Places that We Could Care For

The gifts and reminders that come from staying in one place and observing my surroundings, tending the soil, and wondering what it means to care for a place.

The birds start singing around 4:30 in the morning, before the sun is up. Chickadee-dee-dee-dee-dee and cheery-up cheerio cheery-up cheerio. I didn’t always know they had a time of year for singing loudly and with gusto but now I appreciate the way their chorus grows from February into June. Not far from where I wake up early to bird song, bigger birds stalk through the mud and grass on long legs and flap over the water with wide wings. Snowy egrets, glossy ibises, and great blue herons returned to their summer home in the marsh weeks ago and now I see them when I pass by the expanse of river, grass, and salty mud. I love the seasonal reminders that have come from staying in one place and observing my surroundings for years.

Eight years ago we moved to our house and generous sized suburban lot. While we did a bit of fixing up our fixer-upper, we explored the yard. Discovering wild strawberries in the grass, an old apple tree perfect for small climbers, and raspberry and blackberry canes skirting the edge of the woods felt magical. An overgrown patch of lawn behind the garage was happily dotted with milk weed and St John’s wort. Violets still run rampant and bright red poppies come up every year near our patio. A quince bush by the corner of the house opens pink blossoms in the spring and the ruby throated hummingbirds frequently visit to sip nectar. So many gifts from who ever planted or left them here.

Over the years I’ve built a vegetable garden that meanders from one side of the yard to the other. I have slowly altered the space around our house from a large expanse of grass with some towering fir trees into my preferred habitat of edible and beautiful plants. I’ve put a lot of time and energy into building garden beds, adding plants, weeding, and watering. I am grateful to be able use this suburban lot as a sort of blank canvas for the gardens I’ve dreamed of and I’ve put so much care into this transformation. For all of that I give to the plants and soil, I am easily repaid in vegetables, flowers, and fruit.

As spring becomes warmer, sunnier, and greener, I check on my garden beds, assess what they might need, decide where to put plants and seeds. I wander my yard peering below small piles of dead stalks and leaves to see the green shoots reemerging. Hello lemon balm, hello lupine, hello little sunflower sprouts that will grow taller than me and shade most of this garden bed. I devote many hours to tending the soil by adding minerals and compost, covering it with mulch and wood chips. I prune away bittersweet that has no competition here and can wrap trees with fast growing vines, eventually pulling down branches or trunks.

And I wonder, what does it mean to care for a place? Is it the physical labor, or simply remaining here year after year, or is it feelings of attachment and meaning? A place is not just the landscape or buildings, infrastructure or systems. It is memories, experiences, and relationships of many kinds. Just as places can mean and signify many different things to each of us, there are many ways to care for the places we love and live.

Like the Little Red Hen, I plant the seeds, I water the seeds, I pull the weeds, I harvest the vegetables, I make the food. I decide what I want to do with the garden, but I can’t always control how things will grow and what will flourish. Building this garden that is so meaningful to me is a way to to physically interact with the grass and soil and bushes. In a time and place where cars can speed us away and planes can move us thousands of miles in hours, it can be hard to feel rooted anywhere. I plant seeds and trees that grow actual roots in the soil even if I don’t know how deep my own roots will go. And in addition to this anchoring, my plants bring me delight and joy.

Last month, we cut down the two crabapple trees that were growing behind our house when we moved in. They bloomed deep magenta in the spring and dropped their leaves and little red fruit at the end of summer. The first week we owned our house, the larger crab apple tree’s branches draped nearly to the ground forming a shelter, perfect for spreading a blanket where a one year old could play. The next spring we pruned the branches back. I kept cutting down dead limbs each year until the tree was just a trunk for woodpeckers. Now it is a stump surrounded by daffodils and tulips where we once built a fairy garden, layering memories onto this place.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to conclude this essay for a day or two. I guess am not actually done with this idea of caring for a place and all the ways that we connect with places and add our own memories and experiences and meaning. I think about my small experiences in the place I live, finding a mushroom on the logs I inoculated with shiitake spores three years ago, watching bees go in and out of the hive, the trails and beaches and trees near where we live. I think about how knowing and caring for one place might help us to value and protect more of our amazing and astonishing planet.

In our interconnected world, where it is possible to see and talk to people on the other side of the earth in an instant, work from anywhere, and get almost anything with the press of a button it could be easy to forget about where we are right now. But when we look around and pay attention there is so much to explore, smell, touch, taste and learn about places that we could care for.

Warmly,

Anna