Peripheries

or Coming to Terms (Again)

If you go back to its roots, a periphery is literally something that is "carried around."  Back in the 16th century (or the 14th, depending on your source), the word referred to the atmosphere around the earth.  I'd love to know what, in those long-ago days, people really meant by atmosphere.  Maybe they had something like the Belt of Venus in mind:  the pink glow carried around the horizon at dusk and dawn, at the point where light and dark merge—something visible and radiant with the vast unknown beyond it.

"Periphery" has long since lost that atmospheric shade of meaning, and even its literal one.  These days its primary definition is simpler:  the outer limit or margin of something.  It's a neutral word, describing plain facts.  Take the fine hairs on Sempervivum leaves, for example.  They grow on the leaves' peripheries, on their margins or outer edges.  That is a simple truth, and periphery sums up those little hairs' place in the world without question.

Something beautiful gets lost in the summation, though.  Even in the softness of shade, those delicate whiskers carry light around the periphery of the leaves and bring an atmosphere shining to life.  The edges are where light gathers and plays.  The periphery isn't a neutral place—it's where the magic happens.

Still, better a neutral meaning than a negative one.  The other definitions of periphery aren't so pleasant.  They're about relative position and status:  inside vs. outside; center vs. edge.  To be on the periphery is to be marginal, secondary, in a lesser or unimportant position.  It's to be like the second of the hens-and-chicks in the photo above—on the edge of your awareness, fuzzed out of focus.  Not central to anything, even though you might notice if it weren't there.  Just...not mattering all that much.

Is anything as fascinating as the periphery of a tulip leaf?  At least, until the tulips bloom.  Then the leaves become...peripheral.

I've been a little thoughtful about peripheries lately, a little pensive.  I've missed some activities that kind of broke my heart not to be a part of—an impromptu cello performance by my oldest nephew, some dear friends' son's bar mitzvah—because, even though I'm doing better than I have in years, I'm not well enough to participate fully.  CFIDS/ME really puts you on the periphery of your own life, because being in the thick of things is too disabling.  You make it work for you:  you find other avenues for life, like blogging and Facebook, and reveling in the small wonders in a small garden.  Over time, you kind of forget what "normal" life is like.  But then you have a sudden reminder of the everyday pleasures other people enjoy unthinkingly and realize how far out on the periphery you are.  You are a bit like Gomer Goldfish:

Except that I'm never that grumpy.  Obviously.

This really isn't a down-hearted or complaining post:  I know full well that being peripheral to activities does not make me peripheral in the hearts of those who love me.  There are so many things that I can do.  The things I miss out on do not diminish the value (or my enjoyment) of the "less important" things that come my way.  And I really like my sofa; you could not find a more comfortable sofa to lie on.  For hours on end. 

It is, however, a thoughtful post.  I've found myself wandering around the garden (in a non-strenuous way) looking at leaf edges, at boundaries and margins and outer limits, and wondering about them.  What does it mean to be on the periphery?  And if it means something unpleasant, what can I do to change it?  I can't change illness (so far).  It has set the limits.  So instead, what can I do to change the periphery?  To make it, not a place that's out of focus or on the edge of awareness, or even a place of neutral fact, but a place where light gathers and plays, a place that carries its own radiance around with it and has, maybe, just a bit of a pink glow?* 

On the periphery between shade and sun.

How can the periphery be a place where magic happens?

_________________
* Except that I'm not really all that fond of pink.

Movable Quiet

or Quelling the Riots

Keller's yarrow (Achillea x kellereri)

Riots break out in pockets in my garden—explosions of glee and excitement from the flowering kingdom, but only in places.  Except in early spring, when the tulips and sand cherries and ipheion come to life, I don't really have a garden that flowers all at once; I don't have the knack of planning beds for succession of bloom.  Or, more kindly, I've chosen in a small space to prioritize perennials with evergreen foliage instead, and to let the flowers happen as they will.  The garden has bursts of color here and there:  sun roses and California poppies, and over yonder some other sun roses, and then in another bed one of the flax plants but not the others.  And some scutellaria in the corner.  Oh, and some daisies and gaura off to the side, not to mention 'Wild Thing' autumn sage, which has kicked off its own party again beside the patio.  Some parts of the garden are very colorful right now, in a random, hither and thither sort of way.

Sometimes my brain ends up in the middle of the same kind of hither-and-thither riotousness, when a feast for the senses gets out of hand—an excess of randomness or color or sound or light or input of whatever kind.  Too much sensory stimulation affects me like a tapdance in an echo chamber, or like electrically amplified bagpipes with a good dose of feedback, or like purple and chartreuse stripes with mustard-yellow polka dots.  All to say, sometimes a little less stimulation is OK.  That's heresy, I know, in this multi-tasking era of more-bigger-faster-louder, but there you are.  Not everything has to excite. 

Even a garden can be noisy, with its patches of brightness, or clamorings for water or transplanting or pruning or weeding, or squabbling birds or barking dogs next door or distant traffic sounds.  I've been thinking about noise and quiet while trying to decide what to do with three Keller's yarrow plants that didn't show to advantage beside 'Wild Thing'.  I had hoped that the cool of the yarrow would be striking against the heat of the sage, but it wasn't.  The yarrow just looked put-upon, with all that riot and rumpus going on next to them all summer.  Now the three of them are sitting in containers, waiting for inspiration to strike.  (To strike me, that is.)

