Memorial Day Letter (to a Fellow Gardener)

I am sitting in my garden, appreciating the beauty of the layered leaves. The cloud cover is that particular shade of Memorial Gray, neither dingy nor celebratory, but softly understanding of all griefs, personal or military. In just four weeks the air will be perfumed with firecrackers yet now, with similar flags flying and jets crisscrossing overhead it is wistful with the scent of suntan oil still confined to its bottle and smoke from rain-dampened barbecue.

Earlier I took a walk along the shore where low tide exposed 5 feet of  barnacles white as tombstones and rank with rotting seaweed. Golden Gardens had been strung with nets and swarmed with the hopeful and half-dressed leaping and shouting and willing the ball to land on the right side. The glory of the season’s first bare feet, and sand rising in slow motion like salt spray around the players. Along the edge families shivered and fussed with potato salad and waited for heat to reach the searing stage, impatient for plates to fill and for conversation to become interesting. Miles away in a sea of asphalt the Veterans of Foreign Wars handed out red poppies and tried to explain poetry.

Now, becalmed from half a mile of stairs and the discipline of the walk I do think I could spend a month or so just gazing at the Stewartia as it peels its bark and offers the miraculous evolution of blossom from polished green pearl to alabaster brooch to intricate ink-black pod. Right now it has almost everything on it at once except for the white flowers. When they fall they are purely nuisance. When they bloom it is a five-petaled rondeau that stops all thought but wonder. 

 

The magnolia behind the Stewartia has added another six feet, racing heavenward to catch up with the hundred-year firs on either side. Perhaps when finally it knocks upon the sky it shall gain respite from drought and pestilence, and finally stop dropping its leaves. I expect any day to see bald eagles nesting at the top branch among June’s flowers, attended by circling flocks of crows.

 

No hummingbirds yet, but we are working on that with a ridiculous surfeit of fuchsias, most of which are just beginning to hang their first pendants. The question of the day is why do chickadees tend to look worried. Just sitting on a privet branch they look both ways. As though a crow or eagle or housecat or jaguar – or perhaps a common leaf blower – might at any moment attack.

 

 

Yours with pruning shears and a good book,

The Gardener

 

P.S. Coming soon, a new series of prints and cards: Seattle Icons, from The Atlas of Memory, a tribute to Seattle’s historic architecture and places of inimitable magic.