A Moveable Garden

Weekly recap of my ritual of existence in this liminal space called life. (See here for more info.) Click any photo for larger view.

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• Weather

I was at Rehoboth Beach from Monday to Friday, on the train most of Sat., and only home on Sunday. On Tuesday in Reboboth we had a very windy rainy day, so windy that we couldn’t go on the beach without having our eyes slashed by sharp grains of sand.

When my sister and I walked two blocks (quickly) in town from her hotel to the candy store, we were thoroughly soaked though we both wore windbreakers.

Thursday and Friday were perfect beach days — as I noted on Instagram — with low winds and temps around 80°F on Friday.

Back at home in New Hampshire, the average high was 69.6°F this week, with high temps ranging from 76.3°F to 62.4°F. Lows averaged 44.9°F, ranging from 49.1°F on Mon/Tues. to 36.1°F on Saturday night when we had our first frost advisory. Absolutely no rain this week at all.

Drought map as of 16 Sept:

Fire danger in our area is at its highest level:

• Beginnings/Firsts

As mentioned just above, we had our first frost advisory of the season on Saturday night/Sunday morning. Temperatures hit 36.1°F at our house and frost was minimal and patchy here.

✨✨✨

A first-ever for me was visiting the nascent Delaware Botanic Gardens in Dagsboro, DE (20 mins east of Bethany Beach) on Thursday with friends for 2.5 hours. The greeter called it a “baby botanic garden” — conceived in 2012, ground broken in 2017, opened to the public in 2019, then closed for three years early in the Covid pandemic, and last year cleaned up and weeded — but then he had probably never seen the Coastal Georgia Botanical Gardens or the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in their infancy and toddler years, when they were, respectively, a bamboo farm and some wooded trails. The greeter also expressed misgivings about the unsteady rate of plant growth in the Piet Oudolf-designed meadow garden this year, but they seemed perfect to me. I’d love to see them in spring and high summer too.

Delaware Botanic Gardens photos (and there are more in Wild Things)

Most are of the Piet Oudolf-designed meadow gardens

“caricatures” (sculptures of natural materials) at Delaware Botanic Gardens

the fence lizard’s mouth

• Wild Things (Flora, Fauna, Fungi) in addition to others elsewhere in this post

All in Delaware

some Merlin-heard birds in Delaware

• Wandering 

As mentioned above (and in LL#89), I wandered to Boston (by bus), then Baltimore (by train), then Rehoboth Beach, DE (by car), and back this week. And while at Rehoboth, we wandered to Cape Henlopen State Park and to Delaware Botanic Gardens in Dagsboro, DE, and finally, briefly, to Bethany Beach, DE. After I got home, we walked in town on Sunday.

Baltimore, train, & bus pics

a few Rehoboth town & beach pics

Cape Henlopen State Park / Gordons Pond Trail (more in Wild Things)

for Delaware Botanic Garden pics, see Beginnings/Firsts above

• Curiosity & Discoveries

Obviously the Delaware Botanic Gardens was a fun discovery for me. So many insects on the flowers!

I laughed every time I walked by this place on the main drag in Rehoboth, First State Corn & More. I’m sure everything there is delicious, especially with a judicious use of Old Bay. I wish I’d stopped in for the hushpuppies!

Also, this perfectly scented Sicilian Orange soap (bought at Browseabout) that my friend (RVN) introduced me to. Ooh la la. We sniffed it every day to clear our minds. 😊

When I got home, I discovered this monarch chrysalis!

• Creating

Memories!

