Monthly Archives: August 2025

Weeks and weeks of homebody bliss.

feasts, home, my garden, wildflowers, , , , , , , ,

I’ve been home from my travels more than two weeks already, and before any more trips loom on the horizon, I have eight more weeks of homebody bliss remaining. It’s still high summer, when the days –or at least, the afternoons — are of the warm sort that energize and call me to the garden. This is the greatest good fortune. Glory to God, that I have a garden. Glory to God!

Stinking Chamomile

Other things besides the garden have helped to fill my days, and are filling my calendar into the near future. When I am home, I can be a host, and have guests! My house is happy when extra people are enjoying its spaces, and feeling the breezes blow through. That’s happened twice already in the last two weeks, and I’m expecting it to happen more.

When guests come in the summertime, they can stroll about the garden and pick a plum, and younger guests can play in the playhouse. The last one who did that made a soup entirely of tarragon and fountain water, and then dumped it into the fountain. Speaking of the fountain, when I am home I can keep it running, and keep it clean. It’s not very cheery to have a fountain turned off.

Lesser Goldfinch – internet photo

The birds are enjoying the summer. I hadn’t noticed the goldfinches much in the last couple of years, but this week they have been frolicking around the fountain; they seem to have plenty of time to play, probably because they’re not burning so many calories to keep warm. Today the house finches came along to drink and bathe as well. And one goldfinch made a side trip to the arbor, to perch on a long wisteria runner that was reaching out horizontally. He made short and quick jumps down toward the tip, which dropped a couple of inches in elevation with each jump, pecking at the buds, or maybe at insects, until he was at some critical point, after which I suppose he’d have found himself upside down if he’d held on — so he flew away.

Spanish Clover

It was a wet spring here, and the early summer was cool, but now everything not in watered gardens is crisping up. I took my friend to one of my favorite parks for an easy hike, but it was so dry that the trail in many places had deep and wide cracks that made walking difficult, even in my boots. I guess I’d never been there at this time of year before? It did smell good out there, I must admit, and amid the crackling grasses we saw lots of wildflowers — first, masses of Yellow Star-Thistle, Centaurea solstitialis, an invasive plant that is in bloom now.

Yellow Star-Thistle

Star-Thistle is one of the many invasives that one can learn about on the website of the California Invasive Plants Council website, which I only just discovered. I think I’ll like to return there. The website of Yosemite National Park also features articles about such plants locally, and one of them tells about the great lengths different agencies go to, to control what is in California considered a weed. A Wikipedia article is unclear about whether the star-thistle is considered noxious in six or in 23 of the U.S. states where it is present. Are you my U.S. readers familiar with it? Evidently the purple star thistle is essentially the same thing, except for the color.

Star Thistle

The pennyroyal that amazed me at Tomales Bay also grew along the path in less spectacular displays; and Spanish Clover, and Stinking Chamomile (Anthemis cotula), photo above. That chamomile was new to me; Gwen sniffed it and said that indeed it did not smell good.

Domesticated and not-stinky chamomile is growing in my planter box, just one specimen that sprouted from the old seeds I threw in there before I went to Greece. I should plant it every year, it is so cheery.

Last week we celebrated the Procession of the Cross, and the festal cross stayed in the middle of the temple until the Forefeast of Transfiguration. Now we will celebrate Transfiguration for about a week until the Leavetaking of Transfiguration which is the day before we celebrate Dormition (Assumption) of the Theotokos in the middle of the month. I love the way the calendar anchors me to the church, and reveals the abundance of saints and events who fill the year with the glory of God.

Before the service, before all the fruit had arrived.

As usual we brought baskets of fruit, and after Liturgy processed through the vineyard singing. It wasn’t as prickly as the trail I walked on last week, but it required careful stepping around grape prunings and blackberry brambles.

I pruned the lavender this week, and set it aside to take to a friend so she can add it to the straw in her chicken coop, to sweeten up the atmosphere:

A different friend came for lunch, and we were able to eat outside on the patio, after a leisurely tour of the garden. It was just warm enough to thoroughly relax, but not to wilt. I added snips of my parsley and tarragon to the salad we made together. I could have put a few calendula petals in as well, but I didn’t think of that.