I'm glad to see the yarrow up closer these days.  This variety is a quiet one and easy to overlook in the garden.  It is forgiving enough of most dry-climate conditions that once you plant it and it "takes" you can pretty much forget about it; it will need some water on occasion, but not babying.  It's small, maybe eight inches high and a foot or so across, with narrow gray-green leaves and small clusters of flowers from mid-April to mid-June or later.  I suppose the white blossoms are bright enough to be showy in their way, but they fall a long way short of spectacular.  Like many plants that become my favorites, though, no matter how unassuming Keller's yarrow may appear, it rewards a closer look.  Otherwise you might miss the creases and scallops of its clean, white petals, the gentle yellows at their center,

the way the leaves arch like quill pens, and their fine sculpting. 

Once you start exploring, this is a plant you can get lost in.  Tracing the lines of the leaves, you find yourself mesmerized, immersed in an active quietness, a kind of meditative pleasure.  The color is a gray-green so soft that you could go to sleep in it.  Jangled nerves slowly come to rest. 

I may just leave the yarrow in containers this year—I'm enjoying being able to move a little bit of quietness around to where it's needed, like the anti-matter version of a boombox, or a musical rest that you can carry with you and "sound" at will.  Not everything has to excite.

And not all excitement has to be loud.

Done In

or In Which We Wage an Epic Battle

Actually, the subtitle is a little misleading.  The epic battle has already been waged and won, and now the biggest sand cherry and I are off nursing our wounds.  I won't bore you with a blow-by-blow replay, but our opponent was the hunk of concrete below:

It's a little over a foot long, about six inches wide, and four deep.  I hadn't meant to start a tussle, but then, who does?  Yesterday while I was loosening the soil under the cherry to plant some dwarf columbines (Aquilegia chrysantha var. chaplinei 'Golden Treasure'), my trowel came across the hunk of cement about eight inches down, not wanting to be loosened.  (Where was it five years ago, when I dug through the whole garden twice just to get rid of such things?)  Thirty minutes of root- and branch-breaking, vocabulary-stretching work later, victory was ours.  The sand cherry and I are both done in, but it will have been worth it.  At least, it had better be.

I'm off to bed again for a while.  A pity.  I was thinking so many exciting thoughts about mulch, just perfect for a sparkling post.  Another time, I suppose.

In the meanwhile, I have some vocabulary to unlearn.

Of Crocuses and Cranes

or A Pang at Parting

They're leaving.  Last weekend as I sat on the patio the sandhill cranes were circling overhead, riding the thermals to gain altitude, one small flock after another joining the rising spiral in a sky streaked high with cirrus clouds.  All the while they were calling out, but their normal creaky purr sounded remote, as detached as an echo, as if their thoughts were already elsewhere.  Abruptly, the haphazard circles broke apart and stretched into the trailing limbs of a V.  The cranes locked on to magnetic North, and in a few minutes they were gone.  A little later a new flock appeared, circling, calling, distant, the hive mind already focused on summer nesting grounds.

The cranes are heading north a little early this year, I think.  I often hear them around the third week of February, but just a few, the early scouts rather than the main troops.  This wasn't the vanguard, though.  It was the full migration, a morning's worth of cranes, and not the only one.  They're leaving.  Last week I heard them go overhead by the hundreds; yesterday I heard a few flocks go by; today a few birds.  By now they may all be gone.

A mess of sandhill cranes, in the circling and mixing phase, February 2012, from my garden.  Not an inspired photo, I'm afraid, though if you're interested in sandhill cranes it might be worth clicking through to see the birds full screen.

Their departure is one of the few pangs of winter's passing for me.  I almost always take a trip down to the cranes' winter quarters at Bosque del Apache or thereabouts over Presidents' Day weekend to bid them farewell.  This year I wasn't able to manage it.  Instead I kept vigil from the patio, with crocuses for company.  It seemed fitting:  the fall-blooming crocuses had joined me in welcoming the cranes last November; how right, then, that the spring bloomers should be present to see them off again.

Funny.  In the last post I talked about crocuses nestling among the pebbles in the garden's settled beds.  The central bed, though, is still in the throes of re-planting and is largely empty and unmulched.  A small patch of crocuses there has come into bloom in the open space under a young Agastache rupestris—and it is actually blooming as a patch.*  With these flowers, blossoming on bare earth, I'm not so much aware of happy nestling and groundedness as of the way they reach skyward, stretching with all their might toward the sun.

It's as if they, too, want to travel with the cranes, as if roots and gravity are impediments, as if wanderlust burns hot inside them, and they ache with the desire to fly, to be away, to look over the garden walls to the next hill, and the one after, and the one after that, with the horizon always one siren song beyond.  It's as if they feel the pang of being left behind, the walls closing in behind them.

Bernardo Wildlife Area, NM, February 2011

The way that I do, too.
________________________

* If you want to join me in jumping up and down for joy, I won't stop you.

When you're tired of my exploring different ways of looking at a crocus, please do say so.  I don't have to reach thirteen (and won't, I promise).  In the meantime, don't miss Jean of Jean's Garden's post on different ways of viewing forsythia.  It's fascinating and delightful both, and strikes home for anyone who's ever experienced a dull, gray winter.  (Most likely, that would be you.)

Other not-to-be-missed participants are b-a-g at Experiments with Plants and HolleyGarden at Roses and Other Gardening Joys.

Living Small

or Paying the Price

I shouldn't have taken the day trip, really, but with Martin Luther King Day off last week and a sky full of fast-moving clouds, the call of the road was too much.  I like my little townhouse and love my little garden, but oh, do I get tired of looking at walls.  I wanted to remember big things—skies that soar without hindrance and landscapes that stretch to the ends of the compass rose.  Instead of contorting over a macro of some tiny leaf or stem, I wanted to stand straight and tall while taking a photograph—a photo of something on the distant horizon, with the camera's focus set to infinity.

