It’s the best of times. It’s the worst of times. It’s midsummer in South Cackalacky.
What’s the worst? That’s easy. Heat reaching the 90’s about 11ish and topping out around 100°—humidity ranging up to 80% or even more—day after day after day, for weeks on end.
… Accompanied by storms of mosquitoes and no-see-ums, garden and black widow spiders staking their claim on the beds, flies and Palmetto bugs rudely intruding on indoor space.
… And you know fall is coming—you can see the daylength diminishing, if only a few seconds a day, with every tick of the calendar—but it doesn’t help. The season is exhausting you, enervating you. Less so than the nattering from the numbskulls whose mantra—it’s hot every summer—is unchanged despite 2024’s status as the hottest year since global recordkeeping began in 1850.
Still. Like I said, the worst.
But then as compensation… there’s also the best.
These are some of my favorite recent blooms, images taken around the 4th of July just after I returned from the Pacific NW. It was so cool there (60s and 70s!) that that South Cackalacky heat was slapping me in the face. At the same time, the fast-warming earth was exhaling the most exquisite expirations that, mingled with the scents of lily and flowering tobacco among the rest, hit like country wine.
And I’m walking arm in arm with my husband thinking, then suddenly shouting:
“We did it! We made the fragrant path!” 1
No, these were not the ravings of a madwoman. I was referring to my plan, my secret plan (which now that I think about it might have been secret even from my husband?) for our garden: that plan being the fragrant path.
It’s a specific allusion, of course, but it’s also a general ideal: a garden full of fruits and flowers, of scents and “sweet airs.”2 Each element carefully chosen and even imbued with meaning3 though an air of artlessness would prevail. It’s romantic conception of a garden … which is why I now realize I never confessed it to a soul, even the FB4, even though it guided my every decision.
But.
We did it—and moments like that, when you almost audibly hear the click of a fulfilled promise, also marked the fulfillment of a cycle.
This is Bellaflora 2.0’s third birthday, and threes, you’ll recall, are significant in gardening.The first year it sleeps; the second year it creeps; the third year it leaps.
Yes, this is Bellaflora’s leap year. And amid the weeds and the slowly disappearing piles of storm debris, we really did create a refuge where we hear more birdsong than traffic and the web of life reveals itself in the dance of lightning bugs at night. And … it seems like there’s more of them this year than in years past (?) and I’m desperate to believe that’s true because I am so in need of hope right now.
I’m not telling you it’s all birdsong and butterfly wings. The squirrels and mice and spiders are relentless this year. There’s a possum the size of a Maine coon cat who visits the front porch every night, great horned owls with evil designs on small dogs lurk in the woods down by the creek, the regenerative power of southern weeds can only be described as uncanny and … did I mention the heat?
Yet I’m in a good place, a grounded place, right now. And that’s been hard-won because my world has been shaken to its foundations by what happened last November and the age of darkness it’s ushered in. We all know the details far to well for me to list them yet again. But while the world may be terrible and corrupt and under the sway of Empire, the earth is always innocent, even in her times of rage.
Out in the garden right now the heat is raging, but the gifts of said heat are falling off the vine just in time for me to go inside and start cooking up some goodness in the kitchen, which is how I ended up with that bubbling kimchi in the video above. It’s so beautiful. Here it is again.
So, you might be thinking this is about to turn into a sappy blog post about food and flowers, but you would be wrong. This is a blog post about food, flowers, and the journey into self. Totally different.
I promise you, though, there’s not a moral. Just a message with a flicker of hope in our hopeless world …
This is the message with which my long period of dormancy has gifted me:
If the scent of the fragrant path was my reward for careful stewardship and long effort, then the fact that I have spent the last week making freezer and fresh tomatillo salsa followed by freezer and fresh tomato salsa and that act somehow led me to a farmstand in Mauldin (that was strangely void of peaches5), resulting in a batch of blackberry shrub chilling in the fridge, and now there’s kimchi—bubbling—on the counter and I’m starting to think I’m ready to tackle decoding the instructions for grandmama’s wine… the one thing leading to another and yet another…? The message appears to be an invitation to keep following this bread crumb trail to bliss.
Because what I’m experiencing is not, I think, the resurrection of something inside me I thought was dead. I think it’s more like the reawakening of something so worn down (by life?) it seemed dead. And now, oddly, in this most hopeless of timelines, it’s bestirring itself and giving me hope.
May you rediscover reasons for hope in during this new moon season. It’s the Buck Moon, by the way, the season when antlers drop and are replaced by new growth. And please enjoy this song as you go about your day.
Hope in a Hopeless World (Widespread Panic Version)
Hope in a Hopeless World (Eric Bibb version)
And to the Escaped from Cultivation community, a special word: I disappeared after my aunt’s death in April without a word and I apologize. The world, my family, and my calendar all blew up simultaneously and I needed time to sort the pieces. I’m back. Thanks for waiting.
I’ve always loved Louise Beebe Wilder’s The Fragrant Path: A Book About Sweet-Scented Plants (published 1932 but there’s a 1996 edition available now, too). Ed Rasmussen of Fort Calhoun, Nebraska, was a further inspiration: the witty and wry catalog for his Fragrant Path Seeds was the most addictive form of flower porn I’ve encountered before or since. He has retired and his absence is greatly mourned by plants people.
Thinking about Caliban’s speech from Act 3, Scene ii, of The Tempest:
"Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again."
What do you expect? I’m an English professor. LOL. An English professor who played Ariel in the school play.
Something I plan to write about so stay tuned.
Sorry, “Farm Boy”—one of many nicknames for my husband.
More on this in my next blog post, because it’s an “I told you so” moment.
