Fall Garden

It is all transition out in my yard and garden. The leaves are falling, of course, and the summer flowers are fading and growing leggy. The snaps have gone to seed. Petunias are hardy, but even they are looking spent and sad. I have not pulled them up, for no reason except a total lack of time. I haven't watered in weeks. though the dew and cool evenings seem to be keeping things in reasonable stead.

But my morning glories... something cosmic seems to be happening with them. I have joked that I moved into this house because of one window and a handful of flowers. And it is absolutely true. When my ex and I were house shopping in the early 90's. we looked at a number of places in our price range, and all of them were just fine. Then we found this house, on a corner lot with a small lawn, and all empty rooms (which always makes it easier to imagine oneself in the house). As I walked through the house I fell in love with two things: a small stained glass window in the living room, and a trellis full of shocking blue morning glories outside the back door. They clinched the deal. They made it possible for me to see the whole thing: myself, my husband, my children, happy here for years to come.

Maybe I thought the trellis full of morning glories would help me to focus more on my husband than on my best friend. But as a year or two went by, I forgot to pay any heed to the flowers (which I realize many consider a weed... but they did not thrive. I neglected them, and they died, just like the marriage).

Two years ago I decided to try planting morning glories again. I chose a different location, a fence more towards the side of the house. The first year the seeds barely came up. A few spindly shoots tried half-heartedly to climb the fence, but the first frost took them out before a single blossom unfurled.

This year I planted them again, one packet, out by the same fence, behind a row of snapdragons and lobelia. The vines climbed the fence, hardier than before, but still relatively sparse. But beginning about three weeks ago, the flowers came. Enormous blue trumpets unfurled, two or three at a time, then a dozen or more at a time. Each morning I step out my door to get in my car, and I have to pause to catch my breath, they are that beautiful. (I also count them. Beloved had a favorite aunt... the aunt who saved her life... Auntie used to visit Beloved in her first home, and step outside in the morning to smoke and count the morning glories.)

I have never helped to coax anything so stunning out of the ground before. It is not anything to do with me, this beauty, my skill was of no import. I did exactly the same thing I did last year when not a blossom came. They simply came on their own. The stars aligned. Perhaps the weather has been perfect. Perhaps they are doing their part to distract from the sad dying that is going on all around them. But oh, the gift of them! The way they lift my heart!