El Malpais National Monument

It was a great idea so far as it went, but January isn't a sensible month for day trips.  It's the busiest time at work, when my gentle, low-stress job suddenly turns into a free-for-all of legal forms and number crunching.  Every meager bit of energy I have is needed to outlast it.  The day off should have been spent on the sofa, recruiting my strength with sustaining broths and weak tea and toast.  And maybe a tincture of something.  Doesn't that sound sustaining?  Instead I went on a quest for the wild blue yonder and am paying the price,  remembering why living small is a...let's not say good, but a wise thing for someone with CFS. 

All to say, I probably won't be around much in blogland for a little while longer.  I have that every-cell-of-my-body-lugging-25-pounds-of-lead-weights feeling and am a cognitive mess to boot, and still have to finish the month at work with some semblance of adequacy.  If you can remember where I left my keys or my glasses—or the refrigerator, for that matter—kindly let me know.   (Was there a logical connection between those two sentences?  And if so, how?)

A snow squall blows through El Malpais

At least the trip was worth it...

Bringing Out the Life

or Rejecting Neutral Gray

November 12

I don't know whether the sunsets are actually more glorious at this time of year or whether they just show up in more attractive places.  A little of both, probably.  The clouds (if any) in summer are usually thunderheads—impressive and sometimes beautifully colored, but fairly localized.  In late autumn and winter, on the other hand, the clouds (if any) tend more toward the altostratus or cirrus side, lighting up huge stretches of sky in the middle or upper atmosphere as soon as the sun skims the horizon.  At this time of year, too, with the sun setting farther to the south—at the end of a long, open street rather than tucked between roofs—I have a better view from the upstairs window of those vivid colors, if you can overlook a few telephone poles and wires.  And antenna towers and commercial buildings.  Sunsets are among the few real perks of the cold months.

People sometimes ask me whether I fiddle with the colors of sunset photos before posting them.  I don't.  They usually turn out more orange than I expected and less pink, but that's just the whim of the camera.  I do, however, always take them ⅓-⅔ of a stop (do we still call them stops?) darker than what my camera's light meter suggests, which brings out the life, the wonderful depth and vibrancy, in the colors.

As I understand it, in its default mode, a camera's light meter is the Goldilocks of the photographic world, wanting a visual porridge that's neither too hot nor too cold.  "Just right" to a camera is "18% gray" (or 12%, depending on who's talking):  a neutral shade halfway between the light that reflects off black objects and off white ones.  When the meter tells you that a photo is correctly exposed, it's telling you that with the current settings you'll get a picture where the overall balance is at that 18%-gray middle point between dark and light.

You have to feel for the poor light meter, trying to make the best of situations when it has no way of knowing what the parameters really are; at one time or another we have all been in that boat.  Faced with a sunset, no matter how dramatic the darkening upper atmosphere or how brilliantly glowing the clouds, the camera will do its living best to neutralize the whole scene, to find the intensity that is equivalent to that medium gray.  It means well.  Unfortunately, if you heed its advice it will also give you a sunset that's pale, drab, and washed out—a fair-to-middling sunset, when the one you saw was spectacular.

November 20

I was thinking about all of that, looking at sunsets this week, and looking beyond into winter.  I still dread this time of year, even here where the season is sunny and relatively mild.  The problem isn't the weather or the shorter days.  It's the isolation—the way closed windows shut you away from the sounds connecting you to the world:  the ambient noise of neighborhood life that in warmer weather, at least to those of us who spend most of our free time alone, resting, is a kind of company.  Without those connections, the world can look a little pale and drab.

So the goal this winter is to override the norm of neutral gray, to live ⅓ of a stop more intensely than average—maybe even ⅔, if I really want to kick up my heels.  I don't know quite how I'll do that in a way that's quiet, low-energy, and has me home on a sofa by 6.  If cameras are a good role model for life, though, and I don't see why they can't be, ⅓ of a stop is all it takes to go from fair-to-middling to spectacular.  One-third of a stop:  nothing radical, nothing extreme.

Just one little flick of the dial, to bring things into warm, vibrant life.

Thinking Out Loud

or Fun with Nuts and Bolts

Well, I don't know whether we'll have that much fun. In fact, this will be the kind of straightforward post I almost never write.  I apologize if it's long and dull, but I'm hoping you'll be kind enough to bear with me and offer me your suggestions. (Apologies also to those of you who aren't into this much gardening nitty-gritty.  We will return to our regularly scheduled program on Sunday.)  I'm still thinking through plans for the garden and beginning to put some of them in practice, but I thought I'd run them past you before I reach the point of no return so you can warn me if I'm doing something insane before I've actually done it.  

The Goal—to create an open-feeling, airy space that evokes the outdoor places I love so much in the high desert landscape, in a 15' x 15' (actually 14' x 14') walled, urban planting area. The point isn't to make it seem bigger, just more airy and less "clogged up."  



Though a bit dark, this photo gives a good idea of the shape.  I've already removed the densest plants and mostly emptied the central bed, replacing the gravel there with pecan shells.  (I'm still waiting for some oomph and inspiration to move the pots of gravel to a new home.)  The sand cherry by the blue bench is kind of a big, hairy monster, but overall I like this level of airiness and now want to fill in the blanks without changing the general feel.

