24
Status Report
The crews came quickly. They finished their repairs to the house and cleaned up the debris in a couple of days. The backhoe had been driven off under its own power, much to the Fremonts’ amazement. The garden plot onto which the explosion had so neatly deposited it had miraculously survived. So perfectly had the backhoe landed that only those few flowers directly under the wheels and bucket had been smushed. A few more were run over when it was driven off. But, amazingly, none of those flowers had been pulverized or even mortally damaged. All sprang back to vertical life within two days.
“I can’t believe it,” said Nan. “All the hurt flowers have bounced back. We won’t have to replace a single one.”
“It’s the magic of the Fremont gardens,” George said. “Subjected to devastation no other garden could withstand, they bounce back even better than before.”
Jerry built and painted new trellises for them, and, though a number of rose and clematis blooms had been severed from their canes and vines, the canes and vines themselves were back in business and thriving again within the week.
The rest of the Fremont backyard gardens survived the explosion virtually intact. Nan figured it was because the modest shock wave from the explosion was either mostly directed toward the house next door or passed over everything close to the ground. George wondered whether something else might have helped them, and hinted strongly at supernatural influences.
“Will you knock it off with that,” Nan chided. “Everything has a scientific explanation, unless, of course, the hand of God is involved here.”
“I wasn’t counting out the Big Guy,” George said. “I’m just trying to be open-minded about it.”
What was certain was that the Fremont gardens, front and back, were going great guns. This was a summer when the weather was at its nurturing best. Hot spells gave way to cool ones with regularity, and the well-timed rains came gently, steadily, and plentifully.
This was when the backyard’s monarda, daylilies, Asiatic lilies, purple coneflowers, and balloon flowers were in all their glory, with the black-eyed Susans just starting to brighten the color schemes up with their luminescent yellow petals and black eyes. The blue hydrangea had erupted in the most vivid deep blue they had ever seen or would have ever thought existed.
In the front yard, Mary and Shirelle were doing ye-owomen’s work, but this was the easy part; it was mainly maintenance mode at this point, and not even that much of that, the weather having cooperated so wonderfully.
With that in mind, Shirelle had found a job at Burdick’s, where she worked part-time to allow her a couple of days reserved exclusively for the Fremonts. Mary, having gotten the word from Nan that, sorry, her parents would foot the bill for only one semester of college, was working at one of Livia’s three smaller nurseries, the Root and Stem. That was a full-time job, but it was the day shift, meaning there was plenty of time left for gardening when she got home from work.
Everything they planted two months earlier had flourished or was flourishing.
The big wave of lavender Walker’s Low catmint blooms had come and gone, giving way to lesser and more sporadic displays. Shirelle had lately been using her Fremont time to deadhead the spent blooms, hoping against the odds for a big comeback in August.
On the catmint’s northern and southern flanks, the Happy Returns and Rosy Returns daylilies were just now hitting their stride. They were throwing out short-lived flowers daily, and it was Mary’s job to deadhead those during her free time in the evening and on weekends. More muted than the catmint and brilliant yellow Happy Returns, the Rosy Returns featured curled-back, frilled-edged petals that were a bronzed pink, funneling down to a vivid yellow-green deep inside the throat of the bloom.
Providing some further edging were the delphinium. They looked like miniature spires or even church steeples of densely packed purple, pink, and white flowers, and were blooming like crazy. They were finicky, though, needing mulch at their base, and had water needs that even the summer’s regular rainfall couldn’t quite satisfy. Shirelle felt the delphinium gave the front yard crucial narrow and vertical accents.
Waving in the slightest breeze were the clumps of ornamental grasses, which had grown to two-to-three-feet tall. Shirelle had planted just the right amount to break up the riotous colors and provide a more natural-looking contrast. She was glad to see that the Karl Foerster and prairie dropseed were quite enough, and that her change of heart about planting more varieties had saved the gardens from ornamental grass overkill.
How would it be possible to describe the hybrid teas!
