November 10, 2010

Slept late. The east was pale when I shouldered the cats off me and threw the comforter back. Rising was difficult after two days of hard yard work. Monday I dug the front yard against the house, and planted the irises I had planned for the newly cultivated back yard, when the hemlocks would be cut and my tiller would be in operation. The arborist never came and the tiller didn’t work, so back to the spade and the bent back. The men from Sears who came to pick up the hateful tiller were kind and enormous. Yesterday was even harder. There was some sort of emotional crisis that I never identified, and I wanted to do none of the things I had to do, so I began pulling ivy out of the fern beds. As I did, I kept running into the dark bushy spruce, and it entered my head to prune it. It was like the cone of a green rocket, its thick branches coming all the way to the ground, a depression in there in which animals–including Jocasta–used to hide. I had never seen the trunk of the tree. I keep forgetting how long I’ve lived here, but it’s years and years, and in all that time the wide circle under the tree has been completely hidden. I didn’t know the tree was branched into three near the base. When I was done, the spruce was bare of limbs up to the level I could reach with my handsaw. One of the three trunks I cut away completely. One can walk under the tree for the first time–if you’re no taller than I, standing up. The ground underneath was powdery and ashy, whether from some chemistry of the tree or because it had been hidden from the elements for so long. I dug up a wide circle around the trunk, hauled in 180 kilos of topsoil, and planted crocus, iris, anemone. The topsoil–400 pounds– I had to haul twice in the space of two hours. They were short-handed (and all girls) at the hardware store, so I had to load the pickup, the unload again onto the land. All that and the depression underneath is still visible, though barely. I wonder what it was. A garden pool long ago? I dug quite deep and got nothing but old needles and powdery soil. And a lost softball.

Reading about Zeb Vance. There are a number of ways to get into his life if I were just pleasing myself, but I imagine around me the throng of amateur historians and descendants of the great man and protectors of Southern honor who will all expect their axes to be ground.

Got to the studio at last. Painted joyfully. I was the first there, and there was sweet silence, but the noise level rose as one by one the others arrived and began the battle of the speakers.

A water leak bubbled up from a crack in Lakeshore Drive three or four days before the city came out to fix it. It’s taken them too days, digging an immense trench and doing a lot of banging and scraping, which shook the windows in their frames. The guy running the bulldozer weight upwards of 300 pound, I’d bet, and is maybe necessary as a counterweight to the tremendous blade that shakes the earth when it falls.

Evening: More digging, more planting. I think the property is thanking me with what pleasure it can give for not buying the other land and moving away. Dug up more of the immense flagstones that must have paved most of the back yard at one time. Some I could lift. Some I had to roll like Sisyphus to the place I wanted them.