What Shall I Do Today?
A Summer Garden, Less Scruffy Than Mine
A lifetime ago, I woke to summer eagerly, and
hurried through my small domestic tasks so I
could bask in warm and breezy days, with
friends, with books in gracious shade beneath
the maple tree, its bark worn smooth where I
habitually reclined. The world, with all its
blessedness, was
mine. I loved the storms that lumbered
in, the frosted quickening of the wind, the snap
of ozone in the atmosphere, and then the clearing
and the clean, bright look of everything.
In childhood, there is no time, in summer. I
devoured everything that Laura Ingalls Wilder
ever wrote. I played canasta on the porch, and I
recall an afternoon with people I’d known all
my life—Candace, Don, and Maggie—laughing
over nothing, strolling to the pharmacy two
blocks away for Popsicles, and strolling back. I
had new tennis shoes, in red, they must have
been, for Don and I imagined them as Dorothy’s
magic slippers and pretended we could rematerialize
in Oz, but didn’t even try, because, why would
we? Life was perfect where we were, a perfect
summer day, a shaded, quiet street, the easy,
soft cocoon of friends, an afternoon it seemed
would never end.
Now, again, it’s summer, with its obligations and its
chores, its heavy blanket of humidity, the scent
and sound of mowing lawns, and everything’s in
bloom. My little yard is forested with sunflowers, my
wooden fence is draped in ivy. I have things to
do, more now than when I read, insouciant, beneath
the tree and felt the grass caress my scabby legs, and
was content; but it needs little effort to recall the
wonder of it all, and bring it back, and notice how
the earth is generous, and how it can be after winter
seals the surface—only that, and not the heart. And
so I wake to summer eagerly, and still anticipate the
miracles I’ll see today.
My Fence of Ivy
Sister Alma Rose Has the Last Word 