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Tornado Weather

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The other morning Doug looked at the sky and said, tornado weather. The clouds were dramatic, moving fast, with pouchy bottoms and casting a greenish light that didn’t come through in this photo. It just looked spooky to me, but Doug has lived in Michigan long enough to know what it meant. I made sure I knew where the cat was, in case we needed to grab her for a trip to the basement.

It started to rain so hard and so noisily I thought it was hail. It was rain, crazy frantic rain, the kind they call “mata pajaritos” in Chile, rain that kills little birds, because it knocks the nests out of the trees. Rain made the water in the birdbath outside my window look like a mosaic, or the snakework in a medieval Celtic manuscript.

It was the middle of the afternoon, but the sky grew so dark the sensor on the back deck turned the string lights on. Rain streaked down the photo I took, like confetti. The power went out; the generator turned on. The alarm on my phone began to blare, the tornado sirens started to wail, and the cat freaked out. We grabbed her for the trek to the basement, freaking her out even more. It was nice down there, but she doesn’t like to be grabbed. As we settled her down we heard a big thump. In a few more minutes things got quiet and we went upstairs to check for damage.

The house was fine. The roof was fine. The yard was covered with leaf litter, the deck with overturned flowerpots, and in the backyard the top third of a black cherry tree was standing on its head, draped over a powerline. Thousands of people, said the radio, were without power; businesses were shuttered; there was a tornado, a small one they said, in Detroit. And yet the sky was all blue innocence.

We got the generator because, being at the end of a powerline that served only a few dozen people, we were usually – and quite reasonably – among the last to get restored. This time the tree hanging on the line was a hazard that bumped us ahead in the queue. With the widespread damage it still took a couple of days for DTE to get a crew out, but they did come, and chunked the tree into pieces and onto the ground. After they left I inspected the pile for birds’ nests, but it seems that none were harmed.

Edging Toward Fall

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The garden’s been a bit off this summer. Some of my tomatoes, on different plants in different beds, did whatever that is in the photo on the left. Tasty enough, but weird; also a smaller crop than usual. Weather? Critters? Meanwhile a resourceful bunny managed to break in through the chicken wire. In the time it took me to find the break and block it up, she nipped all the flowers off the squash plants and munched up many squash leaves. They have recovered, but there will be no bounty in the freezer this year.

It was, however, a good year for crabapples, which are much appreciated by the deer. Also by me, as the deer spend most of their time snarfing up the crabapples and leave my flowers alone. There are three new fawns this summer, and one of last year’s little guys is now sporting two single-spike, prongless antlers, which means Mama Doe really doesn’t want him around. If deer wonder anything, he must wonder why she keeps chasing him away from where the rest of them are feeding (“Mom! It’s me!”). At first he tried just keeping out of her reach as she nosed through the fallen fruit, but lately he’s started coming earlier in the afternoon, before the others get there. Life as a young buck isn’t easy.

The phlox in the backyard are thriving this year. I planted garlic chives around them on the advice that this would keep deer away, but the deer would wade right through it as soon as they saw the flowerbuds, and chowed down on them. This year I have a lot of milkweed coming up among the chives, in front of the phlox. Whether deer won’t cross the milkweed or whether they’re too distracted by the siren call of the crabapples, the phlox is flourishing, unmolested. 

The plumbago in the front yard is flourishing too. Plumbago is such a useful workhorse of a groundcover. Neither the deer nor the rabbits eat it. It holds back in early spring when the daffodils are in glory, leaping out just when it’s time to cover the daffs’ long, drooping, yellowing leaves; in full summer it bursts into blue flowers; and come fall the leaves turn bright red. This is a plant that really leans into the seasons. It spreads, but slowly, and I’d like to expand its share of the yard. Despite its excellence plumbago can be hard to find in nurseries, so I’ve ordered a few more from my catalogs.

While I was searching nurseries for plumbago, I found this pot of black pansies. Pansies can handle a fair bit of frost, so there’s a good chance they will last till Halloween. They will look nice and witchy sitting on the front steps with some pumpkins. That tomato I started out with also looked a bit witchy, but part of its witchcraft was turning into two BLT sandwiches yesterday. It did an excellent job.

