I never expected to be at ease with setting my writing aside for months. I’m still a member of a couple of writing groups, but I don’t Zoom into all the meetings even though I’m in town. I even forgot a Zoom workshop I was looking forward to! Yikes! I am, at least, still jotting down ideas when they occur to me: even though NaNoWriMo seems to have crossed the Inky Bridge, November will always be novel-writing month for me. But I have moved writing a few places down on my to-do list … because The Yard.
As you may know, we moved to Oregon last summer, and our mantra in 2024 was “This year the house, next year the yard.” Well, 2025 is “next year,” and we’ve been working on the yard. The landscaping crews are gone now. One crew removed one poorly fir tree and trimming a pine, two cherries, and a dogwood. The other took out all the old sod and replaced it, added some more plants out front, built a 10×10 pad for the gazebo (we call it a Summer House) we brought from Arizona, and best of all, added some steps from the deck to the grilling area and from the grilling area to the gate on the east side of the house. Woot!
(We know that lawn is a sort of colonial bad thing, but lawn isn’t all we have. About half of the back is sort of wild, currently the venue for competition among vinca, strawberries, hyacinths, and wild geranium, and a safe place for wee creatures to over-winter. The landscapers noticed and liked that we were keeping all that. The dogs enjoy it too, and it’s a beautiful vista from the kitchen window.)
There’s still a lot for us to do. We have four structures (two of them already stored in the garage) to put together. One is a big ol’ gazebo for the back deck so we can sit/eat/drink outside even when it’s raining, one’s a cover for the grilling area, one is the aforementioned Summer House (which will also feature our outdoor altar), and the fourth is a garden arch to nestle among the (apparently victorius) vinca. There’s also going to be a little shelter for the dogs so they can pee when it’s rainy, but that’s not here yet and will take maybe half-an-hour to put together.
And there’s still a trip to the nearby nursery (Deep Creek on Hogan Drive) in the offing. We need to get some other things done before we choose any more plants. The people here before us didn’t have a master plan for the yard, and that didn’t work very well, so we’re getting most of the hardscape taken care of before we add more plants. We’ll still be able to say, “Oooh, that’s cool! Let’s get one of those!” because we will reserve some space just for such surprise finds.
As the weather gets warmer (it was 70° today, I think), it’s more fun to be outside. The yard looks bigger now that we’ve got almost all the deck railing down (it was clunky and rotten; we were lucky not to face-plant when we leaned on it), and the structures are going to complement it. The dogs are very much enjoying the new lawn. It’s healthy and no longer lumpy, so the fact that there’s a bit less of it doesn’t matter to them. It is very good rolling-around-on grass now.
As a bonus, we were advised by all the landscapers that the enormous tree we thought was a Western red cedar is actually a giant sequoia. This required renaming the house: it’s now Casa Sequoia, but that’s fine, because it’s a wonderful … um, coincidence or capital-S Sign, depending on your perspective.
At the first house my parents owned in Portland, my dad planted some giant sequoias from seed. (This was one of his “Ooh, that’s cool! Let’s get one of those!” moments.) I can’t be sure from Google views if any of them are still there, but there do seem to be some Really Big Trees on the property. Anyhow, in Dad’s honor, we named our sequoiadendron gigantium Bob. I greet Bob and all the other plants every morning when I take the dogs out for morning potties, and continue to delight in them throughout each day. And it’s that enjoyment – as well, of course, as the yard work we’re doing – that’s dropped writing farther down on my to-do list than it’s ever been. Pretty sure that when I get back to writing on the regular it will be with a renewed energy that only this backyard could give me.