10 Nov: back to fall clean up (and a book)

Sunday, 10 November 2019

I was surprised to see one of my hamamelis (witch hazel) already in bloom.

Fall colour blazed in Ilwaco.

across the street

next door

a maple and our alders

I do wish alders had good fall color.  Their leaves just turn dull greeny-brown and fall off.

a block to the west

Ilwaco Community Building

We did fall clean up and leaf collecting.

the tiered garden

after

Allan’s photo

The weekly Quaker meeting was in session.  One member had good bumper stickers.

I could imagine going to this meeting.  My long ago significant other, Bryan, was from a Quaker family, and his mother, Louise Runnings, was an inspiration to me, as was Laura Woodring, the Quaker mother of Montana Mary.

I trimmed some of the leaves from the hellebore in the entry garden (a bit early, but I don’t want to have to remember later in the year) and did not hoard all of the leaves for myself.

I worried that the heathers were too far out onto the sidewalk.

Heathers look awful trimmed back.  The ones sprawling onto the sidewalk might have to come out in the spring.  Meanwhile, they can have their winter flowers.  Perhaps they can just stay until someone complains, which might never happen.  We did trim the kinnickinnick.

Allan’s photos

I originally turned this job down because of the almost-monoculture of white winter-blooming heather (and the salal!).  Allan convinced me to take it on.  It is mostly his own particular job. Perhaps we can introduce some heather that blooms in the summer, just for variety.  

I do love the wealth of autumn leaves.

The parking lot is one of weird and awkward slopes and steep angles, hard to walk on, some sort of engineering mistake, or so I have heard.

Ilwaco planters

We tidied up the city planters at city hall….

Now they are ready for the person in the office who puts out potted plants to take them over (I hope).

We went on until dark cleaning up as many of the Ilwaco planters and street tree gardens as possible, for the last time.  We are giving up this job because of the bucket watering.

We dug golden oregano out of four of the planters where it had completely taken over.  I had planted it in small amounts from starts of mine, in an attempt to be budget minded.  It had gotten so vigorous in the last few years that I felt that it would daunt the creativity of whoever takes on the job.

It came out much quicker and easier than I had thought it would, thanks to the Root Slayer shovel.

A friend came by just in time to get a few free pieces; the rest will go to narrow, contained beds at the fire station.

The tree gardens got all tidied up, including the two with annoying perennial sweet pea and asters:

Allan’s photos

a vocal audience

We ran out of daylight with four planters left to do.

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Reading

Here are some takeaways from a memoir that I read last week, one that did not fit well into the narrative flow of this blog.

I had the amazing good fortune as a child to be taken camping by my parents by a river, with a rocky beach that had a grove of (maybe) willows, and in that grove I was surrounded and landed on by butterflies in the way that Burrough describes.

The memoir is not a collection of bucolic nature stories; it is mostly about Burroughs’ tyrannical and twisted father.  Parts of it sounded so familiar to me, like this:

…my mother on the main floor, my dad in the basement, and me in the attic.

This passage…

..reminded my of the daily surge of bliss I felt in my 20s to be a grown up out on my own.

I also think, when I read friends’ (Facebook friends, mostly) stories of having had wonderful fathers, do they know how lucky they are?

What Augusten feels when he meets a father who is lovingly proud of his son:

So, if you have or had a good father, rejoice, and never take it for granted.  (I must add that when I was 32 and suffering from a broken heart, my father wrote to me an astonishing letter of support, saying the heartbreaker in question did not deserve me and other such comforting words.  It was so out of character from our usual relationship that I wish I could understand why…. Lately, I have realized how very little I know about my father. Did I ever ask him questions about his childhood in Chicago? If I did, the answers were not forthcoming and now I will never know.)

I think I have now read everything by Mr. Burroughs except for his latest book, which I have on order and await impatiently for winter reading. I was fascinated to realize that another memoir I read several years ago, Look Me in the Eye, about growing up autistic, was written by Augusten’s brother. I think I must reread it.