May 26, 2009

• Sunny Morning Walk

  The day started hazy.  When the haze burnt off, I had to get out in the sun.
  
  That’s the sky to westward over my backyard.

  And this is the sky over the muskeg on the eastern, sunrise, side of the trees:
  

  P.K.Piebean went with me for a walk.
  
  She’s a talker, and she was mrrrating at me all the way.

  Doug and I have a lot of work to do, pitching the leftover firewood into a neater pile back farther from the road so we can take delivery of next winter’s load sometime before September.
  
  There’s a lot more wood than we thought there was when it was buried deep in snow.  We had begun to think we were running low on wood as it became hard to find.

  The muskeg is drying up and last year’s brown swamp grass (really sedge) is giving way to new green.
  

  The frogs are quiet now, and their pools are drying up.
  

  The forest floor is a patchwork of spider webs.
  

  The only flowers in full bloom now are on this ultra-hardy ornamental plant I have in about ten containers in the part of my yard I call the garden.
  
  Everything there is potted and perennial.  I dug them up at the old place across the highway, and there’s no ground here prepared for a garden.  It is all peaty, root-riddled, forest floor.

  Mostly, what I have are hardy onions like this, and chives.
  
  There are also a few pots of Shasta daisies, some Siberian strawberries, Valerian, and, of course, the rhubarb in big raised “tubs” made of chicken wire.  Those are the things that survived five summers of neglect and six winters of frost before I got around to moving anything.  At first, I thought we’d only be here temporarily.  Last fall, there were some raspberry vines in the garden over there, too.  If they come up again this year, maybe I’ll get them moved.

  Native plants are beginning to show buds.  Spirea, commonly used as hedges in the suburbs, is a wildflower here.
  

  Lots of blueberry buds indicate abundance of berries later on, unless it rains at the wrong time and knocks the fruit off.
  

  Okay.  We’re going back in now.  Tell everybody ‘bye, P.K.
  

  

  • 5:20 pm
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