Saturday: There are at least two dozen squirrels running up and down the big trees out back. Quentin, the dog, is fascinated. A shadow just passed over my head as a hawk swooped through the branches into the next yard. Out of sight, I can hear the sounds of the squirrel it has just caught. Immediately all the rest rush to the branches of the big tree in the opposite yard and have just disappeared. High drama in the backyard— nature red in tooth and claw. If the morning events were the climax, the afternoon is dénouement. Not long after one o’clock the squirrels one by one returned to their play, but not in the numbers from the morning. Then the gasoline powered lawn equipment commenced a ruckus, disturbing the squirrels’ weekend pleasure. Now all is quiet—the heat is coming in and they must be napping, though there goes one right now: Quentin is quivering, but only from her lounging position.
Sunday: Wallace Stevens— fastidious Connecticut Insurance executive—opens his most famous poem:
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice
I’ve got coffee (no oranges) and an old iron chair—no carpet, just dirt. My cockatoos are robins and cardinals, still Sunday morning here is also lived in the holy hush of ancient sacrifice. Jets still fly overhead, but the usual low rumble of traffic is dampened. No garbage trucks, sidewalk repairmen, chainsawers— just birds singing the day in and a dog chasing a ball, kicking up the dust so it floats in the places where the sun slants through the branches. The hushed human activity gives them the morning stage, and each takes a turn.
Monday: No dust, just mud. Last night’s thunder actually shook the windows, brought Quentin to the bed. This morning the backyard shines, slick. The hostas are stretching. Everything smells new, like dug dirt, like the smell of a field just plowed. The worms are squirming across the wet ground, the robins follow, a perpetual cycle of living, eating, dying. Holidays sound different than Sundays — more cars, more sirens, even some people doing carpentry. Still, it feels strange: not a Monday, not a Sunday, just a day without time.
Tuesday: A day of expectancy, listening to other reports from far afield— floods, tornados, deaths in Texas and Mississippi, heat wave across the gulf coast, and Hurricane Bret forming in the Atlantic taking aim at the east coast. Long day of sometimes sun and thick humidity, but also a sense of impending violence. The storm first edged into the neighborhood during the afternoon Quentin walk, still light out, but wind whipping trees, turning the leaves upside down, inspiring her to hustle through the walk, abjuring her normal extended sniffs at key marks. Instead she took the leash in her mouth, looking up at me, trotting back to the house as large drops smacked the sidewalk loud, bringing out that summer-rain pavement smell, just arriving at the porch when the clouds released. Now waiting for the torrents, watching the computer screen go from green to yellow to red, and watching the trees shake their leaves, then go still, quietly dripping.
Wednesday: When I was quite young, I remember wandering around marginal land— the places between wood and field. Often bounded by small streams (which we designated creeks based on some obscure criteria), the fields led to banks of day lilies, masses of them, plants I took to be wild natives. For me, a day lily had one face— that bright yellow orange trumpet waving over the mud. They were to be found in wild spots, not someone’s flower garden. The other day, on my morning Quentin walk, I paused while she attempted to hike her leg (boy-dog style) on some ivy cascading off a wall by the house next to the park. There, on an overgrown bank were day lilies— the proper orange ones—flopping as if in the edgelands. So even though it is entirely too late for spring planting, I got bulbs, dug around the spot where the last rose bush once lived and where a hollyhock now blooms, and put them in. The hot wet weather of this week is doing its magic. Tiny green shoots (short and thick) are pushing away the dirt, making that spot yet another wild edge.
Thursday: While the South continues to experience unsettled weather—tornadoes, floods, drenching rains, and killing heat —Atlanta remains insulated from the extremes. Today was just drizzling rain, more mud, occasional sun, the odd breeze and cool weather. The afternoon showers kept me on the back porch with the dog sleeping near, reading Thoreau‘s essay on wild apples. Ever the contrarian, he celebrated apples sprung wild from tossed seeds (sour, bitter, discolored, and in the wild occasionally glorious) rather than the grafted dimensionless sickly sweet fruit we to this day consume. Of course, he’s living in a completely different age and climate, but the essay invites a survey the trees from my perch on the porch. This neighborhood is a gentrified wonderland, but unlike the atlanta suburbs with their landscape-designer cookie-cutter sterility, the trees of Cabbagetown have sprung up where they may, often on unclear property lines. Few look to have been planted with any intention, so while not wild apples and not a wild forest, I find myself surrounded by wild trees. Unruly, undisciplined, unnamed, twisted, gnarled, they have no place in a “yard” but here, they are perfection.
