It’s that time of
year when flowers abound—especially at the Ashbury’s. You may recall that after
several years of pleading for some blooms, my beloved, our
daughter and our son finally got the message, so that I now have gardens
once more. I can’t tell you how much this means to me. Of all the things I can
no longer manage to do, gardening is the thing I miss the most. Something as
simple as no longer being able to get down on the ground and back up again
without help has had a tremendous impact on my life. And while I still do a lot
around the house, that whole up and down thing you do when you garden isn’t one
of them.
I wanted
perennials, because this property as a whole is a challenge. If you stand at the
very back of our lot, you are actually on the same level as the top of our roof.
That “hill” takes up the lion share of our land. That part of our property has
been inaccessible to me for ten years, and just lately, has become that way to
my husband as well. The best we can do there is have our youngest grandson cut
the grass, keeping it neat.
Our tiny front
yard is very uneven for walking on, and not very wide from the edge of our front
porch to the sidewalk. However, we have spring bulbs planted along the walkway
and in front of the porch. We also have a couple of peonies, two lilacs that are
very slow growing, and a smattering of lilies-of-the-valley. This year along
with the hanging baskets our kids gave me on Mother’s Day, we have not three,
but five oblong flower boxes hanging in two tiers off the porch itself.
These are filled with pansies. We’ve put a few annuals along the walkway, and
once the tulips and narcissi die out, we’ll put some asters there as well. And
that rose bush my husband gave me three years ago is still alive, and currently
in bud, outside my bedroom window.
But there is one
area of our property that we can work with, and that we really have improved
upon from a few years ago, and that is our small, fenced-in and relatively flat
back yard. My beloved admits that small area is really the most he can manage on
his own anymore. He cuts the grass—the lawn is an area not even ten square feet.
He’s planted various annuals that we picked up on the Victoria Day Weekend in an
ell-shaped garden along two sides of the yard. That same weekend he also planted
some perennials: two trilliums that I searched and searched to find, and about 8
gladiola bulbs. He resurrected our gazebo, and put the table and chairs out
beneath it.
He’s even wired
the gazebo for electricity so we could have a light at night, and so that, if
the day is not too hot, I can take my laptop out and write in the fresh air amid
nature’s beauty.
We also have a
barbecue in this small back yard, perfect for those “family dinners” our second
daughter loves so well.
I think back to
the days when we were starting out, when we lived in the house that had been my
mother’s, out in a rural area. We had tree-quarters of an acre, with a couple of
dozen trees, big flower beds in the front, and a veggie garden big enough that
the neighboring farmer came in the spring with his tractor to plow and then disc
it for us.
I miss that
place, sentimentally. I miss the umbrella-like canopy of the weeping willow, the
sound of the breeze rustling the poplar leaves, and the sight of my laundry
stretched out on the clothes lines secured on the poles driven into the very
flat land. I miss going out to that veggie garden and plucking a luscious tomato
to make a sandwich for lunch, or harvesting fresh beans for supper.
I miss the
perennials—daffodils, narcissi, and tulips, the lilacs and the
lilies-of-the-valley that grew in such rich abundance that when the breeze came
from the north in the spring you could step out onto the verandah and inhale
that marvelous bouquet. I miss the tiger lilies and the smoke bush that my
mother planted, and the flowering crabs we’d bought her one long ago Mother’s
Day.
I miss all that
keenly—but it wouldn’t be the same, even if we could go back to that place,
because we’re not the same.
So in reality,
what we have now is better than those memories. Because what we have now is
real, it’s here, and it’s what we can manage.
Love,
Morgan
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