Backyard Notes - June

A swift push straight into summer

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.

I notice the lines too late, bumpy red tracks of poison ivy rash along my cheek and chin. I probably scratched without realizing, leaving a claw mark of oils that I try to scrub with Tecnu and steroid cream.

Then I notice the source just past the backyard swings, where the vinca from the neighbor’s yard has run away into ours, where the stilt grass has begun to take over. Leaves of three, let it be, I repeat with a sigh. I must have taken our Sadie dog there in the dark and brushed against the poison leaves. Already, I have met, head on, the fast, overgrown scurry of summer green.

Like May, June has fled from the starting line in one breathless race to July. In the New York area, we finish school much later than the rest of the country. June is full of field days and sportsfests, the end-of-year parties and picnics and birthdays. The ice cream truck came today, my third-grader tells me. The fire truck hosed us off before we got on the bus, she tells me the next day. An endless parade of childhood memories.

In between all the celebrations, my father closed on his new condo a mere 8 minutes away from our house. The golf club and lake where we are members opened. We spent a day at the splashpad with friends where birthday cake fell in the dirt but my friend’s newly minted one-year-old ate it anyway (protein, we say).

Without warning, the beach bag is in use every day. The towels rotate from the bag to the deck railing to the wash and back again. I look for space on the shower rod to hang the wet bathing suits. We’re even pulling out the suitcases for a short trip to Howe Caverns with friends.

I wonder how many secret swimming holes we can find on the way there and back, then whine like a child when we’re beneath the rushing falls of Mine Kill State Park and I don’t have my bathing suit. Freezing fresh water and deep pools with slippery rocks remind me of all the gorge swimming I did in college and I hate to miss the plunge. So I vow to always wear a bathing suit under my clothes from now on.

In the yard, it feels as if all the plants are also running wild. The peonies and irises have come and gone. The catepillars have devoured the leaves of the hibiscus. And the Joe Pye Weed has choked out the boxwoods, bursting with their gnarly, deep pink.

I listen to recaps of all the U.S. Supreme Court decisions, always handed down in the wilds of summer. Always that long tally of judgements, one after the other, tumbleweeding down to the people. I am told by one legal expert that there’s still some integrity left in the courts. I hold on to that, even as I strain to understand the turn of each new stumble and fall.

It’s time to harvest the lettuce before the heat. I wait for tomatoes, pluck chamomile flowers for drying and deadhead the puffy orange and yellow marigolds. Our CSA is bursting with leafy vegetables and we wilt them into nothing, eat salad greens on repeat, and stay grateful for abundance.

The fullness of June. The longest days of the year. Sunscreen and thunderstorms. The slash of red against my cheek from that poison ivy patch. Bug spray and grill smoke and pasta salad.

It feels as if I’ve taken off before I even turned the key. Summer is here.