The Conditions—earling morning to mid-day sun for four to six hours, depending on the location. The most open light is right in the center, with dappled shade along the periphery beneath the three small trees and full shade between the two largest bushes on the left. Seriously alkaline soil with fair drainage and no nutrients; mixed clay, sand, and decomposed granite.  An average of eight inches of moisture per year.  USDA hardiness zone 7, AHS heat zone 8.

The Parameters—I'd like the garden to be all of the following:

1. Interesting in all four seasons.  I'll be out on the patio every weekend morning all winter, so I don't want too many of the kinds of perennials that fade away to nothing, or that look gorgeous for three weeks a year and then have nothing further to say for themselves.
2. Not very thirsty.  Plants that might look better with additional water, but that can survive on just rainfall are ideal.
3. Friendly to wildlife and able to withstand the neighbors' cats.
4. Easy to create and maintain.  I'm really not saying the following because I want sympathy or anything—I really kind of don't—but because it's a critical factor that has to be taken into account.  This year my CFS/ME has worsened; even just this summer I've lost about another 10% functionality.  Literally the only fun, non-sedentary activities left in my life are occasional, vacation-day trips to the outdoors, and gardening.  If the downward trend continues, they will have to go as well.  I'm not planning on that happening, but because I love being out in the garden so much, I want to make sure that I can continue enjoying it no matter what.  I'd like to set the stage for it to run itself a little more if need be without losing its general shape or fizzling altogether.  With my current energy levels, any changes I make will be piecemeal—a few small things here and there.  It will take me a couple of months to do what a healthy person can do in a weekend.  All to say, the easier the better.



There are actually two young sand cherries along the sides, growing slowly in part sun.  I've unearthed the soaker hoses from the mulch so I know where to plant; I currently run them once a week but would like to cut that use at least in half.



The Assumptions—By all means, correct me if they're wrong...

1. A loosely constructed, naturalistic look will probably hold up better under neglect than a carefully planned design.
2. A circle path in a square bed by a rectangular house ought to be enough shape for anyone.  With that much geometry in such a small space, a naturalistic look won't descend into chaos.
3. Seeds:  boy, are they easy to strew about.

The Plan—To leave all the big things in place.  I kind of wish I'd planted one of the desert olives about two feet further west, but I didn't, and now it's happy where it is.  The three trees and four sand cherry bushes will stay where they are, as will the brick path.  That leaves me with a central 5' diameter circle bed in open sunlight, and one continuous, irregularly shaped bed around the perimeter, mostly in dappled shade. 

I'd like to take advantage of that contrast.  The multi-trunked desert olives are already quite airy-looking.  With low-growing (one foot tall or so) plants at their bases, the perimeter beds could have a kind of canopy-and-forest-floor feel.  With the densest plants removed, only the ground-covers are left; they're beginning to settle in, and I'd like to give them a chance.  In the blank spots, then, I'll direct-sow seeds of natives that can handle part-sun—silky thread grass, flax, scarlet globemallow, and at the sunnier edges, California poppy.  (A plant list with links follows, for those of you who are gluttons for punishment interested.)  In sunnier areas, I'll try sand lovegrass, purple prairie clover, and angelita daisies.  Except for perhaps the clover, those are all self-seeders, some of them quite prolific; none of them needs much, if any, additional water.



A view the other direction, showing the general shape of the funkiest desert olive tree.


The central bed will be more of a "bowl of sunshine" out in the open, with short-grass prairie type plants  (also from seed).  Blue grama grass will be the primary planting, with rough menodora, long-flowered gilly (an annual), and more flax, all of which are 12-18" tall (according to my books).  (An experimental milkweed is already growing there, and as it's doing well, it may as well stay and make some more of itself.)

I do have vines planted, but they're still either in their sleeping or creeping years; hopefully next summer they'll begin to leap and cover the walls in earnest. 

The Concerns—I'm hoping the prolific re-seeders will help the garden be more self-sustaining, but I might end up making too much work for myself with extra weeding.  When sturdy, native, drought-tolerant, indestructible grasses with six-foot deep roots start coming up between the bricks in the path, I might really regret this.  An alternative might be to continue planting a tapestry of groundcovers of different heights and textures. Also, what I'm hoping will be kind of an unbuttoned, easily natural look might just end up being a mess.  Thoughts?  Warning bells?

The Plants—
Blue grama grass (Bouteloua gracilis)
Sand lovegrass (Eragrostis trichodes) (This doesn't get to 5' in NM—the seed heads top out at more like 2', and they're all air.)
Silky threadgrass (Nassella tenuissima)
Angelita daisies (Hymenoxys acaulis)
Blue flax (Linum lewisii)
California poppy (Eschscholzia californica)
Long-flowered gilly (Ipomopsis longiflora)
Purple prairie clover (Dalea purpurea)
Rough menodora (Menodora scabra)
Scarlet globemallow (Sphaeralcea coccinea)

The Note of Thanks—

I really do appreciate your help on this.

Transformation

or The Many Faces of Arugula

I have been playing hide-and-seek with words for several hours now, and I finally have to admit that the words have won.  They are off in the brain-fog somewhere, and I have no idea where to find them. So here instead are some photos of bolting arugula, making its hey-presto! transformation from big hairy monster

to Tiffany-lamp wonder

to weed.

Don't think it isn't magic.

Conserving Energy

Is this really an Agastache 'Pstessene' 
CORONADO® Red?  We won't find out today.

or Thrills and Adventures, Postponed

I'm in the middle of an "energy crisis" this week and have been lying quietly on the sofa rather than (noisily?) reading, enjoying, and commenting on your blogs or adding my two cents to your Facebook witticisms.  I hope to be back in form visiting with you all again soon.

