“Who needs a telephone? This (he took a pinch of tobacco from a pouch) is my communication. Better than any telephone. Telephone carries your voice around the earth, not up to the Creator. You don’t need a telephone to talk to the Creator. When we want to talk to the Creator we burn tobacco and it takes our prayers all the way up to the Sky World. What telephone can do that?” ~ Louis Farmer, Onondaga Nation
Another glimpse of of the new abode buried into a hillside and camouflaged in greenery.
Peaches, cherries, pears, blueberries, and fig.
Refugees from the old beach road. They are all planted now.
Lost in the limbo land between buying and selling a home. It seems as if all we’ve done this spring and summer is work on one or the other house or garden and move objects between them. Cats are confused. I am exhausted. The blog has been neglected. I’ve been painting walls and longing to paint again from a palette rather than a can. I am excited to move into my new home though and I love it madly even though it’s stolen all of my time. The most challenging and emotional part of all this has been moving the gardens, deciding which plants to keep and which to leave and where they go and all that jazz. These photos were taken last week at the beach house garden. Everything has changed dramatically again. Faded irises have given way to an explosion of daisies, coreopsis, and foxglove. So much inspiration. So little time.
It’s well into spring and feels like early winter here. The ocean is rough and wild and loud. I find it comforting and invigorating. It worked out well for us on spring break. Most of the vacationers never showed up. We live right on the beach which means that our peaceful isolated life is transformed by weekenders and vacationers in the warm season. We have the place to ourselves the rest of the year and when it storms.
It seems to me that most people only love nature when she isn’t showing too much character. That’s when I love her best. On one of our walks against the wind, we saw the seals again. When the beach is empty and the sea is rough, they swim over from the rocky point and play in the surf. The wild ducks like to body surf. I saw a flock of young males playing that game in the smaller swells.
Chris and I have been building a garden from scratch. Besides working on art in the studio and watching animals surf, that’s how we spent most of our time for the past few weeks. Little Nemo is not happy about it at all. He does not understand why we are outside and he’s not. Poor little guy. The future garden is still just an empty lot so it’s a lot of work to get it started. It’s still painful when I think about the lush wild garden at the old place but there is something to be said for starting fresh. The best thing about starting over is that we are planning and building this garden together.