After 10 years in the desert where you have to work overtime to get almost anything to grow, I'm feeling overwhelmed by the unfettered fecundity here. It's like you have to go out with your scythe and machete and beat back the jungle every other day or you lose ground. I'm suffocating in green.
I'm remembering now how I always felt this way during the summer here in the East, except at our cottage on the northeast shore of Lake Ontario where the harsh winters and short growing season and strong prevailing winds keep the greenery sparse and scrubby. I was born at the end of June and taken up to our summer property, bought that very year, when I was just a few weeks old. Like a duckling, I imprinted on that place. No matter where I've lived—western New York, south-central Indiana, Cleveland, Tucson, New England—I've always felt out of place without Big Water and Tundra-like Turf. Our cottage, an 8-sided shack built by my father, is on a half-acre of old cow pasture that is now, after 46 years of mowing, something like a lawn that doesn't rip your feet up if you walk on it barefoot. The ground is pure clay that spawns a swamp in the spring, suitable for growing rice, and becomes kiln-fired ceramic in the summer if it doesn't rain for a day. Things grow there at what seems to me like a reasonable pace, one you can keep up with. Here in the Berkshires you spit a cherry pit over the deck railing and next thing you know there's a forest of cherry trees in your back yard!
Ah well, one lovely discovery of the past week was a stand of daylilies that the previous owner for some reason planted behind the vegetable garden where no one can see it (I'm planning on relocating it this fall). Daylilies always remind me of our cottage because my grandmother planted loads of them all along the front edge of the property that still bloom without fail, decades later. They're such a cheerful, uncomplaining flower. Unlike me, I guess.
After 10 years in the desert where you have to work overtime to get almost anything to grow, I'm feeling overwhelmed by the unfettered fecundity here. It's like you have to go out with your scythe and machete and beat back the jungle every other day or you lose ground. I'm suffocating in green. 
I'm remembering now how I always felt this way during the summer here in the East, except at our cottage on the northeast shore of Lake Ontario where the harsh winters and short growing season and strong prevailing winds keep the greenery sparse and scrubby. I was born at the end of June and taken up to our summer property, bought that very year, when I was just a few weeks old. Like a duckling, I imprinted on that place. No matter where I've lived—western New York, south-central Indiana, Cleveland, Tucson, New England—I've always felt out of place without Big Water and Tundra-like Turf. Our cottage, an 8-sided shack built by my father, is on a half-acre of old cow pasture that is now, after 46 years of mowing, something like a lawn that doesn't rip your feet up if you walk on it barefoot. The ground is pure clay that spawns a swamp in the spring, suitable for growing rice, and becomes kiln-fired ceramic in the summer if it doesn't rain for a day. Things grow there at what seems to me like a reasonable pace, one you can keep up with. Here in the Berkshires you spit a cherry pit over the deck railing and next thing you know there's a forest of cherry trees in your back yard!
Ah well, one lovely discovery of the past week was a stand of daylilies that the previous owner for some reason planted behind the vegetable garden where no one can see it (I'm planning on relocating it this fall). Daylilies always remind me of our cottage because my grandmother planted loads of them all along the front edge of the property that still bloom without fail, decades later. They're such a cheerful, uncomplaining flower. Unlike me, I guess.
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