Looking and Seeing

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I once had a job as a substitute art teacher. The class was an elective for seventh graders but, truth be told, many were there because their first choice elective was full. They really wanted to be swimming. They said they couldn’t draw. I told them the problem was, they weren’t seeing what they were looking at. I gave each of them paper, pencil, and a zinnia fresh cut from my garden. Pretend, I said, that you are an ant, crawling around the edge of each petal, all the way to the center of the flower. Draw the ant trail you will make. They did, and they were amazed at what beautiful drawings of zinnias they made.

It inspired me to write a poem about an ant on a zinnias – Magellan of ants, traveling around and around, discovering a universe mysteriously changed from what it was when he started out, in the garden. As Georgia O’Keeffe once said, “…nobody sees a flower, really – it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time…” I grow my zinnias from seed and fall in love with them, and when – as often happens – I feel I don’t have time to paint them, I take these photos.

But I see them better when I paint them. The store-bought lilies and rose dominate this painting, but that’s one of my zinnias nestled in the middle. The lilies had a fabulous scent; I can smell it every time I look at this picture. 

But my main garden flowers are zinnias and cosmos. I wrote a poem about cosmos too; it ends: “Vain petals like a pinwheel/drop in a sudden shower/who would name the universe/after such a flower?” The cosmos flower is said to symbolize order and harmony, most of them having a simple structure like the one on the bottom left of the photo. But because we can’t leave well enough alone, the outrageously ruffled beauty in more or less the center is cosmos, too. A more complex universe; it mixes well with zinnias.

I was walking through the yard, hoping to get a photo of actual ants on actual zinnias – it happens – when a gently buzzing sound made me realize what I was more likely to find on flowers. Bees. The mountain mint, in bloom now, was covered with them. Bees don’t mess around circumambulating – they head right into the center of things. Purposeful, confident, no time to stroll around. They know what they’re looking for, and they find it. 

A Sense of Time

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I’ve put the jasmine tobacco that blooms from early evening through early morning, next to the sundial that bears its witness in daylight only. It only struck me that this was possibly amusing when the first flowers began to open as the sundial, so to speak, shut down. Conservation of – well, something. The sundial, sitting there on the plinth Doug made for it, bears a legend in raised letters: “time began in a garden.” But the original Garden was a place of eternal timelessness. Time as we know it began when people left the Garden.

The sundial tells sun time, which is not the same as the time on a clock. With daylight savings time we set our clocks forward one hour, deliberately to get the clock into a new relationship with the sun. So in summer, the sundial starts out an hour behind clock time. Then there are time zones. Ann Arbor is about 700 miles from Boston, but they share the same time zone and so the same clock time. That’s about three fourths of a time zone, so the sundial and the clock are about another three fourths of an hour out of sync. When my sundial here says eleven fifteen, the clock on the kitchen wall says it’s one o’clock. The Old Farmer’s Almanac carries time zone corrections for various cities if you want to be precise. Based from Boston, of course.

But the natural world’s sense of time isn’t a clock. It’s built in; it’s a flow – bloom, set fruit, ripen, fall. Deer have their fawns when summer’s far enough under way to feed them. Mama here has led her two babies to the easy pickings of fallen fruit under the crabapple tree, more nutritious than the forage available in winter, and giving the little ones time to store up some body fat.

The milkweed’s covered in pods that will wait to burst until fall, when their winged seeds can sail out onto newly bare spots on the ground, and settle in for the cold they need in order to sprout. It’s complex, but they found a niche and filled it. The monarch butterflies haven’t quite colonized these yet, but I expect they will.

The weeping cherry tree is first to bloom in spring, early to leaf out, and early to begin losing its leaves, as it’s doing now. It makes a touch of autumn on the front path, fallen leaves next to the plumbago starting its late summer bloom. This is my favorite groundcover, because it holds back in spring while the daffodils burst into glory, then wakes up and spreads over the dying daffodil leaves, tidying the garden. I greatly admire its natural, nuanced sense of time. Also I love the color. 

Rabbit Life

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A few days ago I strolled out to the garden, intending a peaceful time staking up tomato plants. Instead: outrage! I opened the gate and a rabbit zoomed out of my gladiolus and streaked across the garden! She wasn’t very big, but she was insidethe garden. This could only mean a new hole in the chicken wire. Outraged, yes, but I watched carefully to see where she went, hoping she would lead me to the hole. She vanished into the clump of daylilies against the fence, put there for some reason by previous garden owners. I could see they would make good cover for a bunny, and behind them I could see a long, low break in the chicken wire.

