-- Siddhartha Gautama, founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.
We’ve been sharing a lot lately, up on the hill. Despite D’s best efforts, we’re “sharing” some of our newest perennials with the deer, rabbits, and now, a groundhog. The freshly-planted Japanese Painted ferns got mysteriously smaller over the course of a weekend, and by the time I checked on them Monday after work, poof!, they were gone—“shared” right out of existence. Then, a similar mystery with the glowing orange-red blossoms on our spindly young ‘Tiki Torch’ coneflowers. Big, fat, promising buds one day, gnawed stubs the next. Ditto the hakone grass and the toad lilies.
All these plants are old stand-bys for gardeners who have problems with deer, so it was an unexpected (and unwelcomed!) mystery when we found their sad chewed-off remains. Seems like D’s ultra-smelly putrescent-egg-and-garlic deer repellant doesn’t work so well with groundhogs and rabbits. And apparently the deer have never read the plant care tags that feature a drawing of an innocent-looking doe inside a circle with a red line drawn through it, meant to lull lazy gardeners like us into believing we can outfox a hungry buck or a fawn with an experimental appetite.
Luckily, we’ve shared some of our flora with the local fauna a bit more willingly, as well. Never in the years we’ve been gardening have we had so many butterflies sharing the nectar of the weigelas and buddleias and nasturtiums. And flocks of hummingbirds are helping themselves to the scarlet blooms that the coral bells send up on waving stems. The tiny birds move so fast that the dog doesn’t even have a chance to bark—by the time she recognizes their presence, they’ve moved on, leaving her with a puzzled look and a sotto voce growl.
But the sharing we’re most excited about didn’t involve wildlife. Over Independence Day weekend, we hosted the four children whose parents built our house back in 1941. Living all over the country now, they were coming to town for their school reunion, and reached out to see if we’d consider letting them stop by their old home.
“Of course!” Every gardener and home renovator’s dream: a willing audience, with some history to share. So, for the next two weeks we spent our free time weeding and tidying, painting and planting. And when they finally walked up the drive, it was as if Acorn Hill understood—the gardens looked their loveliest, the house seemed to open its arms in welcome, and the weather was perfect: the golden sunshine of late afternoon, blue skies, no humidity. Positively un-Pittsburgh for July.
We ended up, counting the kids and grandkids, spouses and neighbors, a group of 16; and for the next hour and a half, there were at least three concurrent conversations occurring at any given time, along with photographs from seven decades passing between eager hands, and an entire set of the home’s original blue prints spread out on the kitchen counter.
We learned some wonderful details about the house and the family who lived in it when it was new (it wasn’t always painted white, after all!). We hunted in the basement rafters for the bell that was connected to a buzzer in the dining room floor that allowed our guests’ father to summon the maid silently and unobtrusively (lost, unfortunately, to the ages). We even learned about where the stones in our dry-stack walls came from (an old barn foundation in Beaver County). Mostly, though, we learned that happiness is contagious—the joy these four siblings and their families felt at being “back home” radiated from them, coming off their smiling faces in waves as constant as the ones that lap at the sandy shore of the beach. We felt honored to be a part of such a happy moment in time.
After our visitors left for their reunion dinner, we walked out to watch the sun sink down below the hills beyond the high school. As we passed under the oak tree that was already old when our house was built, we spotted, growing up through the sad remains of those deer-munched Japanese Painted ferns, new growth—barely-there, tightly-wound, vibrant green fronds. The fiddleheads were tiny and vulnerable, but evidence, nonetheless, that the Buddha was right: perennials and fond memories, like happiness, never decrease by being shared.
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