A Still Life…A Life Still

I live in a beautiful neighborhood with well-kept homes flanked by chipper annuals and gardens featured on garden tours. Our lovely neighbors have lovely manicured yards.

We do not.

We are the rough and tumble rogues who barely know a hedge from a hydrangea. We favor the “natural” part of “natural landscape,” though I dream one day of tending lush cascades of roses and having a lawn that’s not mistaken for a thicket.

This past weekend, we hit a new low. A potty chair and a shower bench, graciously on loan from the local ALS Chapter office, are now parked by what used to be a robust creeping fig, just beginning its post-pruning ascent back across our brick wall. I’d borrowed the seat and bench to upfit a beach house where my mother had hoped to spend her last Mother’s Day. But her recent rapid decline means, instead, they simply sit stacked in my yard, looking like something R2D2 might dance a jig with.

They are reverse souvenirs — remnants of a trip my mother wanted more than anything but did not get to make.  If I leave them there long enough, the fig will nestle up to them, cover their sterile plastic covering with greedy green tendrils.  My neighbors will roll their eyes.

Handicapped accessible yard art.  A topiary of assistance. A totem of  dashed dreams. A cairn pointing to a path I do not want to go down.

~ by Stephanie on 05/10/2011.

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