FIELD NOTES: I have dreamed of feasting out of doors ever since I...

The weekend before Thanksgiving, 2007

...built a 9 foot-long table out of the old deck some years ago. After mixing 50 pound bags of cement, leveling landscape blocks, hauling gravel, patterning pavers, adding a fire pit and renovating the kitchen herb garden, my ‘banquet table’ and I found our so-called ‘happy place’. But while it has either been too cold, too rainy or too inconvenient to gather there for Thanksgiving, I still envision at least the post-feast coffee curling in crisp air, a fire just big enough to warm fingers, toes and noses, while we eat warm pie from porcelain plates – homemade fruity mince laced with rum, apple crisp, and the pumpkin topped with whipped cream that tastes good only on the third Thursday of November. Right now my table is leaf blown, acorn littered and the only ones feasting are squirrels and birds. The little spigot fountain is wrapped for winter and the sun umbrella is back inside the shed, but I ‘tsk-tsk’ over the debris that I didn’t get to because there will be more than I want awaiting me in the spring. The weather does not cooperate with my schedule, so all I can do today is make pies. All I can do today is watch the squirrels and birds enjoy themselves. All I can do today is abide with what I can harvest.

FIELD NOTES: I heard it falling before I saw it...

The top of November, 2007

...as I walked in Harrybrooke. A huge limb in the woods beside the railroad tracks caused an old childhood riddle to come to mind, the one that asks if a falling tree makes a sound if no one is there to hear it. The cascade of crackling ended when the other trees held up their arms to stop the descent. A recent New York Times article spoke of the new controversy among marathon runners and the banning of headphones at races. Not being a marathoner, I won’t take one side over the other, but I myself don’t walk with headphones because walking is a chance to hear what is around me and to listen to the rhythm of my own breathing and heartbeat and footstep. And what about my footstep? Is it too big? Can we keep the marketing world from gorging themselves on this new idea of reducing our ‘global footprint’ and make it a positive societal change rather than an American fad? If I cannot save the world, I can walk gracefully. I can grow tall enough to see above the short-sighted and at the same time I can reserve judgment on the easily judged. My personal priorities are my personal priorities - no one else’s – and vice-versa. I do not have to have the aspirations of a meteor or a dinosaur to leave behind a big impression. I can be the first frog or turtle or fish of springtime whose ripples delight and then disappear. I can erase my tracks as if walking with the brush of a pine bough behind me. And when I crack and begin to fall, I can hope there will be enough arms held up to stop my descent. The woods changed their footprint today. And I heard it.

FIELD NOTES: I meant to take a group picture...

Sometime later in October

...of my late geraniums, the headiest and longest lingering set of potted geraniums I ever remember having, but a storm came. Finally. All desperate for rainwater, we cannot complain, although asking for your thirst to be quenched and getting a bucket dumped on your head are not the same things. You don’t quite know what hit you or why it did or maybe you didn’t phrase your request properly. I don’t remember what it was that I made myself attend to: Getting to work on time? Cleaning the sink? Making the bed? But I do recall wanting to take a picture of my beautiful geraniums. And what elicits a sigh more than putting something off and too lately realizing that THAT was the most important thing you would have done that day? I did save the parsley – sort of. I always grow more than I can use, chop it down and out of guilt try to save it. This time I stuffed a huge bunch in a big pitcher of water, but all I ‘had time for’ was one tabouli salad so when the parsley eventually yellowed I again acted out of guilt and composted it. It was the least I could do. Last season, I snipped it into ice cube trays filled with broth to use in winter soups, but consistently forgot the bag of cubes entombed in the freezer. More waste, more guilt, more domestic neglect. My favorite from the kitchen herb garden is the pineapple sage – nature’s Juicy Fruit – I snipped it, bundled it and hung it upside down to dry. I like to put it in my winter teas. At least I always mean to…

FIELD NOTES: Pot therapy...

