Brightening

or Relative

California poppies with 'Wisley Primrose' sun roses (Helianthemum nummularium)

My favorite forecast (in a twisted sort of way) when I lived in the northeast was for "brightening."  Not clearing, mind you.  Brightening.  On brightening days, the skies would stop being dark and dreary and turn plain old dreary, a change of degree rather than kind.  The light might not have been become strong, but at least it became stronger.  Sometimes you're grateful for small graces, like the sight of what might be considered shadows by those who have become inured to shade.

I've never heard a forecaster in New Mexico call for brightening, but I still think the term applies.  It's such a handy, relative word, a qualitative rather than a quantitative one.  It allows for growth and for nuances of strength.  With the tulip days of spring behind us and the poppy days upon us, the sky hasn't gotten sunnier, precisely, but it's certainly brightened. The light is ratcheting up a notch, strengthening from a glow to a blaze.  When the sun is overhead at noon, north of the trees in the garden now, and high, it's...well, it's bright.  The garden is brightening, too.  The pastels I love in the gentler days of spring are yielding to stronger, more saturated colors—colors that can hold their own in the sunlight and pitch it right back.

The petunias aren't really this color, but they are definitely bright.

When a bubble of hot-air balloons floated by the other day, my heart flew right along with them.  The sky was such a deep blue, and the balloons' envelopes so brightly colored, that somehow on a spring morning with a glorious day stretched out ahead I felt for a moment like I was 18 again.  Maybe you know the feeling I mean, of being young and strong and confident, like you have the world at your feet—for no particular reason, of course, except that you're young and confident, which at the time seems like plenty of reason and to spare.  You're beginning to flex your muscles and stretch yourself, to test your strength.  You're ready to ratchet life up a notch.  The brightest of adventures awaits, because...why wouldn't it?

Out the kitchen door

But of course, you can't take on the world singlehandedly; even good choices have flip sides of loss; life doesn't wait until you're looking before it starts throwing curveballs at you.  At some point you realize that the chance to soar isn't necessarily your special birthright.  Still, the feeling was gorgeous at the time.  It's a springtime feeling, and one we have the pleasure of reliving every year, as the sun begins to flex its muscles and stretch itself, and the garden begins its first, surging flush of growth.  The remembrance is a small grace, a brightening, a feeling of what might be considered flying, to those inured to going on foot. 

A relative term, brightening.  It means something different in middle-age than it did at 18.

Then again, so does strength.

Inflationary Pressure

or Changing Planes

The only things missing were the balloons.  For the last two weekends I've been comfortably ensconced in the Adirondack chair at 08:15, sunglasses on, camera, coffee, and crossword ready to hand, just waiting for a little floating poetry to drift by.  It never did.

I'm not an avid enough spotter to go out of my way to find hot-air balloons, but usually during the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, which just wrapped up today, I don't have to.  Some of the gathering's 500+ balloons typically come this direction and sail past within hailing distance; this year was apparently the exception.  Contrary winds were possibly the culprits, winds being contrary by nature, although the Albuquerque box effect often overrides them.  When the box is working, winds closer to the ground blow from the north, while at higher altitudes they blow from the south.  Pilots can choose either direction by moving vertically, changing from a lower to a higher plane.  Since I live south of Balloon Fiesta Park, wind direction doesn't usually keep the balloons away like this.  Ah, well.  Maybe next year.

The closest I came to seeing a balloon was this:

The tomatillos in the microgarden are producing enthusiastically these days—producing, but not ripening.  Even the largest and roundest husks are as full of air as any balloon.  The tomatillos wait to set on until the weather cools down, which happened unusually late this year.  Now the pressure's on them to fill out those husks in the few weeks remaining before frost.  Their performance so far hasn't earned them a place in the microgarden again next summer; they've just been wasting water and prime real estate.  The clock is ticking on them in more ways than one.

One of my friends likes to start knitting projects.  Eventually something else claims her time, so she unravels her work and winds the yarn into a tidy ball, and then the next time she has a chance to knit she starts all over again.  Her philosophy is that a ball of yarn is easier to store than half a sweater, and even if she never finishes a project, she's enjoyed the time she's spent knitting, and enjoyment is really the point.  The doing is the fun part; getting anything wearable out of it is a bonus, a happy accident.  She has been cheerfully knitting for years, and so far as I know is still working on that same ball of yarn.

