushed her into the house and redoubled security. When she meowed pitifully at the door, her appetite now thoroughly whetted for the great outdoors, Anne bade her, unsympathetically, "Live on the memories!"

            Keeping her caged up in the house felt cruel to me -- I went around muttering "I know why the caged bird sings" -- but it did keep her alive.

           Then when the kids were out of the house and we moved to another house in a city neighborhood, suddenly we let go of the rule. She was an old cat now., and we lived in a flat, contained area where she seemed less likely to disappear.

            I don't know if we can blame the ear mites on that decision. I took her to a vet some years ago when one of her ears appeared to be infected. He said the opening in the ear canal had begun to close because of repeated infections and that made it more likely to infect again. The only possible cure was surgery. When I asked how much that would cost, the answer -- four figures -- seemed to take him by surprise. Had no one asked this question before? High-priced vet services began to seem to me one of those rackets, like orthodentics, that preys on the natural conglomeration of love and fear. Where was national pet health insurance when I needed it?

           Despite antibiotics, the ear continued to be a problem. The cat would try to scratch the source of the irritation, mites, probably -- whaling away at something inside her head with the claws of her hind leg. This succeeded in tearing up an open wound in the back of her neck that never healed.

            When she began to lose her mind, as we put it, we carried her around to the places when she forgot how to get there on her own. She'd go outdoors then meow pitifully when she found me in the garden. What did this mean? I carried her back into the house, and when she tried to go out again stopped her. For years she could not get into the house unless I picked her up and carried her. Anne said she had a phobia of doors. She perched at the cusps of doorways inside the house, looking fearful and at a loss. She hid from the kind neighbors who came to feed her when we went away to visit family. As she get older, she spent whole days in one place, often on our bed, sleeping until Anne came home in the evening and it was time for the next feeding. She sat on our laps, generally mine, in the evening.

            She slept on our bed for years, theoretically at the foot; sometimes determined to climb to the head and put her face in Anne's hair. Some deep neurosis was at work.

            This lasted until she peed on the bed while sleeping away the afternoon. She lost her bedroom privileges, but worse was to follow. She peed on my lap one evening spent in the customary fashion: the adults watching episode xx in some many-disced TV drama, the cat storing up enough human contact to spend the night in a chair.

            The vet (a different one) said incontinence was rare in cats. But it proved irreversible in ours.

            I beg the reader's indulgence if I do not lead you down all the steps in this dark decline. Suffice it to say that the cat was soon a smelly mess, and the nights she chose to sleep in her litter box were often an improvement over her other choices. And, oh yes, half the house was covered in plastic.

            In the last months we wrapped her in a towel first before we held her. Whatever disease was attacking her internally began to take the flesh off her even while she continued eating her medically formulated canned and dry food, and the hair fell off her lower limbs. When she stopped eating, approaching the bowl in the old routine, sniffing it, but then unable to feel any desire to ingest, we knew her days were numbered.

            She still wanted to be held. In fact, that's all she wanted. Anne came home on Friday night and held her weakened form in a towel for hours as we waited for our son Saul to call from the bus station. I suspected this visit would be his last chance to see Kitty. He had been a child still when we took her home from an animal shelter -- a lot of years ago.

            Kitty never appeared to be in pain. She piped a few strange, louder-sounding breaths, but not very loud, nothing that suggested a struggle... and let go of this world.

            We'll remember her with affection.

A Perfect Day For A Weeding

I'm happy to hear, I write back to my sister Gwen, that you're enjoying your garden this spring. I hope to hear that from everyone.

            Personally, I have come to love weeding. It's a hands-on way to make a concrete improvement in my environment. I go away with a sense of accomplishment.

            I like being physically close to the ground, moving into the sun on cool days, staying in the shade on hot ones. I like smelling the earth and whatever's growing in it.

            Since you often stay in the same place for a period of time, more wildlife appears -- mostly bees and birds for me -- and your brain can pay more attention to subtle clues. You listen to the birds when you're out of doors doing something with your hands. It must be like weaving, crocheting, needlepoint -- things I have never done -- focusing one part of your mind on a task, leaving another piece of your mind to roam its own thoughts or take in its surroundings. A garden is a good 'surrounding.' That's what it's for.

            I find in this climate it's only warm enough for two or three months to do something slow and meditative, to take in the garden -- the home environment -- at this pace, a pace decided by other living things. Birds have reasons, and even routines, for darting about. For calling or singing. You become aware of them. If a bird happens to have a long song to sing, you're there to hear it. If the bees are busy, you find ways to meld your activities with theirs; you give each other some space, as needed, but don't cede the territory to them. It's yours as well.