If everything goes well, by Sunday I should also be ready to offer you the nail-biting, suspenseful, cliff-hanging tale of an unexpected—well, not to spoil the end of the story or anything, but it turned out to be a primrose.  Things don't get much more exciting than that.  Or maybe we'll share a chuckle over that one goldfinch who talks to herself while she eats.  Then again, if we're up for the drama, we might witness a few days in the life of a Ratibida columnifera.  Thrills and adventures await!

But not until I'm functional again.

Benchmarks

or At the Albuquerque Botanic Garden, Part II

The placement of public benches is an art form, and apparently, a tricky one to master.  I know a lovely roadside park in Vermont on a hilltop with panoramic vistas of Lake Champlain, the Champlain valley, and the Adirondacks beyond, where every bench in the park is angled to face the parking lot.  (I am not kidding.)  More than one hiking trail in New York's Finger Lakes area has a rustic seat myopically close to a wall of massive tree trunks, when a view of an open glade lies ten feet further on.  The picnic benches in my own neighborhood park here in Albuquerque roast in open, glaring sun, 20 feet from the closest shade tree.

CFS gives you a sharp eye for certain things, and resting places are high on the list.  I've become rather a judge of public benches over the last 15 years, based on their frequency, comfort, shadiness, and offered views.  They are my litmus tests of how much a park system cares about its visitors, of how well its designers understood how the park would be experienced.

Sometimes you find a place that gets it just right.  In this post I don't have any particular words of wit or wisdom to offer—it's just a pictorial "Ode on Sitting (with Explanatory Notes)", from a botanic garden that I love, where the benches do and say all the right things.

________________________________

The bench in the title photo, with its comfortable, easy curves that defy you to sit up straight, nests in a southwestern take on an English country garden:  the design is relaxed but has formal-ish underpinnings and sports an armillary sphere, a traditional sculpture or two, and a rose arbor.  Its beds feature drought-tolerant but not completely xeric plants, the kinds a home gardener looking for "comfort plantings" might be inclined to try.  Most of the garden receives full sun, but the bench is tucked away under a shade tree.  No one yet has brought me iced tea in a pretty pitcher while I've sat there, but the feeling remains that they might.

Chamomile, columbine, roses, and yarrow.

Farther out, the gardens turn more "wild," with naturalistic plantings of big sage (Artemisia tridentata), yucca, and prickly pear.  Bridging the space between the desert garden and a conservatory, a ramada offers much-appreciated shelter from the sun.  Its roof is made of ocotillo stems—the shadows they cast on the bentwood chairs change with every season.  Feeders and flowers draw hummingbirds and other songbirds; roadrunners visit regularly, looking terminally worried.

I am always surprised at how much shade the ocotillo stems give.  In contrast, here is the view from the ramada out toward the sunshine:

(For the record, the chairs are uncomfortable but worth it.)

A winding path leads to the Camino de Colores, a series of concept gardens representing the four seasons.  One of the more successful is the winter garden (offered here for Diana at Elephant's Eye, with her own garden's Winter Chill).  It has the only bench that is almost never shaded—not too pleasant in late spring, but in winter, with the sun warming that red stone in the quasi-canyon, very pleasant indeed.

In a little cul-de-sac just prior to the Camino de Colores lies the curandera garden, which honors Spanish New Mexican traditions of folk healing.  At first I didn't care much for this garden, as nothing seemed to "happen" in it; then I came to love it for the same reason.  It is a tranquil, domestic place, with no particular sense of order, but offering a generous welcome in its open patio.  The comfortably worn arms and seat on the bench and the tile squares echo the sense of "hearth and home" that predominates throughout.

(Some winter damage from our February cold snap is still apparent here.)

This is a quiet enough backwater that I have sometimes seen a covey of Gambel's quail brave the patio, chasing their own topknots across it; a homey enough spot that dandelions are allowed to set seed:

And the bench invites you to sit in the quiet, in the dappled shade of its giant cottonwood—just to sit, and enjoy the garden.


___________________________________

As a P.S.:  All right, the tricycle isn't exactly public seating, but how can you not love a place that gives its gardeners such stylish transportation?

From the Patio

or Days of Rest

Yesterday the clouds were big and little dots, paw-prints racing ahead of today's cold front.  The wind set the aspen leaves next door to rattling; if your eyes were closed, they sounded almost like a mountain stream chuckling over pebbles.  The desert olive trees hissed softly.  Big and little bees that for some reason reminded me of the clouds scudding overhead buzzed around the catmint.  I watched one bee struggling against a sudden gust to reach its flower—any flower—and then bury itself in a world of pollen once it had succeeded.

It has been another weary week—a week where the tiredness is so strong it hurts—and thus also a week of being grateful for Adirondack chairs, footstools, patios, and spring weather.  And cameras with zoom lenses.

It's not the way I would have chosen to spend these afternoons, but I have enjoyed the hours of tracing the wind's passage through my neighbors' differently tuned sets of wind chimes; of hearing the trill of hummingbird wings rushing by (the birds are apparently still sneering at the autumn sage, since they go right past).  I have enjoyed the small tableaux that appear unexpectedly when you limit your field of vision; the scent of a neighbor's honeysuckle wafting over the wall; a lunch-time nibble on a bit of garlic leaf; the splashes of color here and there—the first of the wine cups in what seems to have become a "dry riverbed" sort of bed without my quite intending it to,

Callirhoe involucrata

and the autumn sage beginning to get serious;

Salvia greggii 'Wild Thing'

the breath-takingly gentle contrast between silver betony's calyx and corolla;

Stachys inflata

the slow opening of daisies.

