Pinky Purple Days

I sat outside on the deck until the last light faded out of the bits of sky I could see through the towering hickory trees to the west. It was the longest day of the year; there should have been some sort of solemn ceremony as it passed. But the mosquitoes were biting me in the evening chill. I did the prosaic thing and came inside. It is difficult to realize that we are already heading toward the tedium of winter darkness: ugh.

Right now we are in the blessed noonday and it is glorious. This is what we waited for all through the dreary months. The garden is silvery, pink, and purple, with one scarlet Oriental poppy lifting its showy head. The sort of flowers I like to plant are cottage garden flowers, kind of shy and old fashioned, but I cannot resist a poppy, even though it is a bit of a braggart. My neighbor gave me red hot poker roots and I dutifully planted them. They looked so out of their element in my purple coneflower and Russian sage border that I took a dislike to them and tossed them to the chickens.

We are deep into the spindly, ethereal florals, some with scents so cloying you cannot really bring them inside. The bees are not wasting a minute of it, and its a good thing too, because it’s only a matter of days until the Japanese beetles crawl out of the ground to ravage the sweetest blossoms. Rita brought in my favorite sort of bouquet today, and I love how it looks with that white valerian in it, but it is so powerfully scented I will have to banish those.

Our hummingbird feeder broke in storage over the winter, so we decided to plant hummingbird feeders instead. We looked for trumpet-shaped flowers and I have seen hummingbirds at every one of these. It’s the best reason for planting the ubiquitous petunia. I don’t even know what some of these blooms are. They just sort of slid into my wagon at the greenhouse and I didn’t argue with them.

Today I noticed that the first baby yellow tomato was ripe, and I ate it without even showing it to anybody else. I paid a foolish fifteen dollars for a large plant that was blooming already back in the chill of spring because I do weird things like that when I am fed up with cold weather. It would be premature to say that it was worth the money, but if it continues to produce such sweet orbs of tomato-ness, the summer is looking promising.

Last year I bought strawberry plants at the local hardware store and I wish I could remember what they were called so that I could warn you not to bother with them. After all the watering, weeding, mulching, fertilizing the plants, covering them when it frosted, I am picking the weirdest, smooshiest berries I have ever grown. (There aren’t many, because of the late freeze I didn’t see coming.) A day in the fridge leaves them looking so tired and wilted I am not even tempted to eat them. The best way is to stand in the garden and eat them immediately. “If you don’t expect them to be strawberries, they are good,” Rita concluded. I do not quite know how to do that. Shut my eyes? Hold my nose? Because they are perfect, red, seedy, and smell right. It’s a texture thing. This week I showed Little Bee and her brother where the strawberries are and they obliged me by eating them all that day, foraging up and down the row and experiencing no difficulty with unmet expectations.

Speaking of expectations, there is a small fruit stand a few miles west of us, run by an Amish family. On Saturdays they sell donuts and I have seen the sign often, but never happened to pass on a Saturday until last week. I took a look at the donuts and promptly bought a half dozen. They were enormous, glistening things, with hardened glaze drips at the edges, and I could hardly wait to give everybody one when I got home. My first bite revealed a sorry truth: they were obviously fried in rancid lard. I took another bite and weighed the question, “Are these worth the calories?” But surely, so I took another bite. I got some milk, and I ate the donut. Almost it was not worth the disappointment that was every bite, but I had paid for an experience that I was reluctant to give up. In retrospect, I paid for a lesson but it isn’t clear what it is. Maybe it will come to me the next time I am picking the strawberries I don’t like.

This spring I needed a strong new stick teepee for my cucumbers. Gabriel and I started with bigger saplings and screwed them together instead of tying them with twine. It took longer this way, but I hope it holds up. He also made a beautiful new arbor for the hardy kiwi vine after I had started it on my own when he was working. My arbor panels were pitifully lacking in structural integrity. When I asked for help to assemble the lot, he was kind enough to lay aside his work in the shop and spent hours finding some stronger supports. We cut down most of the sycamore saplings down by the creek for this project, and I pulled wild grapevines out of the woods for the finishing touches. I am really liking the homegrown look of these supports.

It’s early days in the garden, but things are flourishing and by the time the dahlias do their thing, it will be full to bursting. Every day I walk around and marvel at what is happening, how the leaves unfurl and buds form, some puffy like marshmallows and some spiky like chestnuts, but all brilliant.

When I was a child I had a startling thought one day, “If God had made everything brown, would we even know it wasn’t pretty?” I can’t say for sure when my lifelong yearning for color started, but I was too little to even know what it was. ( I just knew that I hated my grey double-knit dress that made me feel ugly.)

God walked in the garden too, you know. It’s a great time to lay down my smallness and offer to join my work to His great work. I’ll just keep planting the pink and purple things in my bit of earth.