memories

The Ginger Lilies (arachnophobia alert!)

Rae Spencer2 Comments

I don’t remember when the ginger lilies arrived. Years and years ago, long enough that I can’t remember what the yard looked like without them.

We started with eighteen bulbs, which I naively planted in pots because I didn’t know what a ginger lily was. I only knew that Mother had fallen in love with a vase of cut blooms given to her by a friend. She said the flowers smelled like warm cookies and looked a little like large, exotic orchids.

Mother’s friend gave us a box of beautiful pink-tinged bulbs, which I divided into three pots. Then I waited for spring to deliver a crop of cookie-scented flowers.

Instead of flowers, I got something that resembled corn. Each lovely bulb produced a green spike that quickly shot up into a leaf-wrapped stalk, taller and taller as summer wore on. In May they were knee high. In June they reached my hip. By August, they were head high with stalks as thick as chair legs. I had to brace their pots against the fence and support their weight with stakes.

Finally, September brought flowers, which were every bit as fragrant as promised. Less than half of the plants were able to bloom, constricted as they were in the pots, but it was enough to make me a life-long fan.

In November, my husband and I broke the pots with a hammer, because the bulbs had grown so tightly packed that we couldn’t get them out any other way. We cleared three beds in the yard, divided the tangled bulbs, and covered them with deep layers of mulch. After an anxious winter, we raked away the mulch and found dozens of spikes sprouting in all three beds. And so began years of delight…

Indigo’s Christmas Toys

Rae Spencer4 Comments

Several years ago we purchased a set of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer toys. We bought them on a whim, because we both have fond childhood memories of watching the animated Christmas special. We didn’t know that our dog, Indigo, would claim the toys for her own. They became her favorite part of Christmas, and ours. She knew what box they were stored in, in the attic, and visited them as often as allowed during the intervals between holidays. Each November, she danced underfoot as we brought the box downstairs and unpacked “her” toys. Then she climbed onto the couch and stared at them for hours on end. Her first task every morning was to check on the toys, and she begged for us to make them sing over and over during the day.

Last year, my mother died in October. Selfish in my grief, I skipped Christmas altogether. I didn’t decorate or buy gifts. I didn’t send cards or listen to carols, and I complained about the month-long marathon of televised nostalgia.

During the year of my cancelled Christmas, Indigo aged dramatically. Her hearing loss advanced to complete deafness, and an insidious onset of distraction and anxiety altered her personality. So I shouldn’t have been surprised, today, by her muted reaction to the Rudolph toys. She danced a slow, stiff dance as I placed them on the mantel, wagged her tail as I activated them each in turn, and then wandered away in search of a warm place to nap. She has not returned to the toys, and I have not tried to remind her of them.

It seems that this part of Christmas must move into the past and take its place among all of my other holiday memories. I’m sad to lose such a simple source of joy, but I’m happy to say it’s not completely gone. Two years ago, we spent an afternoon filming Indigo with her toys, and I have this video to treasure and share…

Katydids

Rae Spencer3 Comments

Growing up, katydids were my summer lullaby. On hot, still nights, I would move my pillow to the foot of the bed and sleep with my face inches from the open window. I remember the night air’s damp smell and the moonlit silhouette of silver maples. I remember the hollow calls of barred owls in the swamp across the road. And I remember the rhythmic, echoing chorus of katydids. Mother told us they were saying katydid katydid katydid… katydidn’t… katydid katydid…

I never imagined that I was leaving katydids behind, when I moved to Virginia. The closest thing I’ve seen, since moving, is the greater angle-wing pictured above. (Photos taken in 2011).

The yard does have a thriving population of small katydid cousins, meadow katydids, but they sound nothing at all like my childhood.

Check out this web page for recordings. Click on the common true katydid, to hear the call I grew up with, then compare it to the common meadow katydid. You might also listen to the greater angle-wing, which solves one of my ongoing yard mysteries. I’ve spent many a night creeping around the yard with a flashlight, trying to figure out who makes that repetitive click…

While I was hunting katydids today, trying unsuccessfully for a video clip, I kept hearing what sounded like a sneeze. A tiny, high-pitched bird sneeze. This mockingbird seemed embarrassed, when I traced the sound to it. I wonder if birds suffer from allergies, too?

Gesundheit!

What the Spiders Eat (Arachnophobia Alert!)

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This year the ginger lilies have sheltered and fed four enormous garden spiders. Mid-summer, this impressive quartet graduated from eating flies and began to catch moths and beetles. One of them even tried for a June bug. The June bug escaped, but the spider was in no danger of starvation.

Thanks to our mild winter and productive summer, the spiders’ webs are never empty. They eat and grow, eat and grow, molting over and over again as the summer wears on. Now they are giants, far larger than any of the yard’s June bugs.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been fascinated by the variety of prey these spiders have snared. A Cloudless Sulfur butterfly, last week. A sphinx moth and a dragonfly. Yesterday, one of the spiders managed to catch and consume a cicada.

Despite my affection for cicadas, I had to admire the spider’s audacity. And, despite my wretched arachnophobia, I softened into nostalgia over a large egg sac. (The egg sac belongs to a different spider, one of equal size and appetite.)

I remember a dark living room with an old television, where a little girl sat curled in a chair with a cat on her lap and a dog at her feet, watching a favorite movie. The movie featured a pig named Wilbur and a spider named Charlotte. I remember my tears, when Charlotte died, and my delight when her daughters emerged from their silken nursery.

So this year, late in November, I’ll cut back the ginger lilies and weave their stalks into a frost-protective blanket over the bulbs. In the process, I’ll tuck this egg sac into a safe corner of the flower bed, cringing a little as I imagine the multitudes within. Then, thanks to a lovely book and heartwarming movie, I’ll remember that these spiders aren’t quite horrible. In fact, they are almost charming. Especially when they say “Salutations!”

Changes

Rae Spencer5 Comments

The days are definitely getting shorter, and the yard has changed accordingly. Tired leaves litter the grass. The roses bloom erratically, producing smaller and smaller flowers with less and less scent. Few dragonflies remain, only a handful of Blue Dashers.

Spiderwebs lend the yard an autumn feel, harbingers of Halloween and the brittle months to follow. And there’s a silence, under the muted cricket chorus, that sounds like an echo of winter.

No more robins, no more blue jays, no love-struck doves on the fence. Only an occasional mockingbird, and even they tend to hide from view, flitting through the wax myrtle as if they would rather not be noticed. Or photographed.

So the yard reflects summer’s dwindling hours, despite the lingering heat. And I’m torn between sorrow and anticipation, a permanent state in the last few years. Tomorrow is always exciting, mysterious and unwritten. But today is satisfying, too. As for yesterday? Well, yesterday wasn’t bad at all. In fact, I was kind of sorry to see it go…