On yielding to the natural
barefoot in the backyard with an iPhone
I’m distracted all the time because the yard is alive.
“What day is it?” I say, while shaking my arm vigorously, trying to wake it up. It’s early morning, the sun lamp has turned on, and outside it’s the start of a dark gray day. We still have the ceiling fan running at full speed and the window open. The air feels damp and slightly cool. Janyce is walking around in the bedroom.
“What time is it?” I say. “Is it getting hot out?”
“It’s 6:00 am and it’s Saturday morning,” says Janyce. “I don’t know the temperature but it’s supposed to get to about 73 degrees today. Anything else I can do for you? Any more questions I can answer?”
“Wait, aren’t you my butler?” I say.
“Very funny,” she says.
I hear the coffee pot gurgling in the kitchen. Janyce leaves the room to get the coffee and I jump out of bed. It’s threatening rain, but I’m still eager to get outside onto the patio. I’m midway through my Less Lawn, More Life challenge and this week we’ve been asked to upload 50 photos to the project on iNaturalist, documenting all the signs of life in the yard. I’ve left the leaf litter on the lawn all winter and spring and only now have I started removing the largest and deepest piles. I’m using my new electric lawn mower set on high, running over most of the debris, snipping the tops of the longest grasses. I have to admit, it still feels like a mess out there. But I see evidence of my efforts. Like Cinquefoil. Poking up all over, spreading mostly at the edges of the lawn where the turf grass has been stifled. Some people really hate cinquefoil, but I’d rather see this than grass.
“Did you change your mind about buckwheat pancakes?” says Janyce, standing in the doorway to the slider. I’m barefoot out in the backyard with my iPhone in my hand. It’s now close to 8:30 am and I don’t know what happened to the last couple of hours.
“Sorry, lost track of time,” I say, while walking back toward the house. “I’m coming now.”
In the kitchen, I rattle on about native black oaks and white pines, about our non native (and actually invasive to my surprise) Kousa Dogwood that we have been nurturing for years, about how I can possibly photograph the songbirds I know we have in abundance with just my old, inferior iPhone camera.
“I want to improve my wildr score,” I say, as I crack an egg in the small bowl of buckwheat flour and empty a homemade compote of strawberries and blueberries into a small pan on the stove.
“Mmm hmm,” says Janyce, clearly getting tired of my endless morning chatter. I have mostly used up my nature minutes with her today already, even though our meadow project was her idea first. The coconut oil in the frypan is starting to smoke and I drop small circles of batter with a sizzle.
I’m distracted all the time because the yard is alive.
The bumblebees came back to the catmint just this morning, when all last week only a few honey bees and hummingbirds could be seen. Now the tree frogs trill, barred owl fledgelings deep in the woods make their long hissing sound to be fed, the bluebird pair have returned to the nesting box for their second brood of the year, and a curious young doe crunches through the leaves to stand motionless at our wire fence, her white tail swishing behind her, seemingly to get a look at our dog. Selene doesn’t bark at her either, she stares back. We’ve seen Woodman once recently, but the vast tunnels he made from the shed to the bulkhead mean that our resident woodchuck can travel to our neighbors’ yards mostly undetected.
The first week of June is over. Summer feels like it is here already, even though it is still only late spring. Everywhere I look I see an unfinished yard project. But it’s like creating a painting, I think, this way of yielding to the natural. I stand back and try to imagine what the landscape wants me to do. The new native plants are growing tall over on the meadow side, and if I squint, I know exactly where to plant some brown eyed Susans. There’s a big hole in the center of the perennial garden, but more shoots of butterfly weed will fill it in a matter of weeks. And there is no shortage of invasive vines to pull. Happily, I have my work cut out for me.
Give me truths; For I am weary of the surfaces, And die of inanition. If I knew Only the herbs and simples of the wood, Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain and agrimony, Blue-vetch and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras, Milkweeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sun-dew, And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods Draw untold juices from the common earth, Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply By sweet affinities to human flesh, Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,-- O, that were much, and I could be a part Of the round day, related to the sun And planted world, and full executor Of their imperfect functions. — Ralph Waldo Emerson