Anthemis tinctoria 'Susanna Mitchell'

Generally in Microcosm I am looking for some connection between my garden and the wider world, but sometimes there is no obvious or necessary connection—just an experience to be enjoyed on its own, a moment—or an hour, or an afternoon—to be lived, without meaning anything beyond its own beauty.

I'm beginning to realize that that is the essence of rest.

From the Sidelines

 

or Between the Rests

Someone, it seems, has been overdoing it in the garden.  I've been sidelined again this week by CFS, and have spent most of the last few days alternating between bed, sofa-and-laptop, and the Adirondack chair on the patio.  The restfulness has been critical, but in between lie-downs, I've been walking the (fortunately very short) path around the garden.  It's been a bit like playing the harp part in an orchestral piece—pages of rest, then a few brief, colorful notes, and then pages of rest.

The garden is that way, too, at the moment—little flurries of activity amid plenty of open space.  While the perennials are beginning to fill back in after their late-winter trimming, and the ground covers, though taking their own sweet time, are starting actually to cover the ground (impatiently, I begin to understand the impulse to plant invasives—bishop's weed would have solved this problem long ago), the effect is still a splash of color against an empty backdrop.  I would make a note to myself to plant more bulbs next fall, but a) I would lose it and b) I will plant more anyway.

In a way, however, planting more might be defeating the purpose.  The harp, after all, is a coloristic instrument in the orchestra—its effect depends in part on the relative rarity of its use.  The splashes of color in the garden grab my attention in the way that a whole swath, or a bed, or a field, might not; I know each tulip in each patch, when it first broke ground, when it started to bloom, when it reached its prime, which of its leaves get in the way of the camera.  (I grow species tulips, as their stems are either short or flexible enough to withstand the spring winds here, and they bloom early enough to please the bees even more than usual.  But the leaves do get in the way.)

Don't get me wrong—I miss being active without counting the cost, more than I can tell you.  I wouldn't mind being a violinist—even a second violinist—in the orchestra for a change, rather than the harpist, just for the sake of doing something, even though really, the part itself might not be any more interesting.  But these splashes of activity in the midst of rest do have their meaning.  The pleasure of being home for our first thunderstorm of the season, when the first rain (rain!  0.03 inches of rain!) fell in 64 long, dry days, is one I won't soon forget.

I suppose it's all about context.  Rain in between dry spells means a lot more than rain in a gray spring full of showers.  When quietness is the norm, you learn to savor moments of fullness:  the rain, the flowers, the experiences—

all the things that happen in between the rests.

In Praise of Helpers (Stylish Blogger Award Meme)

or Heavy Lifting

I've given up trying to find the source of the quote that changed my life this week.  I read it in a gardening book a few years ago and am hazy now on the exact wording, but the gist of its wisdom was, "Whenever you're about to begin a huge garden task, stop first to contemplate why the universe made teenage boys."

Now, I'm not so self-absorbed as to think that teenage boys exist solely to do my heavy lifting, but the approach does have its merits, common sense being foremost among them.  There are people with energy to burn; then there are the rest of us.  I was thinking about that while looking at the micro-garden this past week—the 2' x  4' divided, raised bed where I grow vegetables.  It's a wonderfully low-effort way to garden except at this time of year, when the soil needs replenishing.  Lugging around heavy objects like, say, two-cubic-foot bags of soil, makes my CFS flare up.  Even though my muscles can handle the effort, my energy levels can't.  Lifting a couple of bags of soil onto a cart at the garden center, into the trunk of my car, and out again means a full day of bedrest afterward.

Fortunately, as I was trying to decide which day of my life to devote exclusively to a bag or two of dirt, that quote about teenage boys came to mind, and its brilliance lit the way before me to one of my favorite local garden centers.  If I had been in doubt before, I would have remembered then why it was a favorite place.  Before I had spent 30 seconds looking thoughtfully at the mountains of dirt, a pleasant and helpful young man came to my aid.  Without any nudging, he offered to load the bags onto the wagon, then pulled it over to the cash register himself, waited while I paid, towed the wagon to my car, and cheerfully loaded everything into the trunk.  He even gave me a friendly wave as I drove off.   When I reached home, I still had energy to unload the car, mix the soils, and fill the garden.  It is planted and ready to go, eight square feet of hope in seed form.

So to those of you who may be pleasant and helpful young men, or who may have been so at one time, or who are just pleasant and helpful people in general, my hat is off to you.  You give an amazing gift that makes an immediate difference in someone's life—and when you do so while making cheerful small talk, throwing in the occasional one-liner, and acting as if there's nothing in the world that you'd rather be doing, you make the gift a thing of beauty as well—a real grace.  Thank you. 

And bless you.

________________________________

I've been thinking of helpers even more this week because Diana at Elephant's Eye nominated me for a "Stylish Blogger" award.  I've long admired Diana for the way she routinely, habitually supports other bloggers—she sees blogging (so far as I can tell) as both an individual and a community endeavor. She offers informative glimpses of life in South Africa, especially of the wildlife, as well as of her lovely garden, but at the same time (and often intermixed with Jurg's magnificent photos), she situates her work in the larger community.

Any meme has its rules, of course; in this case to link to other bloggers and to give some information about myself.  Shall we start with the most pleasant option first?   I've recently joined Blotanical and come across some really lovely blogs there.

One of my favorites is Carol Duke Photography.  I love the way Carol shows a detailed section of an image first, focusing your attention on the lights, colors, and abstract forms that exist in the natural world before "distracting" you with the actual subject of the photo.  She has some more recent entries, of course, but this link is the one that captured me first.  (Carol writes another wonderful, naturalist blog, too, Flower Hill Farm.)

