I.
A friend complained about how noisy New York's gotten. "Thirty-six years in this city," she said, and not until she pushed her newborn in a carriage down the sidewalk did she realize how loud it was, could she actually see the noise in her daughter's tiny, clenched fists. It is stressful even for those of us not used to the soft, muffled tides of the womb. I have started to flee the city, searching for a quiet place to work on weekends. Of course, not even here is it completely quiet: in the background there is nearly always the hum of lawn mowers, roaring leaf blowers, souped-up engines, the occasional jet bound for New York, power tools and train whistles and the foghorn of the fire house a half mile away. Somewhere, someone sits in a driveway and honks their horn in impatience: I told you to be ready! Sometimes I hear the music wafting over hedges from neighbors' pool parties - though not, blessedly, these last few weeks.
The dog snores beneath my feet, his ears flung rakishly around his head. A bird with a chirp like a sputtering car feeds a house full of chicks. Its offspring complain and squeak all day. A wasp nears the entrance of the birdhouse, and I think, Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!, though I don't know quite who'd be speaking the line. From the top of the Persian Ironwood comes the shake of canastas; I recognize the song but cannot put a name to the voice. Behind these star vocalists is a silvery, elegiac hum of crickets that I hadn't noticed earlier in the summer. At three o'clock, it feels like five. The cicadas still swell, but less intensely than before, their sound blown partly away on the wind.
II.
I have begun (alarmingly) to think in Instagram: a cloud passes overhead and the world around me shifts from X-Pro to Hudson to Sutro. Lit up in the sun by the dead-stalked orange daylilies, mites move violently in concert like a shaken glass of liquid. I imagine that they must be fighting terrible mite-wars, battling it out for dominance at an unknowable scale. "Someone once said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths..."
This summer, designs aside, the gardening world has unfolded for me almost entirely outside this porch, or walking past the green strips on Brooklyn streets. After the race yesterday morning, I staggered back toward 103rd Street, and noticed, atop one of the Harlem Hills, a large clump of perennials fenced off from the mowers: Black-eyed Susan, liatris, bee balm - but I didn't have time to take a proper look. I never have time, anymore: I only ever garden in these glances. There have been no trips this summer to see gardens, as I did last summer in Connecticut and Wannsee and Potsdam. Sitting on the porch, I look up from my chapters in frustration, and think: I should deadhead those roses. And a week later: the daylillies are in bloom. And then: I should water those hydrangeas, I should cut those hydrangeas, the hydrangeas are past bloom. The strip where my mother has planted herbs and basil needs to be weeded. I should comb out that mulch. Ah, the bee balm flowers look like jesters' caps! Now the caps are tattered; now they have lost all their red feathers. I should empty that bird-bath, or turn on its fountain to clear the mosquito larvae. I should pull up that morning glory that I have tried to kill for the past decade; it is strangling the holly just feet from the table where I write. I should cut back that butterfly bush, but now it looks surprisingly beautiful, quivering with delicate tiger-orange monarchs. ... Good God, the birdbath's green with sludge. In the far of the back yard, I watch as a groundhog hops silently through limey drifts of euphorbia and into the holly bush. It is (s)he who has been deadheading the zinneas and lilies for us; the flowers must taste as good as they look. "Go get the groundhog," my mother used to say, letting the dog outside. I look at this enormous, dunn-colored beast and can't blame the dog for not trying. We both of us have decided to stay on the porch for now.
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