Her approach is admirable in many ways (to those who don't need or want scarves, sweaters, and woolly mittens)—really on a higher plane than a tit-for-tat, "if I put something in I want to get something out" mentality.  The journey is more important than the destination, and all that.  I get the sense that most of us take a similar approach to gardening, at least to some degree.  Overall I do, too, but not so much where edibles are concerned.  If I plant an edible, I really do want something to eat by summer's end.  Or at least, someone should get something to eat, and that someone had better be more interesting than an aphid.  As I wrote a couple of posts ago, the amaranth may not have fed me this summer, but it's fed all kinds of other things, from katydids to goldfinches, and has been more than worth the resources it took to grow.  But the tomatillos?  Even the bees aren't that enthused.

On the other hand, their shy blossoms really are endearing, and their leaves beautifully sculpted. The papery husks are fascinating to watch grow.  When they get big and round you feel like you could blow on one, just a gentle puff of air, and send it soaring like a balloon.  (Whereas actually, you can't.)  (That is, you can blow on it all you like, but it's not going to go anywhere.)  But those rangy, gangly plants are nothing I would give garden room to if I weren't expecting an actual tomatillo to eat at some point.  A big crock of chili verde is calling me, and I cannot answer, because of those slowpoke tomatillos.

I clearly need to put some gardener's version of the Box Effect into practice, move up to a higher plane, and change mental directions.  After all, I fully enjoyed the mornings on the patio with camera, coffee, and crossword (and sunglasses—very important), balloons or no.  They would have been icing on the cake, but weren't necessary to my happiness.  Why not enjoy those irritating lollygagging endearing, sculptural, and fascinating tomatillos for what they are, and forget what I want out of them?  I'm not going to hurry them along by sniping at them.  Most likely.  Or even, apparently, by giving them regular water and the occasional dose of fertilizer.  I'll just put the cookbook away again.

Ah, well—maybe next year.

Air Dreaming

or Looking Up

I've never actually met any asthmatic dragons.  That doesn't keep hot air balloons from making me think of them, though, with the wheezing sound they make as the propane burners light, and the hiss of hot air from nowhere, bare seconds before a glowing behemoth drifts into view across the roofline.

One of those gasping breaths sounded the other morning as I was pouring tea in the kitchen.  I ran out onto the patio to look, mug in one hand, camera in the other, to see a whole fleet of balloons (a float? a bubble? What is the collective noun for a bunch of balloons?) sailing by.  Albuquerque is a mighty fine place for hot-air ballooning, and it's not unusual to see one or two on a pleasant morning shortly after sunrise.  To have seven or eight of them gliding past en masse, though, is rare except during the International Balloon Fiesta.

These were all commercial balloons, "regulars" that I have photographed from the patio many times.  Even though I know they're only going across town and will probably land in a vacant lot somewhere, they always manage to suggest adventure to me.  As I wrote last year, seeing them in flight awakens the urge for discovery, for travel into the unknown, for going anywhere so long as it's yonder.  Some crisp autumn morning when the cottonwoods in the bosque are glowing with their own internal sunshine, I'd like to go ballooning and follow the trees down the Rio Grande like a migratory bird.  In the meantime, watching the balloons go past reminded me again of the pleasures of looking up, up, up, when often the focus in the garden is out or down.

In my last post, I embarked on a quest to evoke a greater sense of space—of airiness and light—in my garden, and Diana of Elephant's Eye asked in a comment whether I could make use of any borrowed scenery. I do have little bits of views here and there, a snippet of the Sandias, a snatch of downtown, but not much that can be seen while seated on the patio.  My garden very much needs to be a resting place; the seated views are the ones that matter most.  From the Adirondack chair I can see rooflines and satellite dishes, the very tips of young trees, and not much else—or so I thought.  Then I looked farther up.

Oh.  Yes, I'd say that's some scenery I could borrow.

Why didn't that occur to me before?  New Mexico and skies go together like, well, like scrambled eggs and green chile.*  Even in the mountains, sometimes the most spectacular views happen overhead.  Perhaps the best thing I could do to create a sense of open space—not as a substitute for airier planting, but as a complement to it—is to provide reasons to look up.

