June 27, 2006
Ferns
CP and Southwest Airlines head jointly to Pittsburgh today (with a three-hour readjustment in Chicago). She’ll hookup with her grandchildren and their folks and then on eastward to Chatauqua, NY, for a week of frolic in the summer offerings of that gladly literate place interspersed aboard a Flying Scot in the local lake.
Pauvre moi? She’s not going to have me to kick around for a while.
Back here where people are responsible and fretting over GC2006 fallout, there are the ferns, the sleeping wildflower garden, the lukens and the yews, the omnipresent deodar, the front garden, the side garden, the stone garden, the recycle and trash pickups, the newly planted yellowwood tree (two Ws?) and little gem magnolia, the herbs, the car in the shop recovering from the neighbor’s oak tree collapse, the ferns, the hummingbird feeder (will they come again? will they prefer this snarky sugar water or the natural sugar of the nearest red-blooming plant?), and the ferns, always, the ferns.
CP is a brave and devoted gardener, daring, as well. To leave all her hard work and its lovely progeny in the hands of the Brownest Thumb on the Street and in the middle of our town’s annual summer drouth takes serenity, courage, and, frankly, questionable wisdom. It probably reminds her of the “or worse” part of those vows that got all this domestic bliss underway long ago. And, of course, it’s a testimony to the reality that love is never all that wise, anyhow.
I can hear her now when she returns, and says, “Heckuva job, Brownie.”