Backyard Notes - July
Gathering
Backyard notes is a monthly feature of A Note From Melissa. It explores the changing landscape of the outside world and our inner lives as we move through the year. I hope it encourages you to look in your own backyard for changes and patterns.
Each summer, standing in front of the vegetable garden, I think about the tending, the weeding, the watering, all for a “crop” that yields very little. Last year, for weeks, I dutifully collected chamomile flowers each day and dried them to amass what amounted to a few tablespoons, barely enough to nurse a winter cold with tea.
The shishito peppers, I am told, need to be planted in pairs. I watch them grow barely a foot high, frantically producing before they die away. I gather four of them and neatly cup them in the palm of my hand, enough, I guess, to blister them in the pan and sprinkle with salt for a barely satisfying snack.
This year’s lettuce gave us two small salads. And the fairytale eggplants promise just one magical purple fruit, about two inches long, half that in diameter. Let’s not talk about the tomatoes, yellowed with blight, sprouting one sad fruit before they’re set to collapse.
In the car, my 12 year old son is bored, so I tell him to look at the flowers and plants. It’s the best way to see growing patterns. Queen Anne’s lace and purple chicory overgrown along the highways and roads. Coneflowers and Black Eyed Susans in abundance, dotting yards and lawns in massive clumps of pink and yellow.
I complain to him, no matter how much new top soil I buy or how many seeds I lay down, I grow just a few sad, bent stalks of those same flowers. I wonder what I might be doing wrong. But your yellow and orange flowers, he reminds me as we reach our house, are the brightest of all the ones I’ve been looking at.
Yes, I decide, I am very good at buying flats of marigolds and faithfully deadheading them every day through October.
It seems so much easier to see what we lack.
As I flip through the pages of my notebook, I am reminded of the three days this month that I wrote about the color of the sky, how it blazed white and orange, so hazy with wildfire smoke, I could stare directly at the sun without blinking. It was a pink circular fireball in the sky. The smell outside was potent and strange, less like the smoke of campfires or wood stoves and more like sour chemicals.
Those days, my children were at nature camp. They were sent indoors each time the AQI reached 150 or above to watch a film about the great migration of salamanders. This, instead of taking their muddy nets to Griffin’s stream to catch frogs.
The past few months, I’ve been taking a dance class, a revelation of sorts, a dance built on somatic movement, which means dancing however you feel, freeform, based on mindfulness, intuition and physical sensation. In my middle age I fall in love with how my body dances, for the first time ever, the girl who was “left back” in ballet, as my mother teased, when I was only six years old, when everyone got a free pass forward, everyone, apparently, but me.
This month, our fearless instructor brought us together for a weeks-long journey through dance and movement and yoga and art and writing and sitting in a circle sharing stories of motherhood and creativity. Mothering the Maker, she called it. Maker, I thought, like making babies, but, no, maker, also, like the kind who writes and paints and bakes and colors and dances and acts and makes art.
So, a revelation in the gathering. As I sit in that circle of mothers, as I attend a cousin’s baptism, celebrate summer birthdays, go to the local water park with friends, see Ragtime, a forever-favorite musical, and eat soup dumplings for dinner and hand-pulled noodles for lunch. I meet at Alicia’s house for Pool Day, as I label it in the calendar, reminding the kids that morning that it’s ALL DAY, a day of a little swimming, then listening to the rain and the thunderstorms, talking with a group of women I love and looking down at my watch to see that it’s nearly midnight and we still have so much more to say.
Maybe there were too many days indoors, gaining a new understanding of how the sky looks when under fire, watching the rain fall, listening to the news, the wettest, the driest, the hottest, the coldest one on record.
And still. The gathering. 4 shishito peppers. 10 yellow snap peas. A 1/2 bouquet of flowers. 1 cosmo in a maze of spindly stalks.