This has been a pretty unfocused ramble, I’m afraid, so rambling that I don’t know how to sign off. So, let’s just pretend we were talking together next to my planter boxes, and looking at the zinnias, and then I went into the house and didn’t come back.

But I will return eventually!

The confluence and the leaping forth.

church, quotes, , ,

“The highest light is God, unapproachable and ineffable, neither grasped by the mind nor expressed in language. It illumines every reason-endowed nature. It is to intelligible realities what the sun is to sense-perceptible realities. To the extent that we are purified it appears, to the extent that it appears it is loved, to the extent that it is loved it is again known. It both contemplates and comprehends itself and is poured out but a little to those outside itself. I speak of the light contemplated in the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, whose wealth is the confluence and the leaping forth of this radiance.”

-St. Gregory of Nazianzus (The Theologian), Oration 40, on Baptism

Transfiguration of Christ, Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery, Russia, 1497

Good-bye, Margarita.

my garden, ,

It’s a sad day here in the garden, as my dear manzanita bush is no more. Here is what she (I named her “Margarita” a few years ago) looked like when she first came into the garden in 2003:

And this afternoon just before Alejandro cut off the branches:

She’s gotten leggy lately because I could not figure out how and where to prune, in the midst of her demise. And you can see the lack of green leaves in the main branch. But for most of her life, she has looked quite lovely through all seasons.

I have a new plant that will go in soon. I think it is a different variety. The leaves don’t look the same as the old plant, and I don’t know if I have the name of the previous one anywhere in my stacks of papers. This one is a boy, I guess, “Howard McMinn,” and it is famous for being the most adaptable type for growing “in captivity,” as one might say. It puts up with clay soils, and with more summer water — a typical garden condition — than would be tolerated by many species of Arctostaphylos.

I might name it “McMinn.”

The house stands vacant.

poetry, time, , , ,

Back in the day when I lived with my family in farm country, in the midst of miles and miles of citrus orchards, my siblings and I would ramble through the groves, ours and our neighbors’, and along the private dirt roads dividing the properties from each another. All the kids did this, and no one ever suggested we were trespassing.

Once we came upon a small and shabby house with its doors and windows open, and obviously abandoned. We dared to go in, and walked through the rooms, which still contained furniture such as a kitchen table with dried up food on plates, other unwashed dishes in the sink, and personal belongings lying about. We didn’t stay long, it was too creepy, but my imagination was stirred from then until now, wondering what story lay behind the disorder. What would prompt the residents to leave without finishing dinner, and never come back? Why had no one bothered to come and clean up the mess, and make the place livable again?

That house didn’t show signs of having been beautiful at any time, but under different circumstances, it might have been. It remains for me a disturbing memory, for all the sad stories it might have been hinting at, but also because of the physical ugliness that stood as a witness to chaos. In all likelihood it has been leveled to the ground long since, and orange trees planted in its spot. I wonder if anyone else remembers it.

The poem below tells of a much richer and more nuanced experience and story. The poet Frederick Goddard Tuckerman was stricken when his wife died after the birth of their third child, and felt that as the father of the child he was somewhat guilty. Most of his poems after her death express these feelings of loss, loss of home and of the woman as the center of family life. One commentator suggests that the description of the mother, twice using the word “sat,” indicates her being frozen in time as a memory.

SONNET XVI (“Under the mountain”)

Under the mountain, as when first I knew
Its low black roof, and chimney creeper-twined,
The red house stands; and yet my footsteps find
Vague in the walks, waste balm and feverfew.
But they are gone; no soft-eyed sisters trip
Across the porch or lintels; where, behind,
The mother sat, — sat knitting with pursed lip.
The house stands vacant in its green recess,
Absent of beauty as a broken heart;
The wild rain enters; and the sunset wind
Sighs in the chambers of their loveliness,
Or shakes the pane; and in the silent noons,
The glass falls from the window, part by part,
And ringeth in the grassy stones.

-Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

Alfred Sisley, Abandoned House

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to Sally Thomas for sharing this poem on her Substack page last month.