[while walking]
june hymn
June is fruit, humidity, the return of rain although not sufficient rain in some places and far too much in others. I’ve been watching the gardens with fruit trees and bushes all spring and now that it’s full summer I’m watching them with covetousness. I did sneak one raspberry from a cane that overhung the sidewalk. There are apples, quince, pears, raspberries, blackberries, plums, and figs on my usual loop. There is a greengage tree at the university that was absolutely covered in white blossom early this spring.
June has also held the lingering awareness of the Canadian fires: smoke arrives here off and on as haze. Only once so far has it been a low haze, and even then nothing like what I experienced in summer 2021 when we moved from Maine to Iowa and drove through smoke so thick the sun was a small, red disk in the west. But enough to trigger sinus infections and breathing problems and simply to keep the maritimes and Québec in my mind. When the rain comes here I think of it also arriving on those burning and smoke-filled cities and forests. The horror of the fires are what they contain. Hard to think of the trees, plants, animals, birds—and also of the buildings, oil, plastics, insulation, heavy metals, people’s houses and objects, all burning.
All this beauty. It is not ordinary: it is so precious. I talk to a woman in a town outside of Dublin where I’ve gone to look at a house and she says, but of course you will get a car. I laugh, because this is what you do when people confront you with your own ‘silliness’. Well, no, I say. I’ve never had a license. But you’ll surely have to get a car, she says again. And I demur and we go on to talk about something else, and I am not quite brave enough to say, I won’t get a car because I’ve been thinking about this for almost thirty years. I won’t get one because that would tether me to oil fields and military occupations and a couple of tons of machinery and insurance agencies. I won’t get one because I’ve been walking for more than forty years now and have yet to exhaust the possibilities of foot, bicycle, bus, tram, and train. There are fires all over North America. Online a scientist posts a graph of the Greenland ice melt from this season: I’ve never seen anything like this, he writes. The temperature of the ocean around this island is shockingly warm right now, and every time I see one of those diagrams with the years represented as a red or blue line I feel sick to my stomach. There is very little I can do. It isn’t a one-person problem. It isn’t solveable by my decision to do one thing or another. But I can go by foot and bicycle and public transit. I get something out of that—it changes me (what I can imagine, how I use time, what I see…), expands me, feeds me and makes me happy. I try to constrain my desires and my consumption just that much but it doesn’t feel like a loss. One way—one way I’ve found for my life—of yielding to the bog orchid and the corncrake, the ladyslipper and the loon. Your ways may be different to mine.
But I don’t say any of this to the woman.
Going by foot has benefits, just not speed. But I’m not sure that speed is a benefit in any case apart from when one needs to get to a hospital or similar. The midpoint of the year has gone by now but the academic (teaching) year here is just beginning to slow down. I can’t help but think how much better and more humane it would be if we kept to a much slower pace all through our teaching year. I pick flowering weeds as I walk from the bus stop to my office on campus and put them on the photocopier, week after week. I’ve been able to see the empty lots and byways transform over the past months, day by day, on this short walk.
This week there were more flowers in bloom than easily fit on the platen and the image is packed with them. The colors now are yellow, white, red. Yellow has been a constant through the spring and summer; poppies showed up around the start of June. Blues and purples, the delicate speedwells, have receded. The yellow of late June is a change from the butter-yellow of cowslips and the almost fluorescent buttercups; it is slightly warmer, almost ambered. Now along the canal is meadowsweet, and in waste ground I see chamomile, yarrow, tall oxeye daisies and the ever-present marguerites, white clover. Calendula still overruns garden walls and the creeping purple bellflowers do, too. Do you enjoy color charts? You may enjoy this.
Summer is also the season of house sales. Every week a new sign pops up in the neighborhood. I’ve gone to see a few houses, in part out of curiosity, in part out of longing. There is nothing nearby that we could afford; the average two-bedroom house sells for more than €400,000. I watch bids online and see houses go for €70,000 or €100,000 over asking. How long will it continue like this? The houses are “tastefully redecorated” or “a perfect starter home”. One I visit sells for almost €430,000 and has no heat or floors. One near us sells for €690,000 and has been gutted down to the studs, needs wiring, plumbing, and heat. Another, a house with a beautiful old rose garden in the front, sells for more than the first and will need total renovation. Twenty families have lined up to see the house at that viewing, which was the third of four the agent had scheduled.
Here is richness. The fruit in the neighborhood—cherries in high-pruned street trees, these plums in the paved courtyard of an apartment building. I imagine a city that is a shared garden: boulevards planted with fruit trees. A department of arborists and gardeners. Civil service in companion planting, mulch, and weeding. I would sign up to work in that service. Walking in the shade of these trees, I think, I will never take a garden for granted. Green space, the ability to plant things and care for them, the ability to plant trees, especially—it feels so fundamentally necessary. We make gardens for ourselves but also for the everyone of the passers-by, and also for the future. Who planted this plum tree in the garden of what was once a Methodist chapel? They surely did not imagine me, but here I am watching their labor bear fruit.
Late June is the time of the hydrangea. Most beautiful, generous, luxurious flowers. Down the street from us a house is being converted from a single-family to apartments, and the owner has (I think?) removed a massive hydrangea plant covered in a gradient from bright blue through purple and all the pinks. I saw it every day this spring, watched it carefully to catch the flowers emerging. I fantasize about knocking on the door to ask the builders whether the plants are gone or I hallucinated them. The garden I hallucinate is never gated from me.
Thanks for reading.