ethereal

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The Complete Life Cycle of a Monarch Butterfly: Something I found today on The Gardener’s Eden blog while investigating shade-loving plants.

I envision a full/lush/crowded/healthy border of plants on the northwestern side of the shade garden, grounded by hostas, featuring a trellis for climbing autumn clematis. I have so much time for imagination.

Lately the monarch butterflies have been flittering. Their grace in flight, their sudden stillness. This is what we want from books. A look, a glance away, absorbed concentration, a transformation, a lingering.

See (read) Carole Maso for inspiration. Read Virginia Woolf. Footnote. Pause. Exploration.

A thousand before have written. A thousand afterwards.

A flight of butterflies.

Number them for precision.

List of Iberian butterflies (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) on a Purple Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You start to live

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Sometimes you need to get in the car even though the temperature feels like it is a hundred degrees Fahrenheit with humidity because there is a garage band practicing somewhere in your complex and it is too hot to complain. You get in the car, roll four windows down and drive toward the beach, only you don’t turn towards the beach but keep going. There is no one in front of you and no one behind you. You drive through a grove of trees and even though you are not going fast, and even though you are not in a convertible, it feels like it, and you think this was why that commercial from the seventies was so good, the one that said, You start to live when you start to drive, and in this heat, you feel like you are living at last.

Summertime perfection with strawberries In June

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Sometimes, when you least exect, a season catches you unaware, and even though the solstice is a few days away, it felt like summer last Sunday. Friends came into town, old comfortable friends, and when they asked, want to meet us at a strawberry festival, how could I not? I planted up the tomatoes and basil today, even though we’re far from the second quarter of the moon. First I attacked the crabgrass. It was deeply satisfying to sit on the ground over an old compost bag and dig out the grass I’d been eying for weeks, wondering, seed or weed? But crabgrass is unmistakable, and so far, I don’t think anyone cooks with it. It is however, an extraordinarily bright shade of green, the color of, oh, say, aphids, and I questioned my tugs, hoping it wasn’t tiny lupines or alyssum I was pulling.

More than anything else in this life, I am a novelist, and I weed like I write, chapter by chapter, diligently applying the weeding tool, or sometimes just using my hands, adding to a pile of castoffs until I tire.

Tomatoes, then stakes, then basil. Stakes to support the plants not for vampires.

Then off to eat strawberry shortcake, made we were told by many hands from one single recipe, piled high with fruit and whipped cream. Children gamboled about, spun cartwheels. In one hour, they ran out of cake. But, oh, we hadn’t quite run out of spring readying to summer.