If ‘April showers bring May flowers’ is a true statement – and it certainly seems to be true here in Oysterville – then I think that ‘with mild May comes the green’ should follow. May is the month that the alder and crabapple trees leaf out completely. screening from view the blow-down and other ravages of winter; the woods look freshly gowned in every shade of green imaginable. And May marks the beginning of the lawn-mowing season.
Not that we don’t mow during March or April. But it’s the winter tidying-up sort of mowing. In May it’s the once-a-week-is-hardly-enough sort of mowing. The Mowing Season will continue into October and is the time of a constant hide-and-seek game that gardeners play with the weather.
Ideally, the best time to mow is on a day when there’s been no rain for twenty-four hours and it’s been windy enough to dry out the grass so the lawnmower doesn’t clot up. In our moist marine climate, it’s difficult to keep to a regular schedule.
Nyel mowed yesterday afternoon. The lawn wasn’t perfectly dry, but close enough. It looks fabulous! Today and tomorrow, weather permitting, will be the ideal days to do outside-on-the-lawn things. A picnic lunch. A game of boules. A sit in a lawn chair and read a book. By Friday, the grass will be getting shaggy once more and, by Saturday, Nyel will be looking at the weather forecast and trying to plan his next mowing date.
There are those who plan other sorts of landscaping so they aren’t tied to the mowing ritual. When I built my house by the bay, I purposely left everything natural. But here ‘in town’ lawns seem to set off our houses and help to show off our planting beds. Lawns are also a fine alternative to rainy-weather mud puddles.
It was probably with those thoughts in mind that Tucker (with help from his cousin Larry) sowed lawn seed around his house ten days or so ago. They left a sufficient area unplanted to accommodate the ongoing construction traffic and cordoned off the newly planted parts. For a few dry days, he set up sprinklers to keep everything moist and happy. On Sunday we could see a little green here and there and then, yesterday – WOW! A carpet of new grass!
It won’t be long now before we hear that lawnmower over at Tucker’s again!
On Friday when the surgeon gave the okay for Nyel to drive again, I don’t know which of us was happier – me-the-chauffeur or Nyel-the-passenger. It had been eleven weeks since he’d been able to drive and had been totally dependent in the matter of vehicular transportation. In large part that’s because both our car and truck have manual transmissions and, though it was his left leg that was impaired, he needed it for that pesky clutch.
I also thought about both of my grandmothers, as I often do when it comes to matters involving automobiles and independence. Neither of them ever learned to drive – not a car, anyway. They both could manage a horse and buggy, which to my way of thinking would be even more difficult. But they were both born in the 1870s so, by the time automobiles came along, they were approaching middle age. It probably never occurred to them to learn to drive.
Nana, my Bostonian grandmother, was quite the opposite. She was fiercely independent and, once my grandfather had retired and could squire her around, she was an active Massachusetts “club woman.” I don’t know for sure, but I imagine she was the quintessential back seat driver. Unfortunately (in some ways), she is the one that I’ve been told I take after, at least in personality.
As I stood at the gate talking with my neighbor Tucker the other afternoon, we heard the clip-clop of horse hooves coming up the street. Our conversation stopped and we both turned, watching and waiting. I’m sure we were both smiling. Such a familiar, though infrequent, sound in Oysterville can’t help but gladden the heart.
We hardly ever step foot onto or off of our east porch. Certainly not in the winter. It leads directly onto a vast expanse of lawn. No paving stones or pathway through the garden. Just grass which seems always wet in winter and always in need of mowing the rest of the year. It is, to all intents and purposes, our ‘back porch.’
became the main thoroughfare and our erstwhile back door became the front. When my folks retired here in the early 1970s, one of mom’s childhood friends came to call and mom was so touched that she came to the old front door – the only person, mom said, who remembered.
Friends Erik and Pat Fagerland came over late yesterday afternoon – Erik to clean out our chicken coop and Pat ‘along for the ride.’ I think it’s the third voluntary coop cleanout that Erik’s done since Nyel has been listed in the crippled column. To say we are in his debt is not even close.
Though I was only two steps behind, Pat was already snapping photos by the time I approached. I chose to go inside the run with the intruder, knowing that pictures taken through that chicken wire are not always optimum. The crow considered me closely, did a few fly-bys and then settled down to pose this way and that on the chicken’s outdoor roost.
I seem to be confused these days, but in a good way. My expectations don’t match the calendar nor do my hours match the clock. Part of that is due to the weather, part is due to the earlier-than-used-to-be Daylight Savings Time, and part is due to the calendar.
In fact, Easter Sunday on March 31st was so beautiful that the neighbors had an egg hunt in the church yard for their grandchildren. A little later we enjoyed a mid-day dinner al fresco at another neighbor’s! I think those were firsts in Oysterville, at least in my memory.
There is almost always wind in Oysterville. It’s one of the givens when it comes to coastal living. Our intrepid regatta sailors count on it; it blows away the clouds so that we have periods of clear blue sky, even on rainy days; it helps dry our wet lawns so we can mow without that bothersome clumping problem.
garden. I’m not saying they specifically wait for rainy days, but it does seem that if we have a long spell of that ‘liquid sunshine’ and we can’t apply the liquid fence, here come the deer. And, as all gardeners know, it only takes one visit and a few bites here and there to wreak havoc.
A few beats went by before I figured out that it was Mark, our neighbor to the north. I hadn’t seen him for five or six years and, all together, I’ve actually spoken with him maybe four times in the ten years he’s owned the property. There’s good reason for that, Mark shares his interest in the house next door with Cristen who lives in Portland; Mark lives in Costa Rica.
crab, cooked, cleaned and ready to eat. Nine of them! What a fabulous gift! I put them in the refrigerator way to the back lest they become confused with the potluck food that was coming in for our after-concert supper. (Not that I’m greedy, of course. It’s just that while nine crab are a bounty for two, they wouldn’t go far for thirty!)
Bradley’s daffodils have been in bloom for days now; ours are just budding out. Leave it to Bradley to have chosen cultivars that are early bloomers! In fact, leave it to Bradley to have chosen “cultivars” at all!
Unless there is something I don’t know about (like deer don’t poop in winter), they have been avoiding our place for months. But as soon as those daffodils began announcing their intentions, the deer people started their nightly visitations again.