Yesterday was Summer Solstice. I’d recently commissioned a leaf sculpture from a friend, and I got to take it home yesterday! What perfect timing. I set it up on a little improvised plinth near a wild corner of the garden, where the volunteer honeysuckle grows. I wanted it to be a little altar where I can honor the spirit of the garden.
I picked a sprig of each flower and herb in the garden, and placed the posy on the leaf, with a little bowl of sweet wine and a lemon cake. Tastes of summer.
Lucky, the Garden Cat, immediately inspected (and, I’d like to think, approved) the new installation.
The garden is lush and verdant. The squash and gourds are putting on HUGE leaves. The bank of cosmos, zinnias, and bachelor’s buttons has begun to pop. Every tomato plant has green fruits ripening on the vine. We have a couple of peppers forming, and some eggplants.
We were expecting company later, so I spent some time sitting on the bench swing at the back of the garden, soaking in the season.
It is amazing all the things that happen together, if you are watching. Yes, it must be summer! The flowers have just started blooming in the last week.. The cilantro is bolting. The onions are bulbing. Suddenly there are cobwebs around the garden where none were the week before. (Every little patch of garden has its guardian spider: daddy long legs, wolf spiders, and others I can’t name.) There are subtle but distinct shifts that indicate “this is a new season, now. We enter the height of summer.”
The garden has changed so much, since we put this swing up! Not just building out the infrastructure, but now, watching everything grow up around it. The failed hugelkulture bed keeps me humble, though, being front and center when I sit on the swing.
And then company came over, and I spent the evening with some of Erik’s old friends (and my friends, too, but he has known them for 20+ years). Someone was in town to catch a flight tomorrow, and impromptu patio drinks were in order.
Once everyone had gone, Erik and I returned to the swing and sat in the darkness, sipping a last cocktail (seasoned with herbs from the garden) and absorbing all the deep gratitude we have for this life, this place, and the abundance with which we are graced.
I said to him “I feed the fae for the same reason I feed the birds — why shouldn’t I nourish the spirit of this place?”
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