Gardens and Blooms and Midsummer Nights

It has been nearly two weeks since my last post to this blog.  Sadly, my gentle mother-in-law Jane Lewis continues to decline each day, rarely getting out of bed now and eating very little.  Only two weeks ago she was eating a whole banana, but now it is just a bite or two.  We are spending as much time as we can with her - Martha has not missed a day - but she sleeps much of the time.  So we have been trying to stay busy in the mornings, keeping up with our running and with completing projects around the house and the yard.

We are in that summer cycle of weather now when we can expect afternoon thunderstorms almost every day.  I remember that when I was working full-time, a handful of us would meet at the Town Hall when I got off work at 4:30 p.m., and one summer it rained every day at exactly that time.  My two pairs of shoes, which I alternate every run, never had much of a chance to dry.  Now we can run in the mornings when the rain is less likely. 

Nearly every week, I run up Big Bearpen Mountain on Monday, as I did this morning, that relentless upward ascent through slanting curtains of sunlight in the morning mist, never stopping until I have reached the 4200-foot summit, where I unfailingly take what our friend Jim Askew (now deceased) once called his "Rocky Moment," except overlooking an expanse of June-green mountains off the south side of the summit instead of Philadelphia.

On Wednesdays or Thursdays, I have begun to do some speed work, consisting last week of 400-meter intervals, classic training for a 5-K race despite no races of any kind on the horizon.  Some area races may be taking place, including the Twilight 5-K in Highlands, depending on whether or not Covid-19 "spikes" are taking place.  But we simply cannot see any way we would want to run a road race right now with hundreds of other runners and spectators.  Still, races or no races, hard workouts are good for burning off both fat and stress, and like that long pull up Bearpen this morning the benefits of self-discipline extend beyond simply training for races.

Saturdays, I have been enjoying long, easy runs - eight miles this week - partly in the company of Karen and Fred a couple of arms-lengths away, but mostly alone.  Coincidentally, I learned that Karen's 92-year-old mother died last Tuesday.  We are careful to spread out across the road and continue to steer a wide berth around the many dog-walkers who seem to have arrived in full force this month.  The long, solitary runs are good for praying and giving thanks and trying to connect with the beauty of Highlands in June, this lovely place now blooming with mountain laurel and flame azalea and flowers of every kind.  Martha liberated a couple of stalks of foxgloves from along the road and we brought it to her Mom in the afternoon, joining the many other bouquets in her room courtesy of thoughtful friends.

The daily thunderstorms have been good for the gardens.  What a change we have seen in just a little over a month.

The tomato plants in the garden bed with the best exposure to sun have already developed, from a few scattered blossoms into a good many green tomatoes, some of them the size of plums.

I celebrated another holiday on June 16, a day which is known in literary circles around the world as Bloomsday, because it remembers the wanderings of Leopold Bloom around Dublin on that single day in 1904.  Readers of this blog will remember that I had the opportunity to walk in those same footsteps last August.  I wrote in this blog at the time:

"Bloom was the famous anti-hero, a Ulysses from his own time, who famously sailed the streets of Dublin in Ulysses, perhaps the most important novel of the 20th century.  The novel took place in a single day - June 16, 1904 - a date still celebrated in libraries and literary circles in various cities around the world by readings from the book, especially that famous single-sentence soliloquy by Molly Bloom, the remarkable climactic conclusion to the book:

. . .and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

 

I found one or two very good readers of the book on the internet on that day, which is a huge holiday in Dublin featuring actors dressed as characters in the book and quoting long passages from memory.

 

 

Fathers Day is always a little poignant since Martha and I have both lost our fathers, mine many years ago and hers a little less than four.  I received a beautiful hand-made card from my daughter Katy, and told her that the only other person I know who makes hand-made cards is Martha's aunt Anne Sellers.  In these days of coronavirus cautions, we could think of no better way to celebrate than to stay home.  Martha prepared one of my favorite recipes, salmon with peaches and mint, and we dined on our deck, where the thunderstorm rumbling on the horizon mercifully held off.  I had been saving the most recent of the Globe theater Shakespeare performances, which have been streaming on-line, and watched it on Saturday night, the appropriately-timed A Midsummer Night's Dream, on that first day of summer and longest day of the year.