surprise tomato

two weeks is a very long time. it is a long time to be without one's beloved. and then to arrive at night, to be unable to see the world properly is even more strange. we're back in the mountains, home at the house, after two solid weeks in brooklyn. it feels like a year. years. it was good to spend a weekend in brooklyn, to go places we used to go when we were only city folk. but it is better to be in the mountains with the dogs draped all over everything and the house warm from wood stove and the yard all full of new things.

when we got in, it was after eleven, dark, cold. we hurried everything in, built a fire and fell into bed. this morning, max began his bathroom whine around six, later than he does in brooklyn. so we went downstairs, bundled up and went out to face our first foggy, forty degree morning this season. we'd noticed last night that a section of the logs had fallen into the driveway. my first thought was meddling teenagers, then bears. but i remembered watching the drunken path of that awful gustav and the small and medium limbs strewn across the foggy yard support my hunch that we were attacked by a horrible but not very impressive inland hurricane and that in this one instance, it focused its power to be as surgical as a tornado and it tumbled logs everywhere.

but right next to the carnage (okay, really it was fifteen logs or so, but play along) the dogs discovered a patch of lush grass where a miserable, scabby patch of bare ground used to live. in fact, the whole back yard had transformed. two weeks ago, the sweetie had scattered grass seed right on top of the miserable, bare dirt behind the house, assuming that he'd be greeted with nothing much when he came back. but at six thirty, the whole back yard was glowing that green color of new grass, luminous and breathing. on the way back by the garage i checked my bee house. generally, i peer into the bamboo holes and see the legs of daddy longlegs sticking our all over the place. but this time, there were no legs. there were plugs. the plugs of baby bees snuggled into their new homes for the winter. three. four. five. later, the sweetie, who is taller and can see in much better, counted six. that's more bees than i've ever had.

the two small dogs and i kept traveling. we walked around the house a few times like we needed the trip to get ourselves really there. on the second pass around the porch i noticed something pink against the lattice. when i looked closer there was another pink flower dripping off a vine twined around a rusting peony. morning glories. not the blue ones i remember from my childhood, but still, morning glories. i'd been pining for them just a week ago, hoping my four o'clock seeds would be morning glories instead. and they just popped up out of nowhere. just for me. but not really. i've spent an entire summer weeding the little patch of dirt around my inherited roses and peonies. i've ripped up probably hundreds of morning glories, not knowing what they were. but being gone let them get themselves established and now that i know who they are, they're welcome to stay.

like the creeping thyme. when we finally got around to weeding the slope at the front of the yard, we found tiny clumps of ground cover that smelled like food. we pulled everything back from it and now we have large masses of green with tiny purple flowers scattered all over, holding back the ever-eroding slope of our front yard. the sumac tree in the corner of the yard has started a million tiny sumac trees and we're trying to discourage this behavior. as we were pulling the sumac sapplings i lamented that we never see anything good like spruce saplings. the sweetie laughed. we have five giant spruce trees and didn't really need a baby one. but i realized as i said it that i really wanted one. felt like my life wouldn't be complete without a baby spruce tree to love and worry over.

i went back to weeding near the roses, careful of the morning glory vines. the sweetie found his way to the wood chipper and was lost in the roar of the chipper engine and the spray of plant matter. i was pulling a dandelion from the base of my rose bush when i saw it. it was tiny. and not just tiny, but growing up out of the bits of cement that fell off the chimney when the mason was here to repair things. it was the tiniest, babiest spruce tree ever to shoot up out of the ground (click on it and look bottom, center). just for me. it was about this time i began to suspect something was up. the house, maybe, is haunted. except it doesn't seem to be. no ghostliness and the only unnatural sounds are those of squirrels in the walls. no clanking of chains. but the yard. the yard is haunted. perhaps. not so much haunted as unusual. like a fairy godmother. a fairy godyard? i sit out there in the dirt and weeds thinking wistfully of some ridiculous old lady plant and then find it later in my wanderings.

when we bought the place, i envisioned a yard like my grandma's, like my great-grandma's. and there was the apple tree. lily of the valley surprised us in may and the peonies and roses we saw remnants of in fall bloomed like mad. the lilies were relentless this summer and the sumac, though berryless, sits smugly in its clump by the road. there is chicory along the sidewalk and although they're no longer here, lilac and creeping phlox once sat along the front edge of the lawn matching each other, sending the grandma vibe right over the top. throw in some honeysuckle and a few pinks and i would worry we'd gone back in time to when i was ten. and when i wanted moss around my apple tree roots, the rains came and there was moss. when the sweetie was threatening some sort of ground cover assault on the front slope, i showed him creeping thyme in a catalog. a few weeks later i showed him right there on the front slope, right where we'd never even noticed it before. i am tempted to ask for a pony. or a hazelnut bush. perhaps every plastic bag we dig out of the ground is a wish. maybe every bit of glass we toss out and every clump of wire we remove is a bit of green we'd always hoped for. a wheelbarrow full of mulch will bring down a shower of periwinkles.

and i haven't even mentioned the accidental tomato.