As a former music historian, I very much enjoy Landscape Lover's writings.  It's likely that the same people were commissioning both the landscapes she studies and the music that I did; there's something pleasantly familiar in the overlap.  I've also enjoyed her recent exposés of gardens in Marrakech.

Fuzzy Foliage is a blog entirely about African violets and other gesneriads.  I'm a generalist, myself (which, oddly enough, is why I went into music history), and so am awe-inspired by anyone with a singular, whole-hearted passion, and when the writer is not only impassioned but fun and free of snobbery, her enthusiasm speaks volumes.

Getting Dirty writes well of wind and rain in Tennessee, and, more recently, of seedlings responding to peer pressure.

On the Lettuce Edge recently posted about a lovely Jewish blessing for first occasions.

Green  Apples Garden made an emphatic plea to Mother Nature to let spring in the door, which was just as emphatically rejected.

Outside Blotanical, a blog I'm fond of is Saltaire Daily Photo.  Jenny's love for her town of Saltaire, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the north of England, is apparent in every post.

Suz at A Garden Wench combines lovely images in words and photographs.  No one will be more surprised than she to receive this mention—I just discovered her recently and haven't yet been able to come up with anything more profound to say than, "Aahhh," which I have done only in the privacy of my own home.

I hesitate in a way to mention anyone in the "Troupers" section of my own blog list—they are all people making lives for themselves despite debilitating illness, and they are likely to be overwhelmed by outside attention.  They rely on their blogs for contact with the outside world and for support and understanding and community, but they don't necessarily seek a wide readership.  Even so, I honor Dominique at 4 Walls and a View, because of her constant efforts to raise awareness of CFS/ME in the wider community.  Despite some horrific setbacks of her own, she recently launched invisibleawareness.org, an effort to bring the lives of those with CFS/ME to the attention of a wider world.

And finally, a blogger I'm much indebted to is Michelloui of The American Resident.  At one point she remarked that blogging was the only field of endeavor she could think of where being good to others was rewarded, where one's success depended on one's own generosity.  It was that remark that convinced me to start blogging myself, because the blogging community sounded like a place where I wanted to belong.

_______________________________________

Oh, dear.  The facts about myself.  I suppose I find this awkward because my blog has mostly comprised "set pieces"—a series of essays in which I might reveal something of myself, but where, for the most part, the "fourth wall" of theater has stood firm.  To go informal all of a sudden is a change that's kind of startling—not unpleasant, just disconcerting.  With that bit of squirming out of the way...

1)  The latest anyone on either side of my family came to the United States (or the colonies, as they were then) was ~1730.  Since then, if I have my facts right, no one has stayed in the same town for two generations running; they have ranged from Vermont to California; from Florida to Washington.  I have a bit of a problem with wanderlust.

2)  If the opportunity for space exploration were available, I would take it.  In a heartbeat.

3)  In addition to being a music historian, at one point (like half the population, apparently), I was a professional radio announcer.  My favorite work of all time, except for the hours, hands down.

4)  I grew up in a family that named its wire-hair terrier/dachshund mutt "Phydeaux."  That should tell you a lot about my parents (in a good way).

5)  Leaving musicology and in essence throwing away a Ph.D. because of my health was one of the hardest and best things I've ever done.  Lesson learned: you never owe a job or a career your health.

6)  My favorite charity is Heifer International.  I value independence and self-determination, and I think Heifer gives those things both to individuals and communities—and I think it gives women, especially, opportunities they might not otherwise have had.  (Locally, I prefer literacy-oriented organizations like Albuquerque Reads—New Mexico has a terrible track record for education.)

7) Writing this list has taken me longer than the rest of the post altogether...

A Momentary Rebellion

or I Would Like a Macrocosm, Please.

Even just for a while.

A few years ago I read a book by Patricia Loring on prayer in the manner of Friends (Quakers), called Listening Spirituality (Volume I).  Friends seek to "center down" into a listening quiet; the idea of prayer is always more to listen to God than to talk.  In any time of silence, though, distractions arise—thoughts that bubble up and start chattering.  Loring suggests regarding these thoughts as ideas that are clamoring for blessing.*

So when the word "stultify" bubbled up from nowhere on me today, no one was more surprised than I (has anyone ever used the word "stultify"?), but I decided to pay it some attention.  I associated it vaguely with the idea of a skill or personal quality withering from disuse, a kind of atrophy of the self, but thought I'd look it up to be sure.  From various dictionaries, these definitions emerged:

• To cause to lose enthusiasm and initiative, especially as a result of a tedious or restrictive routine
• To make useless, futile, or ineffectual, especially by routine
• To render absurdly or wholly futile or ineffectual, especially by degrading or humiliating means

Synonyms: cripple, impede, frustrate, hinder, thwart.

It seems like an odd word to have come clamoring for a blessing.  But it knocked on the door asking for something.

Probably for my honesty. This has been one of those weeks when I've looked up and seen a wider world, the world I used to be part of.  It started off with a sunset and two vivid pink contrails jetting off invitingly into the Western sky, and continued with encounters with the world of ideas—with people engaged with their work and growing in it—that left me just as far behind. When I stop and let it, the loss just bites. 

I don't generally believe in stopping and letting loss bite.  I don't see the point in complaining or in harping on symptoms—I just don't think it helps, and it often makes things worse, besides making you forget that other people have their difficulties, too.  But not complaining can sometimes turn into denial or a kind of false front, and it can give others the impression that everything's fine—or worse, that CFS isn't that big a deal—when the opposite is true. 

