The older I get, the more difficult it is to make new memories, and most of them pale in comparison to the old ones. That’s the beauty and the tragedy of memory. One day, though, the experiences we are having now may be tinged with that rose-colored hindsight of memory and become something better than they are today. Such is the simple scene that came to mind when I played this song by Sia. I’d been playing that album as I floated in the pool for one entire summer, idly turning the pages of a book while trying not to get it wet, then pausing for a stint in the sun and some iced tea. Then I’d return to the water, awkwardly scrambling atop some cheap float that