After six months of escalating daylight I was ready for it to end. I’d been falling asleep to an Egyptian oud player with the volume so low it sounded like he was slapping his drum right next to me. It fit in with the birds at dusk and the second-hand dialogue downstairs, the small sounds of the house. The same pattern of chants and squawks, eye pillows and night guards, dog snores and drool.

When there is an intruder in the backyard (normally a coyote/bob cat) the crows gather in a murder and squawk at it (nature’s car alarms). The birds get in a dither too. I fill the bird bath because I like to watch the crows come for a nip, though the water turns the color of rust and it’s hard to keep clean.

I preen about the yard the way nervous, self-conscious men stroke their beards. (I do that too.) But the yard looks great, is just beginning to turn brown at the edges. The cherry tree is plumping up and attracting more birds but they mess it all up with their me-first attitude and drop all the underripe fruit for the bugs and worms.

Most of the really exciting things have already bloomed but it’s like a fireworks display, there’s more in the back. The Autumn Joy sedum survived the Chelsea chop I gave it back in May to promote more flowering. The Beautyberry shrub on the berm is gangly but full with tight, plum-colored nubs. And everywhere the foxgloves in white, pink and purple towering like drunks soon to collapse by the weight of their own heads.

I had to walk more now to offset the amount of ice cream I was eating and was up to seven miles a day and half a pint, respectively.

In the morning at the park if I got there early enough I could make loud man sounds and justify it as more of a scaring away the bears measure than me being a pig. Both could be true. Deep guttural belches that caromed off the hills and ravines frightening small animals and snails, autistic-sounding grunts designed to release nervous energy and caffeine. Me releasing myself, uncaged.

After the bomb cyclone last fall the park service gathered all the large fallen limbs and balanced them off the trail against the trees. I’ve made a habit of nabbing a few as walking sticks and then got the idea I could use some of the seriously big limbs to form borders around our garden beds and keep our gimpy old dog from crapping there. Today I spied the mother of all limbs, perfect looking in the filtered sun, erect but bent, with a long seam running through it, pale white.

There must be others like me out here foraging for rustic garden bed borders, I thought. I tested how it felt balanced on my shoulder and without a thought I lugged it, thinking I’d get used to the weight and it wouldn’t be so bad. I’d haul it like Rocky in that training montage toward the end of the film when he’s punching slabs of beef or running with railroad ties on his back at dawn.

When I got to the car it felt like a trip to IKEA wondering would it fit, jimmying it in. When I closed the hatch I worried the force of it would push the tip of the bough right through the windshield! But it didn’t. And I sat in the car for a time cooling off with the windows down.

The bough was a replacement for another branch along the northern border of the front bed, a bit thicker and longer. So I took the old branch around the corner of the house and leaned it there with other, alternate branches that hadn’t worked out. To an onlooker it might appear there was a plan, but there wasn’t. I’d eyeballed other long branches at the park, seriously long (like small trees), but would need a truck to haul them. And then if the aesthetics didn’t work out I’d be stuck with a long branch (though I could always return it to the park). And the cycle of weirdness got weirder. And I wondered what had happened to me.

Watering my plants I sometimes thought I was in harmony with them on an unseen level—like a communicative, nurturing thing—and that felt good. I’d read about people who had a kind of clairvoyance that was auditory, where they could hear little things that other people can’t, like sounds from non-physical entities, spirits, the dead, plants, rocks, other dimensions. I mentioned this to Charlotte (it’s called clairaudience), that it often gets misdiagnosed as schizophrenia but it’s not, it’s a real thing. There are signs you can tell if you have it, if you really like music or talk to yourself or get a high-buzzing sound in your ears.

She said how is that not bat shit crazy dad, and I couldn’t disagree.

I wasn’t hearing anything from the plants per se but feeling them more on a soul level. And who could tell me I wasn’t, or that wasn’t good?

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Humor, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest, spirituality