71: Planting Season

The summer heat broke about a week ago. I can hear crickets and tree frogs through the open window at night; the sun's going down earlier every day, but it's no longer uncomfortably hot in the middle of the afternoon. The black-eyed susans and coreopsis I planted in the spring have taken off. I've been neglecting the garden since mid-August; it's time to start pruning and planting before the weather gets too cold.

Gardening is one of the few activities that lets me turn my brain completely off. I like the repetitive nature of the work, the searching for weeds and the actual weeding. I spend enough time in thought throughout my day that introspection gets a little exhausting after a while. Getting lost in the plants in the backyard is a relief. I'm still an amateur, so deadheading and pruning and weeding take a little extra effort. Each step is small, but needs to be done repeatedly. It reminds me of knitting, an activity I had to give up a few years ago after a repetitive motion injury.

We're already making plans for next year's gardening. This weekend I'm going to plant more coneflowers, in the hopes that they'll mix in with the black-eyed susans and the coreopsis next year. I have a small flowering shrub I'm going to add to a different corner of the backyard. And we're going to cut down a pair of overgrown arborvitae shrubs near our garage; they came with the house and look like ugly Christmas trees. I'll be planting lilacs and a rambler rose in their place. It feels good to plan, and to plant. Gardening forces me to slow down.

What I talked about:

For Seeing & Believing's penultimate episode, Kevin and I reviewed Kenneth Branagh's A Haunting in Venice and paired it with Robert Altman's Gosford Park, which blows most ensemble costume dramas out of the water.

Our final episode of Seeing & Believing in weekly podcast form comes out next week. After that, we'll be switching over to newsletter format. Come join us!

What I watched:

We're hitting the start of spooky season, so my husband and I are starting to power through the old horror movies we've been saving up. The Criterion Channel has about half a dozen Roger Corman movies set to expire at the end of the month, so we turned on The Masque of the Red Death almost on a whim. It didn't disappoint–it's lurid in the way only mid-century Technicolor horror movies can be, with a wide-eyed heroine and a lot of whip pans and Vincent Price having a ball playing the villain.