• Repairing and Maintaining (everything but the house & yard)

Body/Mind: I felt more relaxed at the beach than I have in a while; I noticed that I was hardly clenching my teeth at all. No strength workouts this week, but being at the beach is always an active experience, usually involving biking but for me it didn’t this time as the windy weather the first few days wasn’t conducive. Instead I walked everywhere, first with my sister on the beach, boardwalk, and in town, and then by myself at the state park (while my friend rode her bike and hung out on the beach), with friends at the botanic garden, and we all walked (or biked) often just going to dinner or lunch in town, strolling the boardwalk, making our way to the beach, running errands, etc. This time of year, after 15 Sept., it would be easy to drive and park in Rehoboth but we mostly left the car in its spot for the week. I did get some strength training carrying my 30+-lb backpack around on travel days. 😉

Cat: The cat had his nails trimmed at the vet on Monday, not without drama including overturning sitting room furniture and the infliction of minor wounds on my husband.

• Gardening/Yard 

Dry, dry dry, The gardens are dry. I wasn’t home to tend to them but there isn’t really much to be done at this point. While I was away, my husband emptied out one rain barrel that has been stinky all season, despite bleach applications — I haven’t used it. The other rain barrel has been very helpful this year and it’s still useable for a few more weeks (until a freeze warning). He also watered the ficus and hanging baskets and took them outside in the mornings and inside at night all week, and he kept the birdbath full.

The most exciting thing was returning home to the frost advisory and realising the basil needed either 1. to be harvested and made into pesto pronto by a weary traveller, or 2. to be covered for a couple of nights with lows below 40ish°F. We covered them. (I’m writing this post after Sunday so I can tell you that six of the seven basil plants did great and one had only a little damage to some top leaves. I’ll get to them soon.)

some garden pics this week

• Nesting 

Cleaning/Maintenance: I did virtually no cleaning or maintenance at home this week, though I ran a load of laundry at our beach rental. My husband had the floors all vacuumed when I arrived home and had just made a dump/recycling trip. He also took in a pair of my pants for me and hemmed another pair.

Food: Ate some yummy food at the beach this week:

Monday: Henlopen City Oyster House (a favourite) with my sister and friends (peel & eat shrimp and cream of crab soup for me). Others had oysters, the arugula salad, soft-shelled crabs, and whatnot. (I also had breakfast with my sister at her hotel.)

Tuesday: RVN & I had lunch at Victoria’s restaurant, with a great view of the raging sea — I had another crabcake and she had seared tuna tacos, and I had the most lovely and delicious “Cool as a Cucumber” mocktail; and Tuesday night we got takeout Indian food from Indigo (daal tarka, vegetable biryani, an eggplant dish – maybe bengan bhurtha?, veggie paratha, veggie pakoras).

Wednesday: RVN & I went to HCOH again! (more peel & eat shrimp for me and grilled squash/zucchini).

Thursday: We all (RVN, ChN, and I) had lunch in Bethany Beach after visiting the botanic gardens, at Ocean 99 — my golden & red beet and arugula salad with grilled shrimp was delicious.

That night the three of us ate a late dinner at Drift (outside) — their rosemary focaccia with kelp butter is chef’s kiss, as was the crab & something (? it’s not on their online menu and I can’t recall) bisque I had.

Friday: We each bought what we wanted to eat in the car on the way home from the many to-go options in Rehoboth; I chose crab balls from Go Fish! and falafel balls and pita bread from Semra’s Mediterranean Grill. We arrived back in Baltimore before five, and after we’d unloaded, spent an hour or so with some of their family and walked to the grocery store for provisions, RVN made us tofu meatballs, burst cherry tomato sauce, and linguini with Pecorino Romano cheese, along with garlic pan-roasted cauliflower and a nice red wine.

When I got home on Sat. night, after we ran out and covered the basil, I just made a bit of a cacio e pepe with artichokes for dinner (my husband had already eaten), and Sunday was veggie burger with either kale (from our garden) or local arugula, with the sautéed local summer squash, our Mardi Gras mix beans (they had a second round of production while I was gone!), local peppers, and Vidalia onion.

Supplies: Maine Medicinals had a 20%-off sale so I stocked up on elderberry syrup this week.

