Smoke

Back in the '80s you had to cross over the Little Spokane River to get into my neighborhood.  The little river bordered our neighborhood on two sides.  A golf course and a rocky wilderness bordered the other two sides. 

In that way, the neighborhood felt like a fortress and that “we’re finally home feeling” would hit you as soon as you heard the car tires humming on the bridge – well before you actually pulled into the driveway of your house. 


A modern view of my old neighborhood.

Living in a fortress also made it feel like your neighbors were in it with you.  “In” what, exactly, I don’t know.  It was just a feeling that told me we all had something in common, that we believed in something together, that living there meant the same thing to everyone.

Looking back, I see how romantic and naïve I was.  But you’ll have to forgive me because I did have some evidence that supported my feelings.  After Mt. St. Helens erupted, for instance, all the men in the neighborhood tied bandanas around their faces and shoveled ash into enormous piles together while every curious kid pressed their noses to the windows and watched in awe. 

Photo Courtesy of the Spokesman Review, May, 1980.  More pictures of the clean up can be seen here.

We organized ice cream socials and all the kids in the neighborhood wore costumes as if it were Halloween and paraded through the streets.  Everyone participated. 

We dropped our bikes in the front lawn when we went to a friend’s house and no one messed with them.  

Every boy belonged to the same Cub Scout Troop and every girl was in the same batch of Brownies.  We walked to the bus stops together.  We got in trouble together.

And in the fall, when the raking was underway, we’d all stand around enormous piles of pine needles in the street and we’d light them on fire.  Dads would stand watch with a rake or a shovel.  Maybe a hose nearby if there was some wind.  And the kids would bring more needles, bags of pine cones, and dead branches and if we were well-behaved we might get to throw some of that onto the fire. 

No, this is not an Instagram picture - just a really old Polaroid
 of me and my dad picking up pine cones in the backyard.

And everywhere was the smell.  It was the smell of smoke, sure.  But it was also the smell of fall.  The smell of taking-care-of-business.  The smell of 11:00 a.m. on any October Saturday.  The smell of hypnotic fire. The smell of a fortress clearing out what it no longer needed.  The smell of being 9-years-old and still having a dad to stand beside.  And if you could take your eyes off the flames you could see down the street that your best friend was kicking pine cones into his fire.  You could see the girl you thought was cute roller skating in wide arcs around her daddy’s fire.  You could see, if you were perceptive enough, that we all had homes and warmth and a family and that was enough.  And even if you couldn’t see that, you felt it. 

It's been nearly 30 years since I stood beside one of those fires.  When I enter my neighborhood now, I cross a mass transit rail.  My neighborhood is bordered by stop lights and sound walls.  The fortress feeling comes only from locks on the gates and deadbolts in the front door.  We press our nose to the windows only to watch suspicious characters.  Our community events are just gatherings of strangers.  If you leave a bike in the lawn, you’re donating it.   

We do treat ourselves to backyard S'mores once in a while.

And I'm pretty sure it is illegal to set things on fire in the road.  Which is just as well.  That smoke is bad for the air and I prefer to compost my leaves.  But you’ll have to forgive me again when I say that I miss the smell of burning pine needles.  And everything it meant. 

No Longer Stumped

Back in July I had a couple trees cut down but I wasn’t able to have the stump of my peach tree professionally ground because the machines were too big to fit within the confines of the brick that makes up the raised bed.  So I have been slowing digging it out by means of my own two hands.  Or, rather, by means of my own sore arms, an aching back and two wobbly legs. 

The peach tree gave us privacy but not peaches.  It was time for it to go.

As I mentioned in my last post (in which I whined at length about the lingering heat) it’s been really hot here for a long time.  Swinging a 5-pound mattock is hard work even in perfect weather.  When it’s a hundred degrees it just feels like punishment.  So I tackled the removal of the stump in small doses.  Sometimes I’d get out there during my lunch hour and swing an ax or pry with a shovel for 20 minutes and then retire.  When I managed to get out there early on a weekend morning I was able to work long enough to make blisters on my hands in pleasing shades of red and yellow.  But most of the time I would just go out there and stare at it, hatefully, so that it knew it was no longer welcome.

While I worked, I filled a 5-gallon bucket with the mashed up pieces of wood.  I lost track of how many times I emptied that bucket but it was more than I would ever have imagined.  When you start digging up stumps and roots you realize that a tree cut off at ground level is just like an iceberg or a character in a John Hughes film.  The substance below the surface dwarfs what you see initially.

I originally thought that this was a beautiful piece of wood cut from the top of the stump of the peach tree.
Now I know it was just the tip of the peach tree iceberg.

