cycles, webs

I find it true again: the beginning of the end of Leo season feels like the beginning of the end of summer.

I sit with my bare legs and realize freshly the sensual treasure of it. Bare feet! Bare legs! Absolutely delicious. The beginning of the end is so often sharp with that sudden moment, isn't it? The reminder that there is nothing we can do to keep things as they are. The reminder it's all died before.

These film photos are from last fall. I realized while packing for the second Raab trip that I lost my film camera on the first Raab trip. Shit. shit. shit. Z&K here coming in from their little house with snacks. This summer, we moved Z into my room; me into the basement. The work on the roof of the garden house that will signal it's transformation into (back into) the Studio happens next week, at the beginning of Virgo season. Am I writing about the garden yet?

This pumpkin carving day (2024) Linden and Hazel came over, in addition to Holly. A small reclamation of the old rhythms. This summer, Hazel came along on the return to Raab after 5 years, after the burn, after the pandemic, after two divorces. In life as in a garden: some things that you believe are lost, with water and time and tending, come back. 

Linden took this one. The black haircut sharp in the foreground is a gorilla mask I bought on impulse at a thrift and brought to OTF. Thank you for this witness, little photographer. 

As I make these notes, the horrific conditions in Gaza hover around me. About the camera, I nearly write: that lost limb feeling. About the garden: even in hard conditions, some things always come back. I think of what those gardens used to be - some of the most beautiful, nourishing gardens in the world - even through 70, 80 years of progressive colonization and ecocide. And now - blasted to bits. People who could always feed themselves, such generous land - made to starve in toxic dust.  This post is not about that, but everything is about that right now. All the gardens are one. My mind reels: so many little photographers, bearing witness. 

Oh this hardy clematis. It was so full of spirit. I hated to cut it. And, it was full of little animal nests and pee and mildew. It kept the front of the house - West-facing, big single pane windows - cool last summer. Being on the porch was like wearing a badass thrifted shawl. And, I couldn't figure out how to take care of it. How to clean it. How to clean and care for the house under it. The porch wheezed like a sneeze waiting to happen. The arms of vine pried at the old siding. The house could not take a deep breath. Every time I tried to pull out just some of the old stuff - there was nothing to do but keep ripping. 

The cheery story of ownership alienates me at every step. The horrors hidden in our current moment of mildness - waving at the neighbors, mother and lover helping with the gardening, friends over for a seasonal tradition - these days feel near at hand. I paid $250 for a sapling oak twice my height to put in the earth on "my" land. This land was once a quilt of ancient oaks and the communities they tended. This house was built in every explicit sense to house only white people. And the artificially depressed property taxes - preserved from the years of trying to sell this neighborhood out from under the Black people who'd had to maintain properties while red-lined - that are keeping my mortgage under $2500 a month? They are both necessary to our capacity to remain here, tending as well as we can, and an out breath of the past into the present.

 I do not feel at all innocent, or good, or deserving. I try to feel proud of the actions I take with my body and mind to tend the spirit of this place: so the plants here can thrive, the house remain water tight. I leave the doors open at night. My legs bare. I want to be an animal, living here. 

 

Chapter 2, Verse 47

I didn't want this house when I bought it. I mean, I wanted it. But I didn't want to own it. I didn't want to own a house. Alone. 

I couldn't figure out who to blame for my misfortune. I knew I was getting an opportunity so many people will never get. I was aware of the socio-economic exploitation - past, present, future - that was providing me with this opportunity. Somehow, this awareness did not make me feel better. 

I was aware that the way that I "earned" the money and credit history that was convincing the bank and the title company and the "homeowner" to hand me this "property" and this big ass debt - was by being married to a very handy white guy for 18 years. 

There was honestly never any question that I would buy this house (or that I would try) once the connection was made. Friends of friends. Right time and place. The Universe. Whatever you want to call it. I don't need to lay out the many ways it made sense.

I couldn't feel choice inside all that sense, though. It feels stupid to say - I have shame about this - but I walked in cuffed. 

To a garden that was once someone's baby. That flourished in the shade of a huge protector. A garden who had her own loses - goodbye tree, goodbye gardener - and became something totally other. The bones were there, some blooming and lush, some blasted by the bare bulb of the sun, buried in poke, giant thistles, nightshade, dock. It was a raw scene, the shock palpable. 

I wonder now - 14 months from when these photos were made - if blame for the way I've felt my hand forced (by patriarchy, capitalism, failure, divorce) was easier to feel than the rawness underneath. Because choices had to be made. I've moved three times in the last four years. I've moved my whole heart. 

Maybe that's one source of the shame, and the blame too. It isn't pretty. I'm not smiling right. I don't feel ownership or triumph. I feel like a grub: eating and pooping soil, cowering as the hoe comes down - even the hoe that I hold. Somehow I'm both swinging and saying no. God I fight. Being small. 