I picked up the hoe that lives in the garden and poked and stomped around the daylilies, listening for bunny rustles. Satisfied that she wasn’t in there any more, I pushed some bricks against the hole to block it, went inside for a spool of wire and some cutters; wired the gap shut from the outside, and finally staked up my tomato plants. 

I had planted gladiolus in the garden because otherwise the deer ate them, and I wanted them for flower arrangements. The rabbit’s technique seemed to be to pull them over sideways, and nibble away. It was very interesting to note that, while decimating the gladiolus, she had totally ignored the ox-eye daisies. They’re volunteers, and plant them selves both inside and outside the garden. Nothing, not the deer, not the rabbits, not even the woodchuck eats them. And as a bonus they’re wonderfully long-lasting in flower arrangements. Maybe I should give up on the gladiolus and let these little daisies take over.

The next day I strolled out to the garden again and yikes! The rabbit was still in there – and now I had closed up her escape hatch. I called in reinforcements. Doug. With a hoe each we propped the garden gate open and herded the rabbit, like a pair of Mr. Mc Gregors, except we were laughing more than we were angry. What a comical sight we must have made, hoes flailing, me squeezing in between the now tall and ferny asparagus, Doug blocking her way to safety like the angel with the flaming sword at the gates of Eden. The rabbit ate of the wrong fruit, and we expelled her from the garden. This is my point of view. Hers, I suppose, would be that the whole yard is her territory, and we’re the interlopers. 

Weather and Heat

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July weather has arrived, and Doug and I are having our usual disagreement about it. Eighty degrees is hot, he says, a typical Michigander view. Eighty degrees isn’t even warm enough for a sleeveless dress I say, a Southern Californian. Dry California heat is different from humid Michigan heat, he tells me. Yes, I say, but I’m sitting right next to you here in humid Michigan and I say it’s not hot. Then I go sit in a shady spot under a tree among the ferns, and he misses out, though he doesn’t consider that he’s missing anything. And I do worry that if I sit there too long the ferns will engulf me – look at them trying, inching up between the bricks, swamping even the lilies of the valley. 

The poinsettias, like me, enjoy coming outdoors for the summer. They had grown so thin and weepy indoors, this vacation was just what they needed, pulling a new green summer wardrobe over their heads; summer camp for Christmas plants. But I know I can rely on them. Indoor winter light will turn them red again when the time comes.

In a Michigan summer it doesn’t get dark till after nine at night. There’s plenty of light to grow things like this gigantic swath of burgeoning shrubbery, four feet high and about as wide. One search engine thinks it’s catnip and one thinks it’s lemon balm, but I didn’t plant either of them so, whatever else, it’s definitely a volunteer. I brought some in and Frassy rejected it as catnip, but she’s picky about her treats.

Last year’s milkweed was from deliberate seeds, but this year they have added to their number on their own account. They look ready for entire flocks of monarchs, but as yet I’ve seen only two dancing attendance on them. Is it too hot for butterflies? Milkweed is toxic to most animals, so I was surprised to find some of the mid-height leaves munched off, as if by deer. We have three new fawns, inexperienced enough to eat something like that. I’d be happier if it was the woodchuck but she’s too wily.

There’s also a mix of the deliberate and the accidental on the deck. The purchased petunias, taking the opposite route from the poinsettias, are going for a hot, summery red. Behind them the bougainvillea, after sulking tragically indoors the last few months, is stretching every finger in the sun and heat, just beginning to get the polish on its nails. The other pots are mostly full of greenery from zinnia and cosmos seeds I started a few weeks ago, but there in the middle of them is a glorious flash of California poppies, volunteer repeats from last summer. The seed must have survived the Michigan winter and frosty spring, waiting it out until the soil warmed up and local conditions matched its native needs. The poppies rose to the occasion. They’re split decision between me and Doug – eighty degrees is not too hot for daytime, but way too hot at night. As nights warm up they fade, waving goodbye in a fall of petals and fine seed. They’ll be back.