Friday: For most Americans, the image of someone panning for gold is familiar: an old, gnarled man in raggedy clothes scoops up gravel and water, swirling to reveal glittering flecks. Somehow water and rock bring treasure. The week-long rains here have continued washing out parts of my backyard (helped along by the dog’s boisterousness). This neighborhood was built in the 1880s to house factory workers at the local mill. Most have yards where, in earlier years, urban livestock would have lived— chickens, pigs, maybe even geese— along with an outhouse, a workshed and of course a wood pile. Now occupied by middle-class professionals, few of the yards still contain chickens, definitely no pigs or outhouses, which makes the yard something of an archaeological site or even a mine. Like the water swirling to reveal grains of gold, the showers have caused to emerge long buried treasure: bits of glass (somehow abraded into a safe form), marbles (the classic toy of children from the last century), bits of tile (probably dumped after a construction job), and of course scraps of broken plate, crockery and other kitchenware. One day walking up over a rise nearby, I encountered one of the oldest residents of the neighborhood, hunched over, staring at the bank beside the road. I stopped to talk as I am wont to do. He explained that after a storm, he could find interesting things — bits of his youth—in the rawness of the newly washed bank. This week, my yard is revealing those bits of past lives, the treasure of former inhabitants.
Saturday: In his classic Wheelwright’s Shop, George Sturt describes in detail how to build wooden farm wagons, including elm/ash/oak wheels. He would buy large timbers in the round, letting them dry for nearly a decade before cutting in to see if they were sound (the very opposite of fast fashion). I’ve never been a wheelwright or much of a woodwright, but have collected logs when neighbors removed trees, sometimes fashioning interesting boards. Some years back I rolled some big rounds of old gum to the backyard where they could dry. Preoccupied with other things, I left them on the ground, so instead of occasionally testing for soundness, I’ve been witnessing rot. At first, turkey tail mushrooms emerged, covering the surface and giving me afternoon tea. Now they are mostly gone—though a beautiful shelf has appeared deep the the now-open heartwood of one log. Looking closely, the wood is checking the way a burning log coals. Rot is biologically driven combustion—the slow burn of a once tree. Of practical necessity, Sturt had patience; my logs are teaching me the same.
Sunday: Smells in the neighborhood are both elusive and allusive. A few blocks over there’s a row of restaurants giving off the distinctive odor of frying food, but here it is less clear—the faintest whiff of automobile exhaust, sometimes the compost pile drifts in. Before the roses out front all died, there was a perfume factory, but now just sitting, it all seems a bland nothingness. But weeding brings smell—what comes from touching plants. The herb garden – dill, oregano, rosemary, sage— is, of course, distinct, but the two strongest here are tomato and the Tree of Heaven. Fingers after suckering a tomato plant produce profoundity—earthy and heavenly in the same moment—but the smell of freshly pulled Ailanthus is pure intensity. The Tree of Heaven is in most people’s opinion a noxious weed. Opportunistic, growing rapidly in the margins, they appeared at the edges of the orchards where I spent my youth, providing branches for the various implements children need to invent their games. Here I’ve been surprised at the young plants coming up as the shade is dense and Ailanthus are heliophilic. Like much of Atlanta, my backyard tree canopy is thick, but the source of all those little smelly plants is evident. Thrusting up high, probably higher than a Tree of Heaven should grow, are two—both having sprouted on the property line and which now rain down the seedlings that I pull weekly: exuberant growth both joyful and infuriating, wood with no character or use, leaves somehow tropical and misplaced, cheap branches dropping from high. But that smell! In his poem “Smell,” William Carlos Williams berates his seemingly independent and indiscriminate nose for seeking foulness:
… the souring flowers of the bedraggled
poplars: a festering pulp on the wet earth
beneath them. With what deep thirst
we quicken our desires
to that rank odor of a passing springtime!
The Tree of Heaven has a rank and piercing odor, carrying with it the efflorescence of life, what seems an almost cancerous overabundance, so at the same time, it reeks of death.
Monday: I woke up to a yard littered with branches, some small, some quite large. Needless to say, the dog was ecstatic— so many sticks to fetch, so much wood to chew. The sky was now clear, the leaves an intense green, all having been washed pure by last night’s massive thunderstorm. In no way comparable to the vicious weather the deep south has been experiencing, last night we got one of those magnificent storms where the trees dance. I watched from the shelter of the front porch as it moved in, first ripping off all the loose leaves, then rocking the trunks of every big tree within sight, the crowns twisting kaleidoscopically. Perhaps foolish, I felt no alarm, praying along with William Butler Yeats:
If there's no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.
After the storm, we had a half-hour of post-thunder strange yellow light—always eerie, disturbing, but so beautiful. This morning I gather the sticks to put in the kindling pile for fall fires. A cardinal is gathering caterpillars from last night’s disturbance, probably from the windthrown branches. Now come the robins, everyone is helping with the morning cleanup.