This day - in the photos. I knelt on the ground in the thistles and prayed first. Pulled some cards, smoked some flowers. Bowed, asked. It was a new moon, I think. 

Directions, discovered as I go along; known and unknown: Put lavender in to help heal the poison wound. Lift out the dead and cart them away. Look for protection for those who need it; more space for the thriving ones. Follow movement with pathways, instead of forcing our feet onto old roads. Remove history's weight so the present can breathe. Layers of mulch: the housewarming gift of the PNW plant-cell community. Feel a yes: make way. Feel a no: find a door. 

Even as I am in it, and the flow of blood to fingers reaches to touch the sap flowing from another's earthbound heart -- I doubt. 

I'm changed. I know what to do next but I'm tired. I know what we make won't last. 

So it's that much more true: we don't do it for the fruit. 

I Want It Back

So what if people don't blog anymore. I am 45 this summer and I just got my first pair of readers and they are too weak already. I need the 2.0s. My eyes are probably prematurely aging from looking at the tiny close screen too much. I don't want a substack, even though Dad Bod is so dreamy and funny. I don't want instagram, even though every once in a while I go on there just to see the TikToks that amb has collated for the week. That's how old I am. I have to do a passcode loop to get into my instagram account so I can watch TikToks for 30 minutes before my timelimiter engages.

 I just want to make notes in my little online garden journal like I used to. 

See, internet? This is a house where I live now and pay the mortgage. The house was built the same year as the house whose mortgage I used to pay. 

I made these pictures back on July 25. Today is August 2. I was documenting the front yard because that is where I spend the least amount of time but it is smaller so it is easier to think about plans there. Less overwhelming. 

I have had a lot of impact in the front yard in the 15 months I have been waving my garden wand over this place. 

There's a lot of pictures of all of it, none of them linked here. There was the clematis vine removal. The cutting back of the two sculpted evergreen shrubs that made me feel like I was at someone else's house. The transplant and subsequent death of another daphne from the back yard. The near death of half of the beautiful giant manzanita that I have now maybe saved by removing 3/4 of the south-facing body and 3/4 of the smoke bush behind it. I pruned the two western red cedars, a lot. I tore so much dead and mildewed foliage out of the area where the clematis wines had made just a pile below the porch. I planted four snowberries under the lifted limbs of the cedars. Nolan wrestled the last of the witch bush out of the corner when he was here in June. 

To do: 

- finish moving the last of the driveway of barkchips into the front beds

- move the straaaggggling raspberries that seem to always to survive without any water and see if they can make fruit if I put them against the house in the backyard and handwater them for a summer

- more asters under the manzanita! 

- and maybe some heather there too. I'll ask at Xera when I go in September - I have many semi shady dry ass spots in this garden 

- manzanita for the N corner

- before that, get the varigated dogwood(?) and the heuchera and the hardy fuscia and maybe that white rose out of the hole in front of the porch

- move the peonies that are rotting under the japanese anemone to the back yard. 

- divide and spread the japanese anemones

- hope the daphne doesn't freeze this winter without the manzanita over it

- continue to tie up and support the regrowth of the clematis

- cut back the stupid garden-center spirea in front of the stair posts

- paint the damn stair posts

- kill the daylilies and the fugging purple bells in the corner by the gate

- cut back the mock orange

I know. It's a long list. Which doesn't include figuring out how to get water up there. And that's just the front yard. I will not make a backyard list because it would be boring and I will not be able to rememeber everything and self-defeat is not a sport.

I feel really worried about this dogwood. I feel amazed this rose survives. This is the path the new studio renters and their clients will take to get to the studio and I want it to be passable. I have very clear, succinct ideas for the bed on the right which include 

- either dividing the giant hellebore here (is that a thing?) or planting another one

- small ferns

- a lil drip line I put down today (for another post in which I encourage myself to water during August) 

- cleaning up the area around the rain barrel and ultimately decommissioning it 

- some kinda lil woodland flower vibes - maybe some of the short irises that are around the other dogwood

Ok enough. The thing that feel so hard and important at this time of my life is to experience awe and gratitude in relationship to this path of land I get to tend. It is bursting with life. The soil/soul has been loved on - by human and tree - and now the garden community is trying to find a new form in the wake of a huge tower moment. Like me. What is inside this gate feels very safe and soft. Like my heart in my chest in a home where everyone is both direct and kind, no one mocks me for what I love, I witness and receive so many kisses, so many hugs. And, when I look around I see the burden of responsibility. To be truly alive I have to be in energetic exchange. I must tend and transform in the ways that reveal themselves to me. But I often feel tired. I often feel stuck, ragged, overwhelmed. 

I want it back - the old magic that crept like a sip of whiskey through my blood when I stepped out the door.