June 21, 2004
Homeowner
We live on a steep hill composed of generally busted-up, fossiliferous Ordovician limestone arranged in a kind of stair- step topography that once served as a redoubt during the Great Misunderstanding of the 1860s. The drainage has never allowed for much soil of any depth or fecundity to form. What good dirt there is, we’ve hauled in ourselves, rearranging the indigenous rocks into terraces so they could be of more service than where God left them a few hundred million years ago.
A stone mason working for us observed these contoured retaining walls (largely stacked by CP over the recent past) and commented, “Pretty good for a home owner.” She thought he meant “for a woman” and told him so. He smiled.
The yard and all its several gardens of herbs, tamed wildflowers, and swapped-out-with-others plantings are all native Tennessee and casual in their splendor. They are admired often, and the ones in the along-the-street garden are sometimes even stolen by running and walking passersby. Once a woman took lots of pictures for a garden book she said she was publishing. CP, who’s the steward of all this, seems altogether pleased, although she’s got no royalties she’s told me about.
I watch all this and enjoy and am most of the time embarrassed to be so one-upped by a home owner. (Actually, I’m a writer with an allergically compromised respiratory system that gets a seasonal no-yard-work pass from its doctor.)