So for today, I am aware of being stultified—and I'm passing that awareness on to you, you lucky people.  I am tired of a world of walls and restrictions, of being trapped by illness within narrow limits, of being daunted by stairs and parking lots, of having difficulty understanding non-fiction and being incapable of remembering it for more than a day, of having to control light and noise and stress and chemicals and food and thought and activity in order just to function.  After 15 years of this, I am aware of thoughts being shallower, of standards lower, of caring and accomplishing less, of slowly giving up bits and pieces of the fight.

I would like to go out for dinner, just once this year; to stay out after 7:00, to remember where the switch is for the headlights on my car; to go to a movie at the actual theater or a play or a concert or a lecture; to listen to music for more than five minutes before the noise gets too intense; to spend my birthday doing something other than lying on a sofa; to go for an easy walk in the bosque without spending the rest of the day in bed and taking a three-day weekend to recover; to travel in a plane and still be well enough to enjoy myself when I reach my destination.  I would like not to feel as if every cell of my body is lugging around 25 pounds of lead weights, to forget the meaning of the word malaise. 

And I am one of the lucky ones.  I'm still at about 60% of my former capacity—with that 60% I can go to my easy part-time job and maybe do one errand.**  Then I go home to rest. On weekends, even if I seldom feel able to leave the house, I can play a bit in the garden and do some cooking and cleaning.  Holidays are the break in the routine, the chance to "chase sunshine" and escape for a couple of hours, or at most two or three days.

I love my little garden.  I love it.  I am so grateful to you all for walking the circle path with me twice a week and letting me share its pleasures with you.  I keep thinking, "Surely they're all getting tired of hearing about 'Wild Thing' autumn sage yet again."  But this little garden is all I have.  It's all I have to offer.  It would just be nice if there were more. 

There.  I am done complaining.  Tomorrow I will remember gratitude and regain some contentment, because I do, after all, have a roof over my head, plenty of food on the table, and a loving family within calling distance.  The rest, I'm convinced, is (more or less) a matter of perspective.  And besides, the Lady Jane tulips—early-blooming wildflower tulips—are up.  They won't bloom until March, but the leaves are showing.

There's light at the end of this (very small) tunnel.

______________________
* It also sticks in my mind that she credited this idea to Hasidic Jewish teaching, but I can't recall for sure.
** Just as an exercise in CFS awareness, assuming that the waking day is 16 hours, and 60% of that is about 9.5 hours, if you had to throw away the remaining 6.5 hours of every day, which would you choose?  Now imagine if you were functioning at 25% of normal, like many people with CFS...  Keep in mind that you won't feel well for any of those hours.

Turning the Corner

or Celebrating Light

Every winter solstice, one of my dearest friends in Vermont happily points out that "We've turned the corner!"  Her blitheness used to drive me crazy when I lived there.  The sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures of January and February were still ahead of us, and even worse, the cruel tease known as "March," not to mention the disgusting weeks of mud season, when knee-high boots are sucked off your feet to disappear forever in the muck and mire.  To be rejoicing that the days are each growing one minute (oh, wow, one whole minute!) longer seemed to be missing the point of the three months of winter and their 129,600 minutes yet to come.

And yet, truth be told, we have turned a corner, away from darkness toward ever-increasing light.  Spring is, in fact, if we are to be completely technical about it and ignore such incidental phenomena as snow, ice, and frigid temperatures, on its way.  Here in New Mexico, as in much of the West, the coldest months of the year are December and January; the solstice really does mark "midwinter."  We're at the nadir of this very shallow valley and beginning to saunter out again.  Now that I'm here and not dreading any actual, you know, weather, I can appreciate my friend's point of view a little better.

I was thinking about that yesterday morning, the first day of winter, as the combination of sunrise, unseasonable warmth, and a hot cup of tea beckoned me outside.   I was taking photograph after photograph of the painterly clouds and thinking of the view as a sunrise (which it was), all the while wondering what distinguished it from a sunset, other than the whole obvious east/west factor.  Visually? perhaps nothing.  Experientially? almost everything:  the sense of vibrancy rather than of sleep, the pull toward action, the glad shout of life—

And rather than being intrinsic to the sunrise, almost all of that experiential difference comes from inside our own heads. 

When I first became ill, I slept between 12 and 14 hours a day, at the minimum. I would sleep through two alarms, and wake feeling as though I had never slept at all. After several months of that, I realized how much hope comes from the idea that "it will all look better in the morning"—how deep the belief in dawn, in the solstice, in turning points, in improvement, runs. When you wake in the morning feeling worse than you did the night before, and realize that that's just the way things are going to be from this time forward, it's not only physically wrong, it's counter to everything you know in your gut about the way the world "should" work.

At some point you realize that turning points don't just happen.  Solstice isn't meaningful all by itself; the days may grow longer, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they will become any better.  A sunrise may suggest an awakening to life, but that doesn't mean the awakening will occur.  You have to make those moments pivotal.  You choose to see the dawn as a time of possibility, to celebrate the growth of light rather than to bemoan the cold of winter, to live your values rather than to harp on your losses.  Hope is something you decide on, not something that automatically waltzes your way with the sunrise or the solstice.

This is the time of year for celebrations of light. As a more-or-less Friend, a Quaker, with deep Protestant roots, I celebrate the birth of the Christ child—the Light come among us.  To those of you who also celebrate Christmas, I offer best wishes for a very merry one!  To those who do not, I warmly extend my hands in a wish for peace on earth and good will toward all.

May God bless us, every one.