But since I last wrote, we have had a few days that weren’t punishingly hot and I’ve been able to expand the amount of time I was willing to work on my one-man chain gang.  And I finally finished about a week ago.  Of course, I use the term "finished" loosely.  There's still some wood buried deep down but, honestly, I didn't care anymore.  I think I removed enough that it won't be a real issue even when the wood starts to rot and the earth settles in around it.   

One of the greatest gardening joys is day-dreaming about what you want to plant when you have a clean slate.  This is especially true when space is limited and your garden plot is not resting upon a supernatural Etch-a-Sketch that can be shaken whenever things go awry or boredom with the status quo takes over.  Such has been my joy for the last two months.

This was my day-dreamer's checklist of requirements for whatever I would plant in place of the peach tree:

• Had to take partial to full sun.
• Had to be big enough to provide screening from the neighbor's windows.
• Couldn't be so big that it impeded the nearby path.
• Needed to be a good transition from the full sun part of the yard to mostly shade part of my yard.
• I wanted it to look clean and be low-maintenance.

I considered an apple tree but decided against it because I didn’t want to deal with protecting it from worms or moths or whatever pests might attack it -- not low maintenance.  I considered planting an orange tree that I have had in a pot for several years but decided against it because I like it where it is -- besides, I thought it might get too big without constant pruning.  I considered a chaste tree and even bought one but it failed to meet the screening criteria.  I also considered a clumping bamboo called ‘Alphonse Karr’ but decided against it because even clumping bamboos should be watched carefully when planted in the ground. 

Chaste Tree bloom - in October!

I finally decided that I would, once again, ignore the advice of the experts and plant yet another Japanese maple in a full-sun location because I like them more than any other tree or plant.  And it didn’t hurt that the garden center was running a 20% off sale on all “fall color trees”.  I went with a 15-gallon Acer palmatum var. dissectum ‘Seiryu’.  It’s a fairly common tree but with uncommon characteristics.  The phrase you’ll hear about it most often is that it’s “the only upright growing green dissectum.”  Translated, that means it’s the only green Japanese maple that looks like the archetypal tree and still has these really cool lacy leaves. 

Seiryu leaves.

It seems like every project leads to another project.  When I removed the
previousplants from this bed it highlighted the fact that the brickwork
needs some serious attention.

I am hoping to give myself and my neighbors some privacy by blocking the view of their windows.

I under-planted the tree with 10 clumps of Japanese Blood Grass (Imperata cylindrica Rubra).  I don’t think it will take too long for it to take over the entire bed.  Perhaps a year or two.  I could have purchased more, but at $6 bucks each, it would have cost a pretty penny to fill in the entire bed.  Besides, Japanese Blood Grass spreads fairly quickly and it can be divided easily. 

Now I suppose I should work on that dead patch of lawn where the mulberry tree once grew.

Not Really Autumn

I don't care what the calendar says.  September 22nd, 2012 is not the first day of Autumn.  Not here anyway.  It is still in the 90s here.  It is still bright and sunny every single day.  Rain won't fall for several more weeks; probably months.  I won't wear a long-sleeved shirt to work until at least mid-October and even then I will probably complain to no one in particular of being too hot. 

Strawberries are still growing even though the shadows are getting longer.

Sure, there are a few signs that Summer is on its way out.  For one, my girls have put out the fall decorations.

And no matter how hot the weather, the path of the sun through the sky tells the truth.  I do notice the dark in the morning now and I notice it even more so in the evening and I find myself remarking that "it's so dark already."  I am 37 years old and I still haven't grown accustomed to the way we lose and gain daylight.  I doubt I ever will.  I hope I never will.

And maybe because the sun goes down earlier it does get a little colder at night than it used to.  I have cut back the time on the sprinklers to compensate so I guess, in that way, I have admitted to my garden that the fall is near even if I haven't fully admitted it to myself. 

The roses don't seem to know that it's autumn either.

Transitions are always hard and while there is something I love about every new season I can't seem to escape the feeling that the start of Autumn means the loss of something wonderful.  Ingrained deep within me, impressed upon the very DNA of my being, is the sense that summer is when we come alive.  Summer is when we grow.  Summer is when the best things that happen to us happen.  So even if Autumn is great, even if there's nothing as nostalgic as apple cider, even if you sigh fondly at the sight of high school football stadium lights on a Friday night, Autumn still means that something wonderful is gone.  And you can't get it back.

So maybe it is the temperature here or maybe it is my own unwillingness to acknowledge the meaning of it all, but right now, where I am physically and mentally, it is still summer.  At least for a little while longer.