            So the other day, almost warm enough to be performing this occupation in perfect comfort -- not quite, but a more beautiful day for being a little cool: that cool dry air creating a perfect light for admiring spring green and other colors -- I am removing a collection of intruders from a patch of groundcover thyme. The thyme (it makes tiny white flowers; a few of them; eventually) had captured this patch of earth fair and square some years ago. But other plants attacked it. I pulled out the intruders, a thick viney clover the original sinner, for several years before I accepted that you couldn't fight change forever and maybe you shouldn't. Making decisions now, deciding to allow some of the intruders to stay for aesthetic effect even though they will cause me more trouble in the future... I'm down on the ground where I smell the thyme. There's a comparatively gigantic echinacea (cone flower) in the middle of this patch, and I decide to leave the decision of whether to transplant it to some indefinite future. It's kind of interesting where it is right now, though probably bad for the thyme. I'm pulling out violets, clover, some clearly identifiable weeds, and a few nascent dandelions -- small, though big enough to take some thyme roots with them when you pry up their own.

            I want to stop time here. Time -- I play, as always, with the verbally inviting paradox: time, thyme -- is in charge here. Is thyme on my side? Not really; it's on its own side. Free will doesn't get to say how long I'll do this. External factors will decide. The weather will change; my legs will get stiff. The phone will ring. I'll remember what I'm supposed to be doing.

            But for a while I am back in the garden.

"Heigh-ho, the wind and the rain": A Garden of Photos from the Other Sort of Day

           In the play "Twelfth Night," Shakespeare gives the play's clown, Feste, a great song known as "The Wind and Rain." The last line of each stanza (except the final) goes "For the rain it raineth every day." Here's the first stanza: 

"When that I was but a tiny little boy,

With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy,

For the rain it raineth every day."

 No it doesn't, I think. It only seems that way. I remember, quite clearly, when was it? -- two-three days ago? -- a whole day without a bit of rain. I have the photos to prove it. 

            (Actually, I think Mr. Shakespeare was intending a somewhat more philosophical meaning for "rain" in that last line.)

            In any event, when I'm not bemoaning the weather I'm taking note of the blooming times of various springtime splendors.

            It's poppy time. (Top photo.) They grow in front of the house and they're wide and bright and showy, like creatures from another planet -- or climate, at least. The have wobbly necks, I mean stems, and they're quite vulnerable to being battered down in the wind, as happened today in our late May nor'easter. Poppies grow all over the world, but I'm pretty sure these are not a variety much like those of Afghanistan that supply the world with opium. We get northern European varieties, I believe, such as Icelandic poppies. Apparently they don't mind the winters here. We are getting more of them every year.

            The obscure perennial in the shade garden (second photo down). I've misplaced its name and hope to recover it some day. The plant came back this spring after being trampled on by the folks trimming the trees in this area last spring. I'm impressed by its persistence.

            The columbine (third pic down) are blooming very late. I'm sure I found them in early May some years. They're advertised as part-shade and a woodland plant, and I've had mixed success with planting them in those situations. Some grow for a few years and then give up. But they do have an English-garden sort of delicate charm, a kind of dancing elfish look.

            The big white iris (fourth down). They popped open on a dark day a week ago when nothing else was looking that happy, so I was particularly grateful for them. We don't really have enough sun for most of the irises, so I'm happy when one is doing well.

            The plant below the iris is a larger variety of the campanula -- known as bellflower from the shape of the flowers. There seem to be an unlimited number of varieties, and I have found this defining sentence for campanula on line: "a diverse genus with varying attributes, but most are noted for their flowers, which can be tubular, bell, star, cup or saucer shaped." I put this plant in last year. It's looks happy, and I'm cheered to see it back this year. If I remember correctly, we saw dozens of these on the High Line park in New York City last year.

            I call these little guys (in the sixth photo down) white star-flowers because I don't know what they are. They spread themselves all over. I don't remember planting them, but I've been known to forget a few planting gestures over the years.

            The last photo is the Korean lilac that grows in the back garden along the fence. It's a very reliable bloomer. I've been giving it some lime in the spring. I don't know if it makes a big difference, but it doesn't appear to be doing any harm.

            It doesn't do me any harm either to look at these photos and remember that days do come when the rain that "raineth every day" is not so much on our minds.