WORKING MY WAY THROUGH A DITCH

As the DeSoto wound it way along country roads, I was
in the back seat, making myself carsick, scanning the ditches
for wildflowers and strawberries.

In the woods, I knew where to find Star of Bethlehem and
Bloodroot -- pretty but makes a messy bouquet. I looked for
Jack-in-the-Pulpit and lady's slipper. I dug up violets and
day lilies and planted them by the chimney of our house on
Spruce Street.

This morning, about 70 years after the above, I walked to the top of the dirt road, clippers in hand, hunting for loosestrife, the yellow whorled, but found only two plants this year and let them be. Usually I come back with feverfew but there is only one in bloom and that, too, can stay. Where is the tansy by the end of our driveway? How come this stuff moves around, will o the wisp?
Not to get too heavy on the metaphor, but change is, well,
change.

The road has been unchanged for as long as we've lived on it
and that's at least 45 years. We know land is owned on either
side and all it will take to change everything is for another hedge funder to buy it up and build a big testament to
success. They do that, even here on this island, although a belated town zoning law passed confining height and size, but that's relative.

Along the road, there is a deer path wide enough for a golf cart and occasionally I see deer using it. Skunks abound in the neighborhood and so do wild turkeys, although I do not know why the skunks haven't eaten all their eggs. 

A stream rushes downhill to the ocean and at its end, a patch of watercress thrives. It has always been there, along with the mint.
Beach peas grow alongside rosa rugosa with their rosy hips, rich in vitamin C. At wading depth when the tide is out, we gather mussels
attached to the rocks, the mussels also coming and going at storms' whim. Periwinkles, not everyone's choice, are also there.

Along the path to the water grow beach plums, some years better
than others. The dainty white blossoms of early Spring give way
to hard green pellets that ripen and grow into plum-colored, well, plums. Making jelly from them is a labor of love, boiling, straining, and messing with the magenta goo -- you need an awful lot of plums to produce a batch worth the trouble.

If you have an itch for candle making, you can use the bayberries
growing along the path but many of those bushes have been muscled out by the junk rose and other invaders. I don't know anybody who has ever made a bayberry candle but the berries are out there, just in case.

Our first house was out on the main road, about a half-mile north of where we are now. Amy Charak lived in an old saltbox across from us -- Amy, as in "Once in love with..." She asked me if we were rich and I told her no. "I hate it when people aren't rich," she said. I invited her and Walter to dinner and asked what she might like:  "Lamb chops." I saw her with a colander full of raspberries
and wondered where she got them. "I'm not going to tell you."
That was Amy.

Up the North Road to the end, then bear right and go past Polly Hill to a driveway on the left with a little sign saying "Eggs." Right there, now covered in summer grasses, is the spot where Bettyann
and Helen dug up jonquils by stealth of night. I planted the bulbs
and now, all these years later, I have a fragrant testimony to sisterhood and bold girls gleefully stoned.

GOOD HEAVENS, IT'S JUNE

Back from Turkey after an excellent trip with a most compatible
group. Praises to the organizers and to our Turkish guide as well
as to the breathtaking Turkish countryside. A good part of the
experience was the Bosphoros with its insane shipping four deep
as you look across to Asia. Plus there is a river running through it,
beneath, at surprising speeds.

So the Bosphoros, the Sea of Marmara -- that inland sea which
connects with the Aegean -- and the fabulous Turkish countryside
throughout Izmir. It was too early for everything to have ripened
but we saw lush fields planted with fruit trees and olive trees
marching to the tops of steep hills and mountains. This central
valley seems to go on and on and there are scarved women in the fields, weeding and planting, stooping low. The men are either on
tractors or in the shady taverna...