My Dad

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Father’s Day is next week, and my favorite bookstore is full of cards for the occasion. Some are funny, some are tender, and they all make me a bit sad, remembering my Dad, and a bit happy, remembering my Dad. Like many men of his generation he served in World War II, and I probably wouldn’t be here writing this if that hadn’t been the case. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, my Mom was born and raised in a tiny town in Texas, and they only met because the Army Air Force stationed him in Amarillo Texas. This fact has often led me to muse that the purpose of war is not world domination, but rather the stirring up of the gene pool. It would explain why, despite all these millennia of killing each other, there are more of us all the time.

After the war they worked their way back to New York, to a house in the suburbs and, eventually, four children. This was Dad’s favorite picture of the first two of us – me and my older sister. Dad called us his “hobos.” I remember that hat, which I wore for years until either I outgrew it or it fell apart. There has never since been a hat so fine to wear.

Dad was a wonderful photographer, shooting black and white film and making gorgeous prints. I used to watch him in the darkroom, waving his hands between the enlarger and the photographic paper, a magician altering exposures for emotional depth. I always thought his prints were museum worthy but, trained as an engineer, he denied being an artist. He always encouraged and supported me in my own work as an artist and poet, and claimed he had no idea where I got it from. He said he “didn’t get” poetry. Then my Mom slid into dementia, and I showed him a poem I wrote about it. And he said, “Now I get poetry. It’s like why I take black and white pictures instead of color.” 

He had other hobbies, too – a wood shop, a metal shop, restoring antique cars, shooting at a rifle range. He taught me to shoot what we called my mother’s .22, though I never saw her shoot it. When age made it too hard for him to use his shop equipment, he built model ships. I have his model of  The Victory here, in a town unexpectedly suitable for the name. I have many of his custom-made tools, too, repurposed for my crafts. Writing this, I can see where I got my propensity for running many creative outlets at once.

He also gave me my love of classical music, which was always playing when he was home. He gave me my first serious camera when I was a teenager, and this is a photo I took of him with it. He looks – well, a little amused, a little proud, a little indulgent. This is how I remember my father’s face; a face it always made me happy to see. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. 

What Heaven Would Be Like

In my father’s heaven, there would be
perpetual restoration of antique cars.
The needed part would turn up
at the perfect moment,
just late enough
for deep satisfaction.
Authentic colors of paint
would line his garage,
real wood for the dash,
real leather for the seats,
and none of the necessary clanging
of this ecstatic work
would drown out Moussorgsky,
Tchaikovsky, or Zarathustra.
In my mother’s heaven,
there would be no workshops.
My father, coming in 
from the harp-strung air,
would listen only to her,
and however wild and incredible
the stories she told,
he would believe them,
and they would be true.

published in The Kansas Quarterly

Summer A-Coming In

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It’s been an especially lovely week to be out in the yard and garden. We’ve had a run of gorgeous weather, so that prepping the raised beds for their tomato plants and flower seeds was less like a chore and more like sunbathing. I cleared off the weeds, sheared the clover, spread compost, and glanced down idly, wondering if there would be four-leaf clovers this year. Yes! There they were, laughing up at me – half a dozen good luck omens, casually waiting to be noticed and carried into the house. Why should flowers have all the fun? 

In the front yard all the perennials are showing up in order. The crabapple finishes flowering, the pear tree finishes flowering, and the iris knows it’s next. How do they do that? The bearded iris toward the back, the Siberian iris in front, and the pear tree off to the left make a joint project of shadows together on the newly bright lawn.

And once the iris are underway, the peonies chime in. It’s turning out to be an excellent year for peonies – many blooms and many buds on every bush. This is a close-up of the peonies, so you can’t tell they’re interspersed with more irises. They seem to enjoy each other’s company. That inspired me to look into companion planting – the idea that certain plants do better together than separately. The classic example of this is the Three Sisters of native American farming practice: beans, squash, and corn. Beans fix nitrogen in the soil for the squash and corn, corn provides a support for the beans to climb, and squash shades the ground with its broad leaves, blocking out weeds. Since I don’t have room in my garden for corn and I don’t like beans, I’m looking for other combos instead. 

