Backyard Notes - May

The month of milestones

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.

A few years ago, the lone mountain laurel in the front yard was yellow and diseased. I’d never seen it bloom and I wondered how to care for it. So, I took to the internet, learned it didn’t have the right soil or enough sun and was advised to find better growing conditions.

I had not been the one to plant it but decided it should stay put. It didn’t need the disruption, not when it was suffering. Instead, I carefully pulled each yellow leaf off and a few green ones that were showing signs of disease (brown spots and holes.)

The next day, l’d look at it again, find yet another green leaf that had yellowed and remove it. Then I’d look up and find another one. When all was said and done, when I stood up and stood back, I saw that there were barely any leaves left.

The following year, it grew a new set of leaves. At the first sign of disease, I’d quickly remove a leaf. When I reached the end of the season, I stood up, stood back, looking at a few healthy leaves barely hanging on.

As time went on, there were fewer yellow leaves, more new green clusters, and even some precious blooms. This year, I prepared to remove the disease but discovered all the leaves were a deep, forest green, and as the weeks went on, the entire laurel budded into dark pink, then burst into a soft, pink bloom.

The entire shrub was full. Immersed in color.

May has been a month of bloom. The culmination of all the quiet growing beneath the ground, all winter long, behind the scenes. Every few days I have a new flower report: the irises and columbine, the ferns and peonies.

With it, come the weeds, the dandelions at the end of their life cycle, the stilt grass ready for takeover, the garlic mustard popping up along the edges of the yard, spilling into the forest beyond. It feels impossible to keep up, so I let it all go wild, dreaming of the fall when I’ll seed it with shade-loving cover (goldenrod and astor) and maybe someday (but really never) stop weeding.

Just as everything blooms, so does the school year. “Maycember” it’s been called. Science fair. Career day. The recorder concert. The piano recital. The 6th grade band performance. The final rehearsals for the theater workshop. Book Fair browsing and shopping days. The calendar full to bursting.

Tucked within it was Mother’s Day, the first one without my mother. A general sadness hovered over the day, despite the garden lunch and donuts with the kids. My husband and I also celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary, which coincided with the 1st anniversary of having surgery to treat my late stage endometriosis (an unfortunate date but the one you take when the world renowned surgeon takes your insurance.)

So an entire month of reaching milestones. Each moment, thinking of where we were one year prior, or two, or many before that. Once newly married, on a honeymoon. Once at that tiny French bistro for mother’s day (which my mother always pronounced biss-tro and we’d laugh and she’d laugh and then she’d pronounce it wrong again.) Once in a different a body all together, now one year out from surgery, having not known how much pain I was really in until it disappeared. Once at our older son’s recorder concert, now at our daughter’s. Once listening to the first wails of that trombone, smiling through gritted teeth, now listening to the 6th grade band perform songs we were humming along to on the ride home.

Quietly plucking the sad leaves, one by one, in all the wrong growing conditions, hoping I might get there, the there being where? then standing up and standing back and saying, oh. Oh!