ERIC'S BIT or TREES IN THE MIDDLE
Just after the sun dropped behind the mountain across the way, after the storms passed, a pale golden light suffused the air, turning the pink blossoms of the ornamental dogwood in the front yard a vivid rose against the dark leaves. As June progresses the blossoms will turn white, lingering into July, to be replaced by autumn with berries which are edible but mostly seeds.
I'm happy to see the dogwood blossoming again. One year it failed to display a single flower. Had I trimmed it back too far the previous year? The tree put on its most spectacular show after I'd pruned it for the first time, and even more severely. I've never figured out the blooming cycle. I've tried all degrees of pruning and even not pruning, but there seems no correlation between what I do and what the tree decides to do.
It's necessary for me to trim the tree at least occasionally because the previous residents planted it squarely in line with the front window. It would quickly obliterate our view if left untended.
Trees are always being planted in inappropriate places. The red maple smack in the middle of the postage stamp sized lawn of our house in New York probably looked cute there as a sapling, but it was already getting too big when we moved in. By now I imagine the limbs are scraping the roof while the roots strangle the storm drain. Not long ago I drove past the home where I grew up and noticed that the rhododendron which had been encroaching on my first story bedroom window during my teens had now grown far taller than the house -- as good as a tree even if it is a shrub -- hiding any sign of the now useless window.
Everyone knows that trees grow over the course of time. Maybe they just never reckon on time moving as fast as it does. That year when a sapling will be far too large for where it's been placed seems too distant to ever arrive. This year I was surprised at how the limbs of the tiny sprout beside the house which I spared from cutting not so long ago are suddenly overshadowing the roof.
But at least the dogwood is back in bloom. In a week or so the pink flowers will fade to white before vanishing for another year. Some time in the autumn I'll probably have to do more pruning but that's a long way off.
AND FINALLY
The next newsletter will be issued on August 15th. By then summer with what Robert Burns called its fervid-beaming eye will be well under way, although whether or not subscribers will beam when their eye falls on the Orphan Scrivener lurking in their in-boxes is anyone's guess.
See you then!
Mary R and Eric
who invite you to visit their home page, to be found hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, our bibliography, the Doom Cat interactive game written by Eric, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/ or visit our shadow identity M. E. Mayer's blog at http://memayer.blogspot.com/ And just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales and our author page is at https://www.amazon.com/author/reedmayer Drop in some time!