The first week of October

...is what most of my gardening has now been consolidated to, the high maintenance annuals allowed to atrophy making it less painful for me to return their remains to the earth and the perennial beds left to their own devices. With school in session and less abundance of daylight, my plants futilely awaited me, like children drooping in their darkened bedrooms hoping for one more drink of water. I must care for what I can care for, and no more, whatever apology it may bring. I have inserted pots of mums in five colors to act as escorts in an attempt to cheer us on until the coldness comes. Record temperatures and lack of water confuse us all – my plants and me. The lavender has bloomed again in the loose, powdery earth, not knowing what else to do and the pumpkins are prematurely softening before their big day. My red geraniums now clustered on the back steps below an aging oak are disturbed by acorn-seekers. Soil is flung about; I scoop it up as best I can and pat it in again, reassuring my beauties, “there, there, now Lady Geraniums, try to keep your heads about you.” They whisper their wisdom to me. The diminutive alyssum does not jealously wish to be bigger than the geranium and, in turn, the geranium’s pride does not bully the delicate nature of the alyssum. The white alyssum simply spills out of the pot because it can, while the geranium must keep her elaborate coiffure propped up with strong elbows. To be sure, nature has its dastardly doers (poison ivy), its cunning tricksters (Venus Flytraps) and opportunistic squatters (weeds), but here in my pots, there is some containment, some control. Company clusters together for the waiting, waning times. Pot therapy.

FIELD NOTES: The smell of green has changed...

Through the window (Autumnal Equinox)

...maturing from newborn celery to supple chlorophyll, and now becoming tinged with the dry scent of brown. The grass cuts with brittle ease and dustiness, its aroma no longer robust and optimistic, but efficient as it redirects its energy in preparation for dormancy. According to the calendar, the summer season is over. Driving into the neighborhood, I notice a little boy intently pushing a colorful plastic mower as his daddy works the big machine. When his enthusiasm will end is unpredictable, but it is certain that everything he plays at now will one day become work as he moves through his seasons. As I move from one season to the next, I look with trepidation at tree debris and closets and storage bins. I want to relish all that seems so God-given in New England - woodland walks and harvests, pies and applesauce, campfires and hot cider, stoops arranged with still-life’s of pumpkins, mums and scarecrows fashioned from old clothes stuffed with leaves – but the preparation frenzy takes over like a wicked witch, the threat of the first frost breathes down my neck like a haunting ghost and I fret that the house will not be prepared for hibernation. But why? Nature is designed to occur rather than to be monkeyed with. No one rakes the forest floor. The harvest simply happens; fruits and vegetables can fall without us. No one tells the flowers to die; they take their cues from thin air. The whole of nature marches, no, processes, while human systems fight the ebb and flow, making us soldiers in battles of dubious importance, prompting us to conjure up inventions like the treadmill and stir up trouble with the climate. If I were following my nature right now, I wouldn’t be thinking about the lawn, I would be slicing Cortland’s for a French apple pie or falling into the hammock with the Sunday paper or a book. By the time that plastic mower wears out, that little boy won’t have to worry about fixing or replacing it; he will be too old for it. He will begin to discover himself and rebel at mowing the lawn, refusing a mother’s request. Then he may move to the offer of mowing – for a price – because the boy down the street gets remuneration. But one day he may notice the length of the grass, do it without being asked and perhaps receive a homemade apple pie as ‘remuneration’ - also without being asked. I wonder if he will be able to balance the voluntary and the required, to not tip the scale too much one way or the other, to gracefully redirect his energy and embrace the flow without the fret, remembering the plastic mower and noticing that the smell of green has changed.

FIELD NOTES: I don’t like it when my gardens start to die...

The end of August

...when the shade seems weaker, the ferns as brittle as old lace, the first dry leaves litter the stepping stones like scraps of old newspaper and the potted annuals have lost their vibrancy along with their high hopes. The deer have finally worked their way to the top of the backyard border having used the lush hosta as a salad bar. I’m at the kitchen sink looking out the window and can’t figure out what I am seeing. For years and years I have adorned each end of the big wooden swing frame that lies perpendicular to the house with two hanging baskets of impatiens. The far one looks odd. Did I forget to water it? I run outside and on closer inspection see that the tender flowers I had embedded and nurtured to bloom have been bitten down to the quick, ravaged like fingernails on a nervous hand. My heart rate goes up and any early morning neighbors hear inappropriate words. The only thing left is the dusty miller rising up from the center like a white flag of surrender on a pole. But days later, near the first of September, all impatiens have fully re-grown their foliage. Like a dry fountain that is turned back on, the basket flows with green again. Another victory in the garden. The waning of another summer is more acute when put up against the shine at the start of a new school year. This is the last year I will send a child off to public school, although I can continue to join the ranks as a teacher. I wonder if the impatiens can manage to re-bloom as well. They do - in red and white and fuchsia - they do indeed.