September’s Send-off
Photo by Dmitry Burdakov on Unsplash
September 30, 2024
Fall, leaves, fall
Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.
—Emily BrontëAnother month ends, and I’ve just passed my half-birthday, which means I’ve got six months left in this seventh decade of my life. Time to let go and compost the dying flowers, listen to the falling leaves, and sing, whatever night’s decay might usher in.
September seems to have gone by quickly, yet it feels like a long time since I saw two hummingbirds on September 2nd. I’m delighted also to close the month with birds—those of the Atlantic shore, which B and I visited for a few days last week.
We left the city early Wednesday morning and arrived about three hours later on Assateague Island, a 37-mile-long barrier island off the eastern coast of the Delmarva Peninsula (so named because it contains most of Delaware and parts of Maryland and Virginia). The island is perhaps best known for its Chincoteague ponies (aka Assateague horses), a feral breed whose origins are unknown and the subject of several theories. According to one, they descended from Spanish horses shipwrecked off the coast in the 16th century; another is that mainland farmers brought horses to the island in the 17th century. We saw a few of them along the roadside.
Photo by Sara Cottle on Unsplash
Assateague Island is protected by a National Seashore, a State Park, and the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, in the Virginia part of the island. Thus it is free of development, a place to explore the peacefully dynamic ecology of coastal bays, salt marsh, maritime forest, and the ocean. However, I owe the pleasure I took in identifying birds to technology, in the form of the Merlin app on my phone, which is amazing. Using the app’s picture ID, I saw Roseate Spoonbills, Great Egrets, and even a Trumpeter Swan—all of them so far away I could barely see them (having forgotten to bring binoculars).
Later we drove north from Assateague through Ocean City, which is as overdeveloped and generally tacky as the island is pristine. Yet even that drive was pleasurable, as B and I reminisced about the years of summer vacations there when our kids were young. Reaching our destination of Bethany Beach, Delaware (less overdeveloped), we spent two nights and the day in between walking on the beach, having dinner with a couple of friends, sleeping in a cozy Airbnb house on a quiet street surrounded by tall evergreens of the beach forest.
Yesterday I again called on the restorative power of nature, this time in my own backyard. I was feeling out of sorts in every way—physically, mentally, emotionally—for only selfish reasons. The news was worse than ever: the horrific and escalating war in Israel, Gaza, and now Lebanon; the appalling destruction and loss of life caused by Hurricane Helene from the Gulf Coast of Florida through all the Southeastern states to Tennessee, including parts of Asheville, N.C., where I vacationed with my family in June.
Yet my self-centered discouragement was caused mainly by the local weather, just the edge of the tropical storm, hot and extremely muggy with on-and-off rain. And on top of all this admittedly minor discomfort I felt guilty—I mean, what kind of ridiculously privileged nonsense is this?
So, late in the afternoon I went out to the wet garden with a trowel, after first prepping two clay pots with a little potting soil. I took one of the pots with me, dug up part of a parsley plant, not skillfully (I might have killed the rest of the plant in the ground), plopped the dug-up part in the pot, took it back to the basement, and filled it with more soil. Then I took the other pot out to the garden and did the same thing with the lavender plant. Except that one was much harder and I had no idea how to divide it (I need a YouTube video before trying this again). I pulled up most of the plant, broke off a chunk to keep, tossed the rest aside. No matter. Some of that plant is still in the herb bed and might survive (lavender is very hardy, I’ve found), and there’s another plant, a huge one, outside the bed.
By the end of this potting endeavor I knew it was a failure—the parsley was wilting already and the lavender was too big for its pot. All of that was fine with me. My garden foray into dividing and replanting, mistakes and all, revived my spirit, and I learned something. This morning (brain-alive again) I realized that I can simply take cuttings from the parsley and lavender plants and see if they’ll grow roots in water, like houseplants.
“Look for hidden treasures in the mundane.”
