Order of the Day

Only the Rosarian is up this early. He walks the road in the pale light, led by his Scottie who snorts and snuffles through the grasses. The dog is slung low to the ground, black as a Queen-of-the-Night tulip. Its name is Clio. “‘Thou unforgetting Clio,’” the Rosarian proclaimed the day they brought the puppy to their country house across the road and down a bit from The Leaf. “The muse of history, you know.”

“And story,” I added. “You always see Clio depicted with a book.”

“Or a scroll,” he said, savouring the last word.

This morning I wave from the Woodland Garden as they pass in front of the driveway. We keep an old white-painted Muskoka chair up there in case my Beloved or I ever feels the urge to sit and admire the view, which is lovely—a long slope down to the creek, where the bittern gulps through the dawn, then up The Farmer’s wheat- and hay-fields to a fringe of bush along the horizon. I’ve never sat in the chair, though I often gaze up at it from wherever I’m working and smile, thinking of the possibilities.

The Rosarian chances to look up in that split-second when the view from the road is clear to the woods. He waves and turns toward the driveway, tugging at Clio’s leash.

“I can’t see your gardens from the road any more,” he grumbles as he walks up the lawn, past the cedars, the snowball spirea, and the rosa glauca (a gift from him) that screen our gravel parking nook.

That was the point. When we arrived at The Leaf, the lawns gaped directly onto the asphalt.

“People can see us!” my Beloved complained. He was used to the cabin we’d been renting, a log building tucked deep in the woods, no one for miles.

“We’ll plant hedges—and shrubs. Our house will be like Snow White’s castle. No one will know it’s there, even though it’s just ten feet from the road.”

For a decade we’ve been madly setting out cedar hedges, lilac hedges, Arctic willow hedges; mixed hedges of blue spruce, Mountbatten juniper, and red and white pine; shrubberies of flouncy dogwoods, mock orange, a massive ninebark, and viburnums of various sorts; allées of oak, maple, and linden; and a linebacker of a weeping willow that stands guard on the eastern flank of the property, daring the neighbours to look.

At least my Beloved is happy. “Gorgeous morning, isn’t it?” I say to the Rosarian, ignoring his complaint. He pulls out a blue-checkered handkerchief and wipes his brow. “It’s going to be a hot one,” he says, “We’re wilting already.”

“It’s summer,” I shrug, stating the obvious.

“Too hot to work outside,” he nods.

If I had my way, every day would be exactly the same. I’d get up with the sun and go to my desk, where I would work until lunch, after which I’d go out to the garden, balancing mind-work with body-work until the evening, when I’d retire to my easy chair to read and make notes. In my imaginary life, I move in this ordered way through my days, going page to page, garden to garden just as my mother advanced through her week, washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, vacuuming and dusting on Wednesday, floors on Thursday, shopping on Friday, the weekend to relax.

This works, to a point, in spring, when the mornings are too cool, the plants too dew-laden for me to work outside comfortably. By the time I’m ready to garden, the air is warm and the soil dry. And by the time I’m ready to quit, the late-afternoon chill is descending.

I keep an agenda, a red-leather book that opens flat with a red silk ribbon to mark my place. Everything that needs doing in the house, at my desk, in the garden, with our friends and family is set down in this book. Once a month, we see the Grand Girls. On Tuesdays my Beloved plays baseball (in summer) or hockey (in winter). On our anniversary we spend the day at the restaurant where we were married. On Easter and Thanksgiving, all the children come home. In November, I order a new agenda, and in the week between Christmas and New Year’s I happily fill in its spaces with my favourite pen, setting down the birthdays, anniversaries, and events that will mark the coming year.

I like looking ahead, knowing where the handholds are. If I had my way, I’d walk the same paths, dawn to dusk, bed to desk to garden bed, a supplicant moving through her daily stations, no matter the time of year. But summer is here. I have to change. By eleven in the morning, the sun is a weight on my back. By two in the afternoon, all the oxygen seems sucked from the air. I can’t breathe, let alone work. Mad dogs, Englishmen, and my Beloved are still out in the sun; he’s cutting the grass, his face glistening, his shirt soaked. I stay indoors, my eye on the sky bleached white by the heat.

For years, I resisted. I stuck to my routine. You could find me in the garden from two to five every day of the year, regardless of the season. A hat was my only concession to the beating sun, the driving wind.

“You work too hard,” my Beloved said one day.

“As hard as you,” I replied. We were both a mess: mud-streaked, sweat-stained, slumped with exhaustion “But it’s not work. I like it. And it has to get done.”

“If it you’re doing it because you have to, then it’s work,” he argued.

He likes to think that was what made me change my ways, but really, it was the heat. Those summers when the mercury rose into the thirties and stayed there for six weeks. I bowed to the season, and left the house at dawn. Now, through July and early August, I work outside from five to eight in the morning, and again after supper, in that sliver of time between the cooling of the day and the stirring of the mosquitoes. I focus on the symmetry of it, the day in a new kind of balance.

“But it’s five o’clock!” my Beloved moans as I roll out of bed and pull on my gardening pants. “I have to get out there now,” I whisper, kissing him back to sleep as I tiptoe off to my early-morning assignation.

I spend the first days of summer tearing out the last of the forget-me-nots, pulling up the dried tulip stems, cutting off the yellowed daffodil leaves or tying them into knots. I chop off the iris leaves at an angle, little grey-green arrows that will soon disappear under a drape of mother-of-thyme. The lupins heads have gone to seed: they have to go. The alliums, too. The pulmonaria, columbina, bleeding heart. Chop, chop, chop. I cut down the mountain bluet and the meadow rue, so they’ll bloom again in the fall, sweep aside the dead leaves of the autumn crocus.

I rip out the spring plants with a gusto I haven’t felt for weeks. I love this moment of transformation as the garden shifts from its soft spring face to summer, when the beds will be alive with hot yellows and reds—lilies, yucca, cleome, late roses, glads.

I like change in others. I avoid it in myself.

“Will you be working in the garden today?” I say to the Rosarian, by way of conversation. Though we can’t see each other’s gardens, on a still summer day I can often hear the two of them calling to each other across their yard. Not words, just the cadence of their sentences, a kind of music like birdsong, which ornithologists strive to parse for meaning. I think I hear the Rosarian say, “Come in now, it’s too hot,” to which the Humanist replies, “Soon. In a minute. Just wait until I finish this.” I wonder if they can hear the same chirping words exchanged across the beds between my Beloved and I. “Stop now.” “Soon.” “Come in.” “When I finish.”

The Rosarian and I stand on the open grass of the Croquet Lawn, the morning sun already blistering our skin. When I was in Brasil, a woman said to me, “I can’t step out the door. I turn to ashes.” This day, even at five in the morning, has that feel to it. The dog is panting, tongue lolling, skeins of saliva silvering to the grass. I pat my secateurs and Japanese knife, secure in their holsters, one on each hip. I’m on my way to pick up the rest of my arsenal—wheelbarrow, spade, fork, and loop hoe.

“No, but you go ahead,” the Rosarian says.

As we talk, the dog gets up, wanders over to the shade of the big white pine that towers over the terrace by the house, and plops itself down, leaving us to our conversation in the sharpening sun. “Look at her,” he says. “We should pay attention to Clio. She knows exactly what to do.”