It’s been an exciting week. I have to share the most wonderful happening first, which is that my grandson Pat’s wife just gave birth to their first baby. Glory to God! This is my fourth great-grandchild. So far among the Greats there are three boys and one girl. I’ll share a photo as soon as I get a suitable one. Welcome, Little Boy!
(In the meantime, here’s Pat at left, long before he was considering marriage and children.)
“The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope.
“I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.”
– G.K. Chesterton
In the last year I’ve planted three different types/colors of Japanese anemones, and the second of these new groups, the pale pink, opened its first flower yesterday. My old white ones have been blooming for a few weeks, and the new dark pink flowers with a wonky petal pattern also. The dark pink ones are the most enthusiastic, thriving on the amount of sun and water they get; I’m hoping the mildew they have suffered is just from unusual weather this year, and won’t always happen.
Recently my daughter Pearl and I were talking about Elizabeth von Arnim’s books, as we often do, and she suggested I might like The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen. I got it right away and have been reading it on Kindle — many of von Arnim’s books are out of print — to great enjoyment. In her telling of her travels around the German island and among other tourists, Elizabeth often uses words such as happy, blessed, joy, light and radiance to convey how she feels when out of doors, particularly when the sun is shining. She is my kindred spirit for sure. Here is one excerpt that reminded me of my own joy this very week:
“
Oh blessed state, when mere quiet weather, trees and grass, sea and clouds, can make you forget that life has anything in it but rapture, can make you drink in heaven with every breath! How long will it last, this joy of living, this splendid ecstasy of the soul? I am more afraid of losing this, of losing even a little of this, of having so much as the edge of its radiance dimmed, than of parting with any other earthly possession.”
In other places her descriptions of the people she meets and the conversations among them are, as is usual with her, both insightful and very funny!
This little purple pot above was given to me by my granddaughter Ivy. It was the first thing she ever made of clay, and it has a convenient hole in the bottom so it can serve as a planter pot. It’s small, and just the right size and color to set off the beauty of a little chick type of succulent. When it becomes a hen I may have to substitute another chick in its place.
I had another super exciting day when the Monarch chrysalis we’ve been watching matured and the butterfly emerged. The pupa stage lasted about three weeks, which is on the long side, and I wondered if possibly the insect had died. But the delay was likely just due to the week of cool and drizzly weather we had recently; the case darkened, and I began to see the Monarch colors inside.
Early in the morning I went out to look, and it was a chrysalis. An hour later, still in my nightgown, I checked again, and the butterfly had broken out. (This makes a total of four Monarchs I have monitored closely, yet missed their big event.) He was clinging to the mostly-bare milkweed stem, his wings hanging behind, heavy and damp.
All along I’d been worried that there was not enough food on those plants to grow a caterpillar to sufficient size, especially since the aphids were devouring the leaves at a fast rate. Then when the caterpillar entered the pupa stage, I thought, “Isn’t that chrysalis kind of small? Maybe it’s undernourished….” Now I stared and stared some more, amazed at how such a creature could have been so tightly packed into the thin case. A full-sized Monarch!
The sunlight was weak, so we waited, Mr. Monarch and I, for his wings to dry; intermittently and gently he opened and closed them. Drops of meconium (I looked it up) fell from his body several times. After a couple of hours he began to flap them a lot and flew/fell into the twiggy penstemon patch.
Down there I feared he’d dropped into a spider’s web, so as he struggled to walk out through the tangle, I put my finger near his head so he could climb onto it. Then I carried him, walking up my sleeve, to the zinnias in the planter box, where he was glad to attach himself to a stem.
I sat for a while in this chair nearby, where the buzzing of the bees in the salvia made garden music for me. Skippers were all over the zinnias, too, but they are hard to catch at their business, they are so quick to take a drink on the fly.
The glorious Monarch stayed another full hour on his zinnia stem before he flew up and away, eventually to a perch high up in 
the neighbor’s redwood tree. There’s no flower nectar to drink there, so I imagine he came down soon, but by then I was very late in Getting On With My Day, and had to go in.
The Anise Swallowtail caterpillars Bea and I had seen a couple of weeks ago disappeared; I hope they are hidden away in their next stage of development somewhere. But two more of these gorgeous creatures can be seen feasting on the parsley now (at right).
And there is another Monarch caterpillar not fourteen inches from where the one just emerged. It seems that there is indeed enough of the narrow milkweed leaves to support not only a large aphid population but at least one butterfly.
As you can see, the week was rich and full beyond the baby and the butterfly. But let me mention two more things that amazed me this week: Sweet peas blooming in September! Not many, but enough for a tiny bouquet. And the music of the piano.
I try not to talk overmuch here about my new housemate, so I will only say that a certain person has been playing my piano more than it’s been played in a very long time. Sometimes she plays morning and evening, and once I woke to the comforting sounds, and once it was as a lullaby when I went to sleep. This is a gift I never thought to ask for, but my Father thought to give it to me.
Do you suppose next week will be calmer?
peas growing on the trellis, and zucchini as well. As it is, volunteer sweet peas have flourished, because those boxes are irrigated on a timer that gives them a little water every day. This week I pulled out all the burr clover and aphid-infested collards and Swiss chard, to make room for the flowers, and to plant more seeds.
The lettuces that had bolted I chopped up and gave to my worms. Out there I set up a board by way of a chopping block just for this purpose. I probably have four times as many worms as I started with last fall, because the man who gave me my starter batch moved far away and couldn’t take his worm farm; he gave them all to me! He consolidated all three or four of his bins into one new one, before bringing it to my house, so I fear that they are overcrowded, and I plan to modify my set-up so that they have more room. But they seem to be doing well on the diet I provide.
Brussels sprouts. There was cold tea as well, pretty fancy stuff that had just arrived today.
A lovely thing happened on this gardening day: I received in the mail this book The Fragrance of God, by Vigen Guroian (2006). I noticed it online when I was buying the new edition of Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination. The Fragrance book seems to be on the same theme as the author’s previous book, Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening. I couldn’t help leafing through it right away, though I was too busy to give it proper attention. Just now I did take time to glean one quote with which to end my mostly garden post. I am reveling in my own heart’s portion of Paradise tonight.
I’ve been in the garden every day, at least a little, and often a lot. When I come downstairs in the morning and realize that it’s already warm enough that I can slide the glass door open, without thinking about it I slide open the screen door, too, and go out to have a look.
