guard your space

I.
Since early this morning, I've been sitting on the green-floored front porch (though the owners knew well enough to paint the ceiling and trim around the front door haint blue, as a protective barrier against ghosts).  I have been asked not use the back porch, currently the preserve of a jealous, nesting phoebe.  From the field behind the house comes the low growl of the neighbor's tractor.  Every few minutes, a car rushes down the road in front of me - driven, I imagine, by an aggressive New Yorker (like myself) come up to the Catskills to escape aggressive New Yorkers.  I move my wicker chair along with the sun.

The owners promised me a thousand shades of green, and so far, they've delivered.  Lily of the valley clusters around the front door, alongside five spindly peonies (spring this far north is at least three weeks behind New York) and abelia.  There are a bleeding heart and two bushel-like raspberry bushes, several hosta and mottled patches of lungwort.  I can see evidence of daffodils past and iris to come, though almost nothing is in bloom.  A cluster of lilacs must be many decades old.

II.
I have been reading an article in the paper which proposes that the key to longevity in humans is neither genes nor exercise nor diet alone, but positive social networks: if one takes away the choice of unhealthy behavior (lack of exercise, terrible food, social isolation), people live healthier lives.  As someone who studied academic history, where everything is about networks and processes and institutions rather than Great Individuals, this does not feel surprising; it has the further whiff of common sense, though of course one should always beware that which seems obvious.  Only one line gave me pause: "Two of them were living alone, but as one told me, 'We’re never alone.'"  I thought, Oh, God, to be always surrounded by people...!   In the context of an isolated village in Sardinia this might be a positive - but in New York, you are, at least physically, never alone, always surrounded by crowds and coworkers and roommates and tourists.  You must always cooperate or compete.  And so we all fled north this weekend, looking for someplace we could breath.

III.
In front of the house, parted to each side like curtains on a stage, are six blasted black walnut trees.  Years ago, touring an old estate in the Hudson Valley, I was told that people once believed that black walnuts attracted lightning, and so planted them like natural lightning rods near their houses.   It is easy to see how the belief might have arisen: Juglans nigra looks like those broken sticks emerging from the rubble of bombed-out postwar Berlin.   The trunk is short, the branches jagged, and the bark bears deep, worried furrows: it looks like something that has suffered some historic devastation - and if not war, perhaps a lighting strike?  And then there is the tree's mysterious secretion, juglone, which renders the soil around the black walnut toxic to many, though not all, plants.  (The lilly of the valley is thriving.)  The black walnut, which is not particularly hardy, essentially poisons its competitors.  We all want our space alone in the country.