Like Crater Lake, or the first swirl of Sagelands ’07 merlot on the palate, they beggared description. Crowning the front yard’s ridge, their luscious, curling petals and vibrant illuminating colors, one hue giving way to another from the tip of each petal to its base, gave them a three-dimensional luster that none of their other flowers could match. Certainly they were arrogant, thought Nan. But the other flowers didn’t seem to mind, and who was she to question the presence of that essence of prima donna in something that could so readily flaunt its perfection.
Her own favorites, which she was careful not to show, were the four Full Sails, which looked to her like a cross between whole-bean vanilla ice cream and an untouched tub of margarine, and had a scent that was stronger than honeysuckle.
Shirelle had cast her usual concerns about overly gaudy color combinations aside when planning for the hybrid teas. She had added a couple of pink Tiffanys to a mix that already included the Full Sails, Blue Girls, Chrysler Imperials, and Bronze Stars.
Shirelle and Mary had also supervised the planting of two paper birches to fill up the bare space at the corner of the lot. They had them sunk into the turf behind the Burdick’s sign, which in response to their entreaties, the Burdick’s folks had consented to let stand through mid-August; and had decorated the site with a few boulders delivered by Burdick’s and set in place precisely to Shirelle’s specifications. They then added golden-brown cypress mulch, which they were continually freshening, and plenty of petunias to brighten up the base.
The paper birches bore careful watching and constant care, as prone to disease and sensitive to scorching sun as they were.
Anyone with an hour or two to spend looking at flowers would have spotted a ruby-throated hummingbird hovering around the daylilies and delphinium, and the two hummingbird feeders dangling from shepherd’s crook rods. Even the most casual observers would have noticed levitating honeybees everywhere. Shirelle told Nan and Mary that you could even pet honeybees when they were slurping their nectar, so intent were they on their task. She had demonstrated with a honeybee gorging itself on monarda nectar.
“Try it yourself,” she said. “It won’t sting you.” Both Mary and Nan had giggled and declined.
“Some other time,” said Nan. “After I’ve had my two glasses of wine.”
For the most part, the butterflies hadn’t arrived yet, though they had all noted a few orange-and-black monarchs in the vanguard of the migration that made them eternal travelers. They would always be on the lookout for red admirals, which had swarmed around the gardens four years earlier in late August through mid-September. They had watched, fascinated, as those butterflies would rest in the direct sunlight, soaking up the diminishing solar energy that strengthened their orange-banded and white-splotched brown-and-black wings and powered their flight.
“Why do they call it a red admiral, when the closest color to red on it is orange?” wondered Mary. Shirelle shrugged.
“It was probably the same idiot who named the red-bellied woodpecker,” she said. “I defy you to find more than a tiny bit of red on those belly feathers. On the head yes, but the red-headed woodpecker name was already taken.”
Whatever it was that contributed to that influx of red admirals had apparently not happened again; they had not returned.
As for the Burdick’s sign, it was still attracting interest, though that had dropped off considerably since most of the people within a two-mile radius had already seen it and had no need of further study.
Still, the front yard had become an amazing quilt of color, which took on a wondrous waving effect when the breeze moved through the flowers. It was common for motorists driving along Sumac Street to slow down and even stop right there in the middle of the road to gawk. Same with pedestrians strolling along the sidewalk on the other side of Sumac. They’d start with the lake, especially if its mating pair of bald eagles were circling overhead, or its great blue herons wading across its reedy shallows, looking for bluegills or frogs to spear for lunch, then turn to take in the wonders of Fremontland.
Isn’t there some way we could charge all those people whose lives we’ve enriched so much? thought George, being only partly facetious.
“Well, at least it’s better than those gawkers who showed up after the gas line explosion,” he said to Nan, as two elderly couples crossed the street to get a close-up look at the daylilies.
“That’s exactly the way to look at it, dear,” said Nan, allowing George to fill her wineglass to midway up the snowy pattern of trees etched into its bulging center. “They are stopping to appreciate beauty, not mayhem.”