News Travels

The weather has been terrific these past few days so we’ve been investing as much of our time as we are physically capable of investing (there has been a crisis there, as well as in the financial markets) in getting the garden up for the summer. Some seed and plantlet planting and transplanting, but mostly (still) just clearing out all the weeds/undesired plants that have made a nuisance (from my perspective) of themselves over the past eight weeks. Ed has had the pruning saw at hand for days, not least because we had a tall maple die over the winter and, because its barren branches are close to the house, it needs to move on to its next life/death cycle station, which would be firewood.

Much of the yard/garden is to be admired already. Not my good work, but its own. The rhododendrons and azaleas are moving in from where the tulips and daffodils and croci and lunaria left off. The lilacs are perfuming the air around. This is really the peak time for flowering in the northwest. The raspberries, too, have joined the move to excellence, and both patches are tall and covered with buds. I’ve replaced their ropes and added new stakes where needed. Only yesterday, I was saying to myself that the side yard raspberry patch (which has terrific natural water flow and excellent sun) was looking better than it ever has.

Such hubris, of course, does not go unnoticed, even if you don’t bother to say it out loud. Thoughts, like words, get around. This morning, I went by that raspberry patch on my way to somewhere else and found that the tops of all the plants around the outer perimeter had been eaten off, including those darling little berry buds. Deer through in the early morning, I’d guess. A nice breakfast.