This brings me happiness

22 July 2024. There is a feeling of peace sitting in the garden. Well, that should be obvious, I guess . . .  but it isn't. Here we sit with the comings and goings of insects, butterflies, and birds, here we sit on a summer day, mid-afternoon, our presence isn't needed, the insects, butterflies, and birds have work to do. Now honey bees visit the garden, you didn't see many of them a few years ago. If the climate is changing, and it seems to be, then let it stop at this. We never had snails before, up to last week we had many snails. And cardinals are now seen and heard everyday, even in winter we have cardinals, and they were few and far between just a few years ago. Now I hear and see them everyday; what happened? On the news it is said that they are plentiful (while other birds are diminishing in number) because there are so many bird feeders in Montreal. Really? I wonder. Let's not spoil things with politics, even though it's difficult not to drop a few comments, but if you want peace, turn off the radio, turn off the TV, leave your IPhone in a drawer, be with nature. 

This brings me happiness

 

This is the best year for the garden! It has taken time, six? seven? years to become established; some things take time and you just have to be patient. I can see how I could have sped things up; for instance, instead of planting a few cone flowers each year and waiting for them to spread, I could have bought five or six, or more, and this would have made the garden fuller, more established, sooner rather than taking so many years. But live and learn, and learning by oneself is without the input of other people. I love to walk or sit in the garden, surrounded by flowers and bushes, and the insects and butterflies are plentiful; I think to myself that I have made this a home, or a place to visit, for them. Every day I see birds visiting the bird bath and this brings me a lot of happiness, I don't get in their way, I stay quiet, I observe them from the dining room window, and I think to myself that I have made this a place they can visit. If you make your garden a place where insects, butterflies, and birds want to visit then they will come; a barren yard, just grass, isn't all that inviting for them. A barren yard, just grass, needs a few flowers to make it inviting; a garden is almost like a room in one's home, it is an extension of one's home.

On impermanence

 

The thing is to accept (and even like) the very thing about life that upsets one the most because we are moving irreconcilably to death. And that is the impermanence of life. We can't freeze life to when we were most happy. We continue on and on and then we reflect on the past, on when we were happy but, perhaps, didn't know it. We weren't self-conscious in our happiness. It doesn't work that way; we think back, we're nostalgic creatures, and we fix on a time when we were most happy, or we think we were. We fight our emotions and ideas of self-reproachment, we beat them down! Why are we even having them? Because self-reproachment is an act of depression and we live with more or less mild depression all of the time. And we remember the past and wish we could live on an island of unself-consciousness and unreflected happiness. Is it a hallucination? Does it make any sense? We are sad, we grieve for what we had. We hate impermanence. And we are too old to suffer more impermanence, more change. What to do? What to do? 

                                                                                        16 April 2023

My grandmother's summer cottage

I used to say I'd like my garden to be a place where my grandmother could visit and feel at home. In fact, I don't remember my grandmother walking in any garden or even being interested in gardens, so what I really meant is that I'd like my garden to be as old fashioned as possible, with old fashioned cottage garden plants, and a quality of timelessness throughout. Yes, my grandmother would feel this timeless quality, as would everyone else who walks through such a garden.

I remember my grandmother's summer cottage on 11th Avenue, not far from the water where we used to swim, in St. Eustache. It was a place of summer cottages back then, now it's a bedroom suburb and proof of the truth of Thomas Wolfe's book title, You Can't Go Home Again. My wife and I visited 11th Avenue in 2007 and I regret that I ever returned even for just an hour, it is in the process of gentrification and nothing is left of the way it used to be, nothing is left of what made it a special place. Because of this I am filled with sadness and nostalgia remembering those summers of my youth, they are gone forever, the old people I loved are gone and will never return. This is, of course, common sense--the one constant in life is change--but it is still upsetting. 

Facing my grandmother's cottage there were phlox growing between her house and the adjacent cottage on the right. Remembering those phlox, one of the first plants I wanted in my cottage garden were phlox just like hers; but the way it has turned out is that the phlox in my garden are never as nice as I expected them to be or as nice as everyone else's phlox in this area. Right now my phlox, with both white and purple flowers, are coming to the end of their growing season while my neighbours still have beautiful phlox. 

A cottage lends itself to timelessness. It should be a cosy place and that quality of cosiness is important; it contains a perennial desire, it is the desire to have a safe harbour, a place where one can relax and not worry about the outside world, and a place where one is safe from the vicissitudes of life. Everyone needs a roof over their head, everyone needs both a home and enough food to keep them from being hungry, and most people need family or friends with whom they can talk, laugh, and socialize. And we can all have some of this in a cottage with its cottage garden in the back yard.

I am reminded of Patrick Waddington's short story, "The Street that Got Mislaid", about some people who live on Green Bottle Street, a street that the bureaucrats who run the City of Montreal have somehow forgotten about; it "got mislaid" from the card index of city streets, and because of this the residents pay no taxes, they don't live in our world but they are of our world. These people are dedicated to their hobbies, playing the piano, gardening, talking about the past, and living with the other people on the street. It is just after World War Two and all of them are wounded in some way, life has not been kind to any of them. As well, the street is shaped like a bottle, implying it is isolated from the rest of the city, which it is, but it is also a kind of utopia, a kind of Shangri-La. It is their safe harbour. At the end of the story, the protagonist is invited to join them and live on Green Bottle Street and he happily does this and leaves the noisy and rough outside world behind him. A cottage is also a safe harbour, we say leave your cares at the door, put your feet up, have something to eat, and enjoy yourself. Or just sit and do nothing.

Here is my grandmother outside the cottage in 1946, the year she and my Uncle Alex
purchased the place; doesn't she look happy! 

My grandmother's summer cottage, photo taken in 1946 when she and my Uncle Alex
bought the place.

Here is the cottage around 2009, it had been winterized and renovated. By 2011 the cottage had been demolished, property near Lac des Deux Montagnes has increased in value, and a new large house has been built on the site. 

Crows Return to the Bird Bath

Not much gives me as much happiness as seeing these birds, whether crows, grackles, sparrows, robins, cardinals, or others. They are all a delight and source of happiness. The curious thing is that they seem to know this is for them, a bird bath, and they come and have a splashy bath or a drink of water; they even line up and wait their turn to use the bird bath. The crows are large majestic birds but never cross a crow, they'll remember what you've done and make your life difficult. Here is a crow visitor from last April.