Tuesday : Care for flora and fauna, while falling under the general category of care, requires different efforts and understanding. The ground of my shaded backyard is populated by ferns, hostas, and liriope. Most people consider the liriope invasive, but it is one of the few plants that stands up to the rigors of shade, heat, and dog. The hostas are a joy. It’s hard to imagine a plant that revels in low light the way they do while producing an astonishing variety of shapes and colors— success through the broad leaves, ready to take in whatever light the tree canopy offers. The fauna are a different story. Squirrels treat the trees like highways, scatter across the roof of the shed, dance crazily, gathering and distributing the nuts of the trees. The birds, always ready to burst into song, are on the alert for insects, caterpillars, and in particular the earth worms from the compost pile. Activity burgeons. Quentin, the dog, is the wild card. Less respectful of the rest of the system, she tramples the ferns, the hostas, the liriope while chasing the birds and the squirrels. She asserts her biological size and mobility as a dominant player in the yard. But this morning she got her comeuppance. The storm blew down sticks of all sizes which she has been reducing to pulp. While drinking my coffee from the perch of my porch, I watch her chew on a stick, then start running in circles, sort of standing on her head, pumping her tongue and slobbering like crazy. She went out into the yard, ran around for a minute looked at me and then did more of the same weird headstand/slobbering. Leaving coffee and book, I walked to the yard, pried open her jaws and after rummaging around in her mouth, found stuck in the roof between her back molars a stick exactly placed where she couldn’t get it out. Needless to say there was a lot of gratitude in her eyes when I pulled it loose. Of course this can be seen as a fable where humans are deployed to care for “lesser” beings. Or it can be seen as an instance of the mutuality that informs life in this field. Quentin tramples this year’s hostas but fertilizes every morning next year’s. The birds shit seeds while killing earthworms. The squirrels gather and bury acorns. The dog is seems as brute force only because of sheer size. Care is more subtle, happening through macro/micro interactions, none of which are more important the other, even if the gleam of gratitude in a dog’s eye produces joy.
Wednesday: To see light requires shadow. The tree canopy here is thick but not total, so the sun filters through. Across the day it moves from plant to plant, almost as if someone has set up a light show to give each its due, all the while breezes animate the scene. A Tree of Heaven seedling sprouts in the dirt near my seat, usually invisible until that moment when it stands up, fully lit, looking like an illustration from a plant identification book. The illumination across the day is a slow-motion flashlight, seeking out some thing, prying open corners, revealing stuff in hiding. Most everything gets its time: the plants in the flower bed along with the weeds, leaves and flowers of a climbing vine, downed branches, gnawed dog bones, bits of broken glass in the dirt, mica twinkling in rock. Or do I have it backwards? Maybe it is not that the objects are illuminated, but instead they are there let me see light—they manifest it through their illumination. All those things are there to let light be known in all its amazing variety.
Thursday: A few years ago, one of my sons gave me a present— an analogue thermometer which now hangs on my back porch like a big clock face telling a strange time. Even though I pass it daily on my way to the backyard, I still open up the weather app on my phone to check the temperature. That the source of that information has to bounce around some satellites and through long networks and server farms bothers me—a lot. It must be a trivial distinction, but a simple tool right here where I stand seems somehow a better way to understand where I stand. Of late, the deep south has been laboring, sweating, and dying under a heat dome. I’m currently teaching a class on philosophy and climate change but nowadays it feels more like current events. In the past weeks Atlanta, normally a hot and humid place, has been spared such intensity. In fact, it seems to have been unusually cool across this early part of the summer. Today that all changed— right now we are in the 80s on our way to the 90s. I look at my poor Newfoundland dog, feeling temperatures she was never born to live in. The heat blankets the yard—soporific—all the critters must be napping (though the bugs seem more than lively). The thickness of the air further dampens sound so the only thing to hear is the insistent hum of air conditioners, today’s song of the south.
Friday: Miss Quentin is aggressively digging a hole in one of the flowerbeds, “bad dog!” setting me to think about the underland. I replaced a couple of panels of backyard fencing last week, so I dug 1 1/2’ post holes uncovering the usual Georgia stratigraphy. A thin layer of humus, a mat of roots, mostly thin (wisteria in my case), and then the clay horizons—smooth red, crumbly yellow with gravel. Near the bottom I start hitting rocks and stop. If you’re really unlucky, you’ll catch a root too thick to cut with a spade (for one I had to get the Sawzall to cut away a 5 inch root). Otherwise unlike Quentin, I don’t find myself exploring the underground of the yard, but have delegated that to the earthworms. Every fall, I rake the leaves to the far corner, creating a huge fall pile which by late spring has been reduced by the worms to something between mulch and soil. My favorite Darwin book is The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms where, through careful fieldwork, he details the massive amount of earth moved by those lowly worms, concluding that “it may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.” It’s humbling to invert my backyard hierarchy— me, dog, squirrels, birds, worms!