Thursday, March 27, 2008
A Garden is a Box of Chocolates...
..and in early Spring, it's an unopened box of chocolates....or think of your garden as that final Holiday gift someone left in a corner, still wrapped, forgotten about, and all of a sudden, while vacuuming or throwing out the debris of Winter, you stumble across that one forgotten gift and no one is around so it automatically belongs to you, and you alone can unwrap at leisure the wonders therein...this is how the garden in our backyard is seeming to me these days: a generous gift from the people who used to own this house...and the design is really lovely,with terraced beds and sumptuous shrubberies, tens of dozens of every kind of Spring bulb, so many of which are half-way up now, fresh green reminders that renewal is a reality, not just wishful thinking.
Our current landlords, two extremely nice people we finally met over Easter weekend, because they came to town to be with relatives and requested a meeting with us...anyway, we spent a good hour here at 216 with them, shared fresh coffees I brewed in our kitchen and discussed life in ways that helped us to know each other better before going around the place and pointing out things they could help with by fixing and giving permission to have work done on...so, the bricks on the lovely back patio will soon be replaced and made safer...various other things they willingly assumed responsibility for (bless them!) and the most important for me was sending in their gardening company to totally clean and refurbish the backyard terraced gardens...when i came home to let the pups out on Monday, there had to have been 6 gardeners cleaning and mulching and cutting away dead wood and schlepping it all to the front yard curb for the town to cart away....our gardens, always pleasant, now look well-cared for and rich...I can hardly wait to add my "2 cents" with some colorful container plantings....
When I asked the head gardener guy how to best water the gardens in the Summer, he smiled and said watering was a thing of the past with this garden because of its long-established and well-plotted maturity: the roots knew how to care for themselves, they had been in place for a couple of good decades! So,, the only watering I must do is for the plantings I initiate myself...all the rest literally live off the ecology of the neighborhood they have been living in for so long! Amazing.
When I realize the chance I have here to live in such pleasantness every day - and not just on the NYC weekends when I could get away to the Upstate House - it puts the utter busy-ness of all things Barter into a much healthier perspective for both Peter and me...Nature has a way of doing that,doesn't it? It sort of puts all else in its place: Nature is after all...well...Everything.
And it knows a lot about Life...far more than we mere humans could ever presume to know.
Out dearly welcoming neighbors on this street are too much fun! The Pillions...I can hardly wait to know them better, and their gloriously beautiful three kids...our dear LeeAnn and Rob Hitch down the way..and their gorgeous two redheaded babies! I just want to spend an evening hugging them all! Not to mention all the dear ladies who have brought up cakes and cookies and made us feel so at home right away here....I promised I would make some evenings clear so that we can all have a dinner together and really get down to the other important business in Life: becoming friends! (there is important Business besides that of Show...there is..there is...)
One day, as I keep promising, I will include some pictures of this much-touted garden of ours, ad well as some photos of the Abingdon experience in general! Soon there will also be some EVITA photos to up load and some rehearsal photos of same...we start serious work on that soon, and the more i study the show, the more i see what the big deal is: EVITA is quite something...no wonder it has become legendary in the theater world...it is an extraordinary work of art....and I grow more excited daily about directing it....it's all beginning to make a certain sort of personal sense to me now. I am beginning to feel its heartbeat and understand its nature better and better...since i had somehow missed it all these years, I truly have been getting to know it for the first time......a privilege.
More soon...thanks to you all for reading.
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