Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Islands in the Stream

Max was at a job interview, Karen was teaching, and I was waiting to go to a funeral so all I had to do was move one car and there was nothing parked in front of the house. I almost never see the front garden without cars. Not that the exfoliating asphalt pavement is a better foreground than automobiles, but... I actually don't have, didn't have, any pictures of the front gardens without cars. That is a little weird, but hey. Now I have a bunch!

Funerals.....I used to resent going to weddings 5 or 6 or 7 or 10 times a year, but you know what? Now I would trade one funeral for a bunch of weddings. And I hate to complain but, I thought the participants would be young people. They seem to be waiting longer to marry however, which makes a lot of sense, except that it means I am going to second weddings of people my own age and I didn't anticipate that. On the up side though, they are generally relaxed and fun and that's good. Hey, theres no substitute for experience.

A "conceit" runs through this garden. A conceit is an artificial construct imposed on the design of a garden (or anything, eg. a poem). For example: a garden that, viewed from the air, looked like a butterfly (or a poem where the words form the shape of, say a butterfly). Nothing so odd controls this site, but I did have an idea in my mind in which the house and the contiguous plantings represented a "mainland" in an ocean, while the turf represented an embayment, making the various island beds, well, "islands". You don't have to buy into this scenario to appreciate the plantings (I hope), but it does add a subconscious layer of comprehensibility. Actually when I removed the walkway connecting the house to the street, I think I lost a lot of the enthusiasm of my fellow residents, but you can't have a sidewalk crossing a bay, or river, or any body of water. Still, I have a sense that there is some valid use of the concept of a conceit. Notice that in this framework, the street is part of the "Ocean."

2 comments:

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