Some things are
inevitable. I take a picture to make a
point, and my finger gets in the way. Well,
it’s not really in the way, it’s in the upper left hand corner, but it’s a
distraction from the point. After all, a
photograph is an attempt to capture a moment.
And of course, it’s inevitable that this was the only picture of this
particular moment that I took. At the
same time, it was the only picture of this moment that I could possibly take,
and my finger was there.
This blog is about my
attempts to manage my backyard. I’ve recently moved into this, my first house.
My backyard includes frontage along a creek, a garden, some trees, some
wildflowers, and some grass. There are
short trails through the wildflowers, and there’s a set of steps leading to a
dock. My first week in the house was
filled with dread – dread of potential accidents like a tree falling on the
house, and dread that I might forget parts of the quick lawnmover refresher
that my dad had given me right after I moved in.
I bought the house partly
because of the property. The creek is
great. I’m a meteorologist studying flash
floods for a living. With the dock, I
have a front row seat to that which I study.
I just have to be careful not to be on the dock if it gets washed away,
as the last one did last spring. I’m not
a gardener, and, apparently, neither were the former owners. It looks like one day someone stopped
tending it, leaving its maintenance to the deer and the groundhog, the
squirrels and birds. The wildflowers
look nice and make the place feel natural, and the lawn makes me feel like a
normal homeowner.
This past Sunday wasn’t my
first time mowing the lawn. But it was
the first time I really explored my own property in detail, thinking about how
to manage the many microhabitats that it supports. I went outside to mow the lawn, but first I
had to clear the sticks that had fallen in the weekend’s storms. I also cleared some plants from the fringes
of my lawn – thorny plants that cling to my clothes and skin. I encountered debris and waste left behind by
previous owners and began to create my own pile of eyesore on top of some
cement blocks on the fringes of the property.
As I was crossing the yard, I
noticed an acorn. It wasn’t really an
acorn. It was a nut that happened to
fall from the tree above it, or happened to be left there by one of the many
squirrels I’ve seen burying nuts in my yard, especially in the crevices of my
stone patio. And there wasn’t anything
inherently interesting about the nut, except that I’d never noticed one in the
yard before. It was a moment…the moment
this blog became inevitable.
You know, the Indians who
lived on Cape Cod buried baskets of corn in the ground to save for the winter. The Pilgrims, though they desperately wanted
to establish good relations with the Indians, stole some of these baskets to
get themselves through their first harsh New England winter. (This tidbit comes from Nathan Philbrick’s Mayflower.) This blog is to help get
through the winter. Being outside this
last month, exploring my backyard, has been therapy for me. And when winter comes, when the wind is
howling and the snow is piling up, I’ll need something to remind me of these
warmer days.
Acorn Place is the name of
this blog. There’s also a place called
Acorn Place that’s important in my life.
Of course an acorn is a seed, and this is the first post. So Acorn Place is a node…a thought space
where things come together in my mind. There’s
the nut…which I never managed to get a picture of, that’s a symbol among many
symbols in a place that I have to frequent often - my backyard…a symbol of that
moment when I realized that it would be fun to start taking pictures of little
things and big things and sharing them with whoever happened to be interested. The sticks that get in the way of the
lawnmower, the thorns that scrape me as I mow the fringes of the lawn, the junk
left behind in the yard that I want to get rid of one way or another.
Suddenly (yet not so suddenly),
I began to think about this ongoing process of yard maintenance. These sticks, pricks, and bricks have their
own place in my backyard, and their own tale to tell about nature, about
science, about the past and present of this little plot of land. They may help to keep things looking the way
I like them, even if they themselves look out of place. I began to document things – taking pictures,
making mental notes. I thought about
putting together a blog to tell their stories.
I intend to manage my land as
thoughtfully as I can, with purpose.
After all, I hate mowing the lawn, and this will give me something to
think about as I crisscross the grass, mow after mow. It will give me something to think about in
the frigid winter, when there is no football, no baseball, and anytime I need a
little break from what I’m doing.
So finally, five hours after
getting ready to mow the lawn, I get no more than five feet into mowing the
front lawn, and I encounter a conspicuous pair of sticks that I had completely
missed in my stick eradication efforts.
After all, digressions aside, this picture is about inevitability, and
this blog is about managing my yard. And
it’s inevitable that if you look hard enough, eventually you’ll get back to
what you were looking for…even if you were trying to get rid of it. Like that part of your finger in the corner
of the picture, it’s always there.
