Category Archives: Weeds & Wildflowers

Go Outside Every Damn Day

It’s not a choice, it’s an imperative

What do rain, sun, and snow have in common? If you said they are all types of weather, then you are only half right. The full answer is that they are all great types of weather for being outside.

That’s right, rain and snow can be just as lovely as sunshine.

Not the outdoorsy type? Who cares. Is it raining? So what. You have an overriding fear of moths? Grow up.

I’m not saying this to be unkind. I’m saying this because the kindest thing I can do is to tell you to go outside nearly every damn day. This isn’t about some study making the daily news rounds, although there are more than a few of those. It’s not even about vitamin D. Well, not entirely.

It’s about humility, awe, and being true to your most primal inner human nature.

It’s about being fully alive.

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My Life With Spiders

Caught In Charlotte’s Web

It is still too dark to check on her.

Last night, I watched helplessly as she rushed to bundle up her home in the failing light, as rain lashed down and the wind blew. She hadn’t quite succeeded by the time I closed the blinds, but she was huddled up in a relatively safe and protected spot.

As dawn finally breaks over the eastern ridge, I hazard a peek through the blinds. Her home is immaculate, and she is perched comfortably in the center, her head down and waiting. I see the beginning haze of a cloud of gnats rising from the stinking laurel shrub below, and I am relieved that she will not go hungry today.

I call her Charlotte, for the obvious reason that she is an orb weaver spider, and I was one of the many children in this world who cried over E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Her home is a web that she has spun across the outside of my dining room window, mere feet from where I sit and write most days.

Autumn in the Pacific Northwest is aptly named “spider season” by the locals.

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I Learned the Secret to Everything In Aunt Nancy’s Basement

(Some assembly required)

Aunt Nancy’s small farm house had a basement. Our cookie cutter suburban tract home had no basement. Maybe this is why I spent so many hours each summer exploring the dark crannies and nooks of this mysterious underground room.

This wasn’t the spooky basement that popular culture had prepared me for. Aunt Nancy’s basement was neat and orderly. A magical place where glittering canning jars with jewel-tone contents were stacked to the ceiling on strong wooden shelves. A place where bunches of onions and braids of garlic were tacked onto the supports for those shelves. Along the bottom, crates of winter squashes, apples, and potatoes lay nestled in protective nests of shredded newspaper and straw.

In one corner a scrap of carpet covered the floor, and atop it sat a few broken down armchairs and an old sagging couch. Stacks of board games and old magazines sat on a shelf. Dubbed “Twister Corner” by my auntie’s family, this was where we all went when funnel clouds threatened. It was also where my cousins and I played when it was too dark or too rainy to go outside.

One set of shelves in Twister Corner held something different, though.

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Pumpkins and Spice, Everything Ain’t Nice

Why can’t I love autumn?

I gaze through the square frame of my window. It makes reality into a painting of a magical world beyond my warm kitchen.

The lawn is green again, now that the summer heat is gone and the fall rains have begun again in earnest. Bright yellow pin oak leaves and rich crimson maple leaves dot the emerald lawn like candy sprinkles. The beauty is almost too much to take in at once.

Like a coven of merry witches, the evergreen cones of the giant sequoias sway in the wind as they encircle the yard. They are wise women sent to watch over us and protect us from the worst that the winter gales will bring. Before them stand the skeletal branches of maple, alder, birch, and oak. A few tattered but joyfully vibrant leaves still cling to their outstretched fingers, all the more shocking against the listless gray sky above.

I cannot deny that autumn is a time of immense beauty.

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On Wings of Death, Comes Life

The promise of the owl

It is not the sound that draws my eyes heavenward, for there is no sound.

It is not movement, for in the gloaming, movement is almost as invisible as the silence.

No, it is something more primal, more visceral, more animal in nature. It is the caution of prey that draws my eyes upward, bred deeply into my human animal psyche from a time when our rodent-like ancestors cowered in burrows, hiding from that which would destroy.

Dark wings blot out the pale moon-lit sky, all the more terrifying for the soundless silence screaming out.

Predator. Harbinger. Guide.

The barred owl alights on a nearby post, eyes like all-seeing saucers reading into my soul. 

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It’s Time to Let Go of the Brown Thumb Myth

Your thumb has nothing to do with your gardening ability

Photo by Katya Ross on Unsplash

“I have a brown thumb,” Jan said apologetically, “I mean, it’s so bad that even silk flowers curl up and die.”

The rose bush I had planted a few weeks earlier was dropping its leaves and looking a bit yellow, but it wasn’t dead. I knelt beside it and dug my fingers into the soil. The roots were still firm and there was no sign of slime. We weren’t too late.

I smiled at Jan in an attempt to put her at ease. She had hired me because she had always dreamed of being a gardener, but she didn’t know the first thing about gardening. My job wasn’t just to install plants, it was also to teach her how to garden.

“You don’t have a brown thumb, just a heavy hand with the watering can.” I couldn’t help but chuckle, “You’re loving this poor rose to death!”

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The Day I Spared Peter Rabbit

Beneath dead earth new life arises

Photo by Davies Designs Studio on Unsplash

I was wading knee deep through the fallen soldiers in a wasteland of death. The skeletal remains of heather, a sword fern, and countless other shrubs and perennials that could no longer be identified crunched underfoot.

Someone, in the not-too-distant past, had tried to eradicate a horsetail problem by dousing the entire garden border with a broad-spectrum herbicide. The only living things that remained were the prehistoric green fronds of the horsetails themselves.

I levered my spade underneath one of the heather remains and pushed it upward. A frantic squeaking accompanied the severing of the plant’s roots. I quickly stepped back and surveyed the scene before me.

With the heather gone, I could clearly see a small burrow with a lining of soft brown and white fur sticking out.

Oh no. Bunny nest.

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