Another Ramble in the Past

From the balcony of our small apartment in Vermont, one cannot see the Green Mountains. Nevertheless, the view is pleasant. I have three hanging baskets, two filled with cheerful red and white impatiens that I planted and the third one a fuschia bought from Costco. In addition there are three window boxes, or more truthfully balustrade boxes, two planted with riotous red and white impatiens and one with dwarf “paintbrush” flowers. Beyond the balcony is the combined back yard of two houses and then trees of various kinds.

Sometimes I find myself thinking of the house in Mississippi that I sold. Well, not the house so much as the small area outside the kitchen window. I had plans for that area. Two tall pine trees dominated it and it was also decorated by the largest holly bush I have ever seen. I thought that one day I would replace the window with a sliding door and put in a patio in the shade of the pine trees. Of course, this wasn’t a practical idea. If you have never lived with a pine tree let me tell you what its main characteristics are. In spring it will drop a thick yellow pollen on everything and the rest of the year it sheds pine needles. If I had built the patio I imagined out there, I would have spent a large part of my time sweeping pine needles from it. As it was, I spent far too much time fishing pine needles out of the pool and these were from a clump of pines on my ex-husband’s land quite a distance from my pool.

But it was a peaceful area. My nearest neighbor was half a mile away and even the mail box was one-tenth of a mile away from the house. No one drove up my drive unless they were coming to see me or were lost and looking for directions. No one casually dropped by, and that was the way I liked it. After my son moved out, I started swimming in the nude in the evenings. On hot moonlit nights I would turn off the pool lights, and float around the pool in the dark watching the moon rise behind the pines and the flickering of the fireflies that seemed caught in the tree branches. Now I swim at the Y in chlorinated water and in a bathing suit.