Meanwhile I found a different companion right at my front door. The shaggy part appeared first and I had my doubts, but once the gap between lantern and wall was filled in, a neat little nest appeared on top. It’s very touching to see that a bird feels safe from predators when close to people. We may be disturbing their flyways and disrupting their climate, but indeed the foxes, owls, and hawks flee when they see us coming. Birds have figured this out. You’d expect a creature that started out as a dinosaur to be adaptable like that. 

Perennial Thoughts

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The weather’s been up, down, and sideways this spring, uncertain enough to keep my seedlings stuck in the house, looking out their sunny window as erratic frost rolls and unrolls over the lawn. But out in the yard, the perennials are not confused. The reliable chives wave their purple goodbyes to the daffodils, while the last of the wild hyacinths refuses to cede ground. Nice try, but nothing can stop the chives. 

Across the lawn from the herb garden, at the edge of the woods, I’ve made a tiny patio of a few rows of bricks. It’s just big enough for a single chair, me, and a cup of tea, maybe a book. The lilies of the valley would like me to know, though they look dainty and possess the scent of sweet innocence, that they are a power to be reckoned with, and should have been consulted. Their outrider will move that brick if I don’t stop him.

The asparagus, another perennial, has been poking its fingers up through leaf mold for weeks now, and the time has come for me to stop cutting and carting them off for dinner, and let them feed themselves instead. They’re at the stage now where they look like, well, sort of skanky Christmas trees – the tightly-closed tips expanded into branches, but the ferny leaves not yet fluffing them out. 

Sturdy, reliable, undemanding, how nice that these trusty plants come back every year with no effort on my part. My lamium, for example – such an excellent groundcover. But what’s that little purple flower sneaking into the picture from the upper right hand corner? Creeping Charlie! A weed! Alas, a perennial too, and just as determined to come back as all the others. The traits so wonderful in a plant you want, so aggravating in a plant you don’t. It’s hard to see their habits as the same, but they are.

Take garlic mustard, for instance. Early colonists brought it with them as a desirable salad green, but few here today consider it palatable. Including me – I’ve tried it. It’s not perennial, but so profligate of seed it might as well be. When I first moved to Michigan and saw stands of garlic mustard blooming in spring, I thought it was lovely. Then I discovered its aspirations to world dominance. Its specialty is swamping the opposition in a bid to turn diversity into monoculture, as though some mega-chemical company were in charge. If only my basil would do that.

 

The View From 35,000 Feet

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I’m a little late with this post because I just returned from a visit to friends and family in San Francisco. I like a window seat when I fly, and no matter how much reading material I bring, I mostly look out the window. I like to watch the maze of taxiways resolve into a map of the airport, and when it disappears in clouds I hear Joni Mitchell in my head: angel hair, ice cream castles, feather canyons, she said. She didn’t mention this one, a teddy bear, or maybe my cat waiting for me at home. 

Then we’re above the clouds looking down. I watch for mountains carrying snow maps of their canyons and ridges, as natural as the crinkly lines of rivers, or the clouds and their shadows. But what about the big smooth snowfields – treeless due to landslides, or landscaped into ski resorts? The hand of nature or the hand of man? 

There’s no question about it when we come to the green circles of irrigated farms. The first time I saw these they made me laugh – could anything be more incongruous with natural landscapes? It’s blatantly obvious that they’re not natural, but why is that? Nature pulls off perfect form with flowers, and likely with some of the plants being grown in those circles. These are on a grid and straight lines are another tip-off of human activity, but I’ve seen circles randomly placed and they looked just as unnatural as these.

Earth, we’re told, is not a perfect sphere, but a lumpy one. From cruising altitude you can just see the curve in the earth’s horizon, a small version of those photos of earth from the moon. For me it packs the same message: we all live here; we’re all in this together. We share the sky, too. On cross country flights it’s not unusual to pass a plane going the other way, whose progress in the opposite direction gives the illusion that it’s zipping along much faster than we are. Then I think of a woman in that plane looking out her window and seeing our plane zipping past hers. Maybe she’s taking a photo of us.

Some four and a half hours after we lifted into the sky, we came back down again. One last view of Detroit area street grids, and the big picture so clear from our high perspective fragmented back into the tangle of details we live in. I’ll be knee deep in them tomorrow, but right now I’m going to fix a cup of tea, sit here, and think about the sky.