Yesterday, slowly emerging from my dream fog to an awareness of early morning
gray, I heard a deep fog horn. An auditory weather report. The clouds
mist low on this next-to-last morning of official summer.
Even after
25 years in this house, the rare sound of a fog horn still puzzles and delights
me. Puzzles because the nearest water, the Lake Washington Ship Canal
through the Montlake Cut, is not so near, and delights me because it sounds
like I’m living near the sea.
On the
second floor of my home, only one window faces east. A tall, narrow, casement
window, its pointed leaded-glass arches suggest gothic fantasies and fairy
tales.
After
hearing the ship’s horn, I swung the window wide open to view my front garden
in the cottony wisps of filtered morning light. As I gazed, a ghostly sun rose
above the uphill trees and was framed fleetingly in a narrow gap between a
broad mountain ash and a sky-reaching Douglas fir. In less than a minute, the
sun’s rising arc carried it behind the fir, chased by the thickening fog.
I love the
bird’s-eye view of my garden from up here. It looks so much more designed, more
intentional from above. The way the row of shaggy Carex comans ‘Frosted Curls’ tickle the path edges with their
disheveled grassy mops looks perfect from my aerie rather than messy. Under the
arching branches of the amethyst-berried Callicarpa,
an accidental grouping of two different Heucheras,
‘Caramel’ and ‘Mahogany’, and a Heucherella
‘Sweet Tea’ harmonize in russet and amber tones. Hidden is the black
nursery pot the Heucherella still
sits in, as is the fact that I had placed it there just to shade it until I
could figure out what to do with it. I can now see that’s been figured out!
