Wasn't That a Mighty Storm?

Wasn't that a mighty storm?

Wasn't that a mighty storm in the morning

Wasn't that a mighty storm

Blew the people all away.

This Tom Rush song has been one of my anthems since Saturday, June 30.  I sing it over and over, just that couplet, as I work. On Friday we were in Bremen, Maine, and I was romping around a butterfly meadow with our new teenaged friends Corey and Ben and Hunter and Jetta and Saphire, among others.

The weather was doing this:

 I had just seen two life butterflies on the same daisy plant--a Northern Crescent and a Harris' Checkerspot, and Corey had identified them for me, and I was about as thrilled and happy as I get. 

Let's do some thrilled and happy:

My life Northern Crescent.

My life Harris' Checkerspot.

Two life butterflies on the same plant. Wow.

I didn't know it, but at the same time I was so thrilled and happy, a storm was brewing up along the shore of Lake Michigan and it had big plans for the Upper Midwest. It would travel down from northwest to southeast at 90 miles an hour, with what was essentially a brief, violent, several hundred mile wide linear hurricane (technically a derecho, with violent straight-line winds) and it would wipe out trees and power lines and pieces of homes; it would remove roofs and topple whatever was in its way from Michigan to Virginia. Which was considerable.

We couldn't get cell reception on the island and of course there were no televisions or newspapers or radios which is the whole point of a place like Hog Island so we were innocent of what was happening to our home. The storm hit our home at 6:27 pm Friday, June 30. That's when the Poll Parrot clock in the kitchen stopped. Saturday morning we finally came off island and got a cell message from our dear housesitter Monica who, now that Charlie Macaw is gone, just stops in to feed the turtles and fish and water the bonsais. And all she said was, "This is Monica. Please call me."

That didn't sound good to me. That sounded like something that's so bad you can't say it over the phone. So while we were waiting on our breakfast in a little cafe in Damariscotta, surrounded by hundreds of pounds of luggage and our tired kids, I called and Monica said, "Oh Julie. There was a horrible storm, but your house is OK. Your house is OK and I don't know how to tell you this but your greenhouse is gone."

And she started crying.

I didn't cry but this fast reel of images started flashing across my mind, gathered over the twelve or so years I'd been enjoying that little greenhouse. Images of it stuffed to capacity in April, waiting to be emptied of its fecund treasure.

Images of neat pots of the geraniums I love most and always say I can't live without: Frank Headley, with his icy white leaf edges and salmon single blooms. Grey Sprite. Rosina Read. Little various abutilons and mallows and cacti and whatever. As long as it has a bloom and will thrive in that small sunny space, it had a home with me.

Apparently, it helps to be pink to be included in Zick's Roster of Favorite Plants. 

I look at these images, taken over the last decade, and remember how the greenhouse healed me. How I could suddenly get that winter lump in my throat and just get up and march down and clear the ice away and kick the cinder block aside and open that door and enter a humid, peaty, fragrant little room of salvation. There was really only room enough for one person in there. 

You didn't need any more than one person in there. One person and her plants.

I never opened the door without saying, "Hello, ladies!" It was the plants that made the place, the plants and the sun and the warmth all winter and the smell of gardenia, jasmine and heliotrope when a temperate Ohioan had no right to be smelling those things. The eye-hurting magenta blooms of bougainvillea in January. Luxuries which became necessities.

Now, I always emptied the Pod by May 1 and planted everything out in planters and baskets. So nothing was inside it but some baker's racks and a little gas heater. 

Which is a good thing because that storm I told you about blew my Pod to smithereens.

 Took the mulberry tree while it was at it.

 And took about a third off Liam's willow, which is only twelve but is one hell of a piece of biomass. Even a third of it took us all morning to cut up and pile and clear away. Now you can see right into the tree. I wholeheartedly approve of this piece of surgery. It's always been full of birds and now we can actually see them, and the part that would have eventually broken off and fallen onto our house is gone. So for that I thank the storm, that mighty, heartless storm.

I think differently about trees close to the house now. I don't ever want trees close to the house, not big ones. That's another reason to love birches. They don't get big enough to ruin much when they come down.

                               

We cleaned up the bits of Pod and had to throw away the frame and footers, they were so badly twisted. The ceiling was smashed, so all we have are the sides, and we aren't sure what we should do with those. It seems to me that any kind of frame we'd try to build around a geodesic dome would be more than a couple of bird writers could engineer. So there it lies, in a neat stack next to a silent, powerless house. The Garden Pod was a prototype that never went into production, so there's no hope of finding the manufacturer and getting a replacement frame. It's shot, kaput, blown away. Someone with more brains and time than we have could probably build something using the walls, which are nice double thermopane plastic. Oh, it was a beautiful greenhouse. If you're out there, make yourself known. We've no room to store something we can't use.

We're ending our sixth day without power, breaking our previous outage record of five days. I'm sitting in a town park composing this post, waiting for the scissorgrinder cicadas to start their evening song. It's cooler here than in the house. The incessant heat brings on a kind of lassitude and eventually a mild despair that is a strong deterrent to blogging, hence the silence. Besides, there is a lot of work to do in the aftermath of a storm. We're tired.

We started throwing food away last Sunday morning and I was still at it the evening of July 4. The last to be cleaned out was the huge chest freezer in the basement. Everything had to be thrown away.  I documented it in a series of artful photos. I call this Cornish Hens, Mango, Potstickers and Seafood Blend.

And I call this Nine Degrees of Suppuration.

  At the end of the second day of cleaning it out, I decommissioned the chest freezer right then and there. By the time I had sopped up all the reeking frozen bird juice and blueberry and popsicle drippings in the bottom, by the time I'd disinfected every surface, I had decided to make it a suitcase storage unit instead of a vault where good food goes to die. Lord knows we have suitcases to store. They don't stay unpacked for long. I mean to change that. When you're gone all the time, these things tend to happen.

So I alternate between singing Mighty Storm and Pieces of April, an old classic by David Gates and Bread which came to me as we were picking up pieces of my greenhouse. The subconscious is a beautiful thing.

So was the Garden Pod.