My Heaven on Earth

I LOVE our garden.

It was actually one of the two reasons we bought our house, but if you could see what it looked like then, you'd be scratching you head. Scott and I just kept coming back to the horrible over-grown garden and the crazy tiki bar and saying, "Are we crazy? Do we like this? Is this nuts?? Who else would buy this place???" (Turns out, NO ONE. The house had been on the market for something like 450 days.)

BUT, it was in our price range, in a pocket-neighbourhood that honestly could trick you into believing you live in the country even though it's in the middle of a good sized city, and it's on a dead-end street. Even better, we were hard-pressed to find even one house in the entire neighbourhood that didn't have at least one dog. Definitely Heaven!

So we bought the place, white carpet, over-grown garden, outdated wiring, and all. Oh, if I could only explain all the crazy stuff that was in this house, you'd never stop laughing. (One example: the bizarre home made street light, converted from an old fire-hydrant. Scott not only threw his back out trying to shift the hydrant, he got electrocuted --- this is how we discovered where the line ran through the yard, ha ha.)

But slowly we started discovering the charms of this little brick box: There were hard wood floors under the carpeting! The back garden had a lot of charm once it was beaten back a little! There was a second pond under the corner bush! (We ended up taking that one out, but it was a nice surprise. Actually still had some fish in it, even; what they'd been living on, I have no idea.) The neighbours, while a little...intrusive...were actually very sweet, once we established our own territory. Scott spent a summer building the stone patio and got wonderfully brown and skinny.

All in all, it's worked out really well. I spent Friday afternoon hanging out under our cherry tree in the back garden, reading a magazine and watching the dogs goof around. This picture really doesn't do it justice; it was taken last month, and everything has grown so much since then. The hostas are already demanding to be divided, which might actually work in our favour, as the front garden is an absolute mess that a few hostas could certainly improve.

I realized that I spent our first two summers in this house focusing on all the work to be done, all the improvements yet to be made. This summer, because we'll be gone for a year, I find myself looking at the budding trees, the expanding hostas, our host of bumblebees, really noticing in a way that I haven't before. Familiarity breeds contempt, they say, and I can see now how true that is.

So this spring, and the summer to come, is bittersweet. I'm sad I won't be here next spring to take note of which tulips are emerging and which buds are flowering and if the bleeding heart made it through another winter. But I'm thankful it's made me pay attention today.


Posted by Hello