In predictable fashion, as I take my seat in the backyard, the roosters are already firing their verbal volleys every half-minute. They often stumble on one other’s debut, overshooting and drowning out the other’s accomplishments. Meanwhile, in the nearby bushes and beyond them the winged elms next to the hayfield, the poultry’s wild kith are furiously communicating in a cacophony of song and staccato twitter.

In the predawn light, the Philadelphus glows with a second bloom of delicately scented white flowers. I scribble a note on my writing pad: Remove the invasive honeysuckle vine. Then, just as quickly, I strike a line through it as a blue jay plows into the foliage to feed its young. Blessed with no graceful moves and the song of a rusting hinge, the blue jay is all brusqueness and big city, as if to say “I’m here, get out of my way.” Regardless, I’ll honor its nest and pull the offending vine later in the season.

An overgrown and uninvited privet behind the well house has gained a similar reprieve, nesting brown thrashers and cardinals having taken up residence for the short term. Though, come midsummer that particular high-rise is coming down as well. (Never fear, gentle readers, we do but make ineffective stabs at keeping nature’s energies in check.)

The raised beds near the back door are loaded with cabbages, overflow from the rows in the hoop-house. (Why one needs a hundred cabbages I cannot answer.) Once these cabbages mature and are harvested, the raised beds will be replanted with basil and cilantro.

Directly in front of where I sit is a lovely stacked rock wall, and on top of it lies the proper herb garden. Half is neatly planted with parsley, sage, tarragon, borage…. The other half is a much older, dense planting of oregano, lavender, thyme, and rosemary — interspersed with an equally dense undergrowth of fescue, Johnson grass, and seedlings (another note made, this time not crossed out).

Beyond the herbs, down from the purple woodland phlox and iris, the old wooden swing now rests on the ground. It had hung for close to 20 years on the neighboring sweet gum, but last fall the chains began to bite the bark that supported it, so I removed them and set the swing on the ground, where it will remain. I like it there. It is a folly, used as much today as when it hung and swung in a breeze: merely ornamental.

Farther back still, at the edge of the woods, the pawpaw grove is threatened by the encroaching forest —which, considering that these trees of fleeting fruit are often an understory plant in the wild, may simply be a case of wanting to rejoin their fellows, going native; like Ballard’s protagonist in The Drowned World, shedding their civilized natures and fleeing to something more elemental. Too bad for them, I now call the shots and I am determined that they stay on this side of the domesticated divide.

The day now plotted and organized, I collect my empty coffee mug and move off with purpose, to while away more time in speculation and avoidance of work.

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Reading this weekend: The Book of Job

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