• Sleeping & Dreaming

Sleep was OK, not great but better than I would expect when travelling, with six sleep scores between 85 and 91 and one a lowly 74 for a night when I got just over 5 hours of sleep. My average sleep score was 86, and my average sleep per night was slightly more than 7 hours. REM sleep accounted for 11 -1/2 hours (I got 3 hours on Sat. night!) and deep sleep for just 5-1/4 hours.

• Reading / Words & Ideas / Listening / Watching  

Reading

BOOKS: This week I finished one of the books I brought to the beach, Into Thin Air (The Arctic Mysteries #1) by Ørjan Karlsson, set in Bodø, in northern Norway. Detective Jakob Webber, recently widowed and living alone with his dog, heads the investigation into the disappearance of 19-year-old runner Iselin Hanssen, with the help of several others, including Noora Yun Sende, who’s just transferred from Kripos in Oslo to this isolated spot for personal reasons. As they are searching for Iselin, another woman is found murdered on the island of Røst, and Webber finds that other women have disappeared without a trace as long as 29 years ago in similar circumstances. The harrowing story is told in first- and third-person viewpoints of Jakob, Noora, Iselin, another detective, a man with whom Iselin went out with once, a man named Peder Skarvheim who cares for this ill mother and hates his neighbour, and an unnamed person who is kidnapping, torturing, and murdering women. It was a slow starter for me but engaging by about 50 pages in. Looking forward to the next one.

OTHER

Seen recently in Hugh Hollowell’s newsletter, Life Is So Beautiful:

From Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. It feels pertinent:

“There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist…most easily succumbs: activism and over-work. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work… It destroys the fruitfulness of his (or her)…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

Some other things I read —

I liked pretty much everything in this issue, Goose Parade, of Breakfast of Champignons (Deb Champion), including “It is good to contemplate the important questions in life, like how to support a goose army. And train them too, I suppose. I haven’t thought enough about important things like goose armies, partly because I hurt my foot and haven’t been walking as much, but mostly because I have been doing relentless chores from an unending list of things to do.”

Lots of these things resonated for me in Jo Elvin’s (My Goodness!) latest newsletter, 15 Things that annoy me way more than they should … the coat hangers, the cords, tiny foil seals (especially when I’m in the shower without a tool to open them), incorrect use of apostrophes, sleeves caught on door handles, STRANGERS WALKING IN STEP BESIDE ME (why???) … but I do love a very green banana and a windy day.

Listening

Watching

At the beach we caught up on the first four Only Murders in the Building, then we watched some Seinfeld, Veep, and Schitt’s Creek episodes (I’d never seen the latter two).

• Connections &  Community

Local Support: My husband volunteered at the local car museum for about 11 hours this week. I bought some items at the local farmstand on Sunday (small Asian pears, arugula, summer squash, red and green peppers) and my husband bought some treats at the local bakery/café during the week.

Relationships: I got a wonderful friend-fix staying with my friends RVN & ChN this week and spending time with my sister for a couple of days. And I got to see my friends’ son (JN), his wife (MN), and two of their three kids on Friday evening in Baltimore. Our friends ND & TD had my husband to dinner while I was away. I chatted with a neighbour and her dog (LT & E again) for 5 mins while we were both walking on Sunday. I ordered a year’s subscription to MUBI for my niece, whose birthday was Thursday. Emailed back and forth with a friend (KKT) on Sat. & Sun. Texted and emailed with a few others.

Donations: I made a membership donation to the Rail Passengers Association this week.

• Endings/Harvest 

A longtime member of our poetry group (DC) died on Wednesday at the age of 90. My husband heard a hummingbird in the garden on Saturday … probably the last ones here, or maybe they were passing through from farther north. I harvested kale and my husband harvested tomatoes and beans from the garden this week.

• All This Useless Beauty

so much beauty in texture, colour, layering, movement, dead and living things crossing paths in the Piet Oudolf-designed meadow gardens at Delaware Botanic Gardens

I’m not a fan of Fall but it does look nice.