Oddly, as vertical as they are, trees don't seem to do that, not at short distances.  They focus attention (at least, my attention) on or under them, not at the sky.  Maybe a trumpet vine to climb the stark east face of the house?  A mirror in the shade, angled to show the sky?  (Surely it would be natural to want to trace the source of the reflection.)  An artwork?  I've long wanted a sculpture, mounted high, of a bird about to take wing, capturing the moment of that leap into the blue.  Like the balloons, just the suggestion of flight might be enough to make the heart soar skywards.

If all else fails, lying down in a reclining chair would probably do the trick just fine.

______________________
* With a little melted cheddar, all rolled up in a lightly toasted tortilla.  Yum.

A Little Hot Air

or A Study in Contrasts

There is a stretch of highway between Vaughn and Roswell, New Mexico, where you do not see a human habitation for about 75 miles.  The dirt-road entrance to a ranch or two, sure; some water tanks with a herd of Black Angus and maybe a longhorn or so grazing nearby; and at the little outpost of Mesa, a defunct gas station; but nothing else.  (The outpost of Mesa consists entirely of the defunct gas station and a sign that says, "Mesa.")  The land is flat and treeless, with mile after mile of needlegrass and cholla and prickly poppies.  Larks linger at the side of the road and flutter up like dust as you drive past.  You can see the curvature of the earth in all directions; the sky is a stronger feature of the landscape than the actual landscape.  It is an empty land, one that people usually drive through as fast as possible.  I love it.  It is a place where I feel like I can breathe, where the relief of not being closed in by buildings or walls or trees is absolute.  (I begin to suspect that I am mildly claustrophobic.)

Between enclosure and confinement lies a very fine line. The line moves unexpectedly sometimes, but fortunately, my garden usually sits on the right side of it.  Surrounded by walls, the garden offers privacy but also (if you look through the right place between buildings) a view of the Sandia Mountains, downtown Albuquerque (through a different notch between buildings), and of course, that gorgeous New Mexico sky (straight up, all you could possibly want).    It is a safe and pleasant place, a nested place, where beautiful rituals of home are enacted:  morning coffee on the patio, the New York Times crossword puzzle, the daily tending of the container plants, the leisurely amble around the path just to look at things, the leisurely amble in the other direction just to look at things a different way.

With the International Balloon Fiesta fast approaching, the walls of privacy are for the moment broken down.  Albuquerque is one of the world's best places for hot air ballooning, so we see balloonists off and on all year; in the days leading up to the Fiesta that begins this weekend, however, they all come out to play at once.  The most popular flying route is along the Rio Grande, and my home is just close enough to the river that some of the strays who want a more urban ballooning experience (?) go overhead.  (And for some reason nothing makes you aware that you're still in your bathrobe like having a balloon crew sail past within shouting distance.)

The garden rituals take on a different tone; an awareness of the outside world punctuates the sense of small and familiar things.  I wander around the path (in one direction or another) inspecting a leaf here and there (the tips of the sand cherries turning red), a late blossom (feverfew leaning to reach the sunshine), an empty pot (the spider web still stretched inside it, a leaf suspended in mid-air), new growth (ipheion, already putting out leaves for spring), a loss (the Mt. Atlas daisies gone).  And in the midst of all this beautiful downward glancing (shattering a seedhead in passing), the puff of fire above, the exhale of propane burners holding a hot-air balloon aloft (a mildly asthmatic dragon come to call), a boat with a jester's-motley sail, an entire silent carnival floating past, hinting of adventure and discovery and birds-eye views and going yonder, yonder, yonder.

Despite the previous sentence I wouldn't exactly say that I go dreamy-eyed about balloons—not enough to hanker after any of the stained glass or painted silk or dried gourd replicas of them that fill the shops in Old Town this time of year (and that make an odd counterpoint to the Pueblo pottery, silver, and turquoise in the shop windows beside them).  But seeing them from the garden makes my heart leap; the contrast between groundedness and flight, between nestedness and adventure, is so striking.  There is a bittersweetness to the contrast that is beautiful in itself, and that reminds me somehow of that morning coffee—intense and strong and invigorating on a cool September morning of primary colors, of pure, shining tones, when sunshine feels good again and the wind is fresh, and home and adventure, space and enclosure, both beckon with equal pleasure.

But oh, the yonder sounds like fun.