Lot 1
A lawn.
Another lawn. It’s next to where we park the car and so it gets trampled. I bought an aerator and dutifully went back and forth stamping holes in it. We bought a spade, a root spade, clippers, trowels, a machine for cutting up the oak leaves.
Tiny acorns. A mulch of tiny acorns, and the oak leaves besides. None of them ever break down. It seems impossible that the endless old oak tree next door would forever be pulling up what it needs to make new acorns and leaves from the ground beneath it, but that none of what it produces should ever break down into nutrients again. Maybe the roots just swallow them whole and pass them back up into the branches again to be reborn.
Another lawn. A hole opened up in it last year and hornets came out. I thought they were harmless until I ran the mower over them and one stung me in the hand. I got stung by hornets three times last year, having not been stung by anything larger than a mosquito for the last thirty years.
A box hedge. Another box hedge. I look out and wait for them to be struck by box tree moth, or boxwood leafminer, or boxwood blight.
Another lawn. A hole, or a trench, runs through one corner. Why? We fill it in with soil and it turns back into a hole within a month.
Big stones from the foundation. The contractor dug a hole through the patio and right on through the side of the basement. Nothing left the lot. Now, big stones laid in little retaining walls, or hiding behind the weigela.
That leggy weigela. I consistently forget its name and have to look it up again. Once everyone is done stripping the humans out of common bird names they should get started on scientific plant names. So many interchangeable cod-Latin-German names…
A bridal wreath spirea (no German there!), on our side of the neighbors’ driveway. It is mirrored by another on the neighbors’ side. Before we moved in our predecessor would consult with the neighbors on planting choices for best effect.
A juniper, or really an eastern red cedar. Why would our predecessor, a good gardener, plant it here, under the heavy shade of the oak? It leans over half-dead, as close to a curly Dr. Seuss tree as you would ever see in real life. I have to put it out of its misery one of these days.
A redbud, grown up into the utility line. My wife curses from the spring into the summer at the little hearts its seeds send up. She goes around picking out the little hearts and leaving them in a heap.
A compost pile. It is not right. Everything is tight and airless. It preserves the orange peels and banana peels and squash hulls instead of turning them into earth. If I had another sort of tree next door instead of that endless oak tree I would have enough proper brown material to make it work.
Dog crap. Dog crap. Dog crap. There’s no good word for it. Any word you try is fussy or harsh or silly. “Crap” is closest to how I feel – you grumble and deal with it. You can’t compost it – wrong kind of brown material.
Crocus shoots starting up from the ground around the dog crap. They are encouraged by the warmth. There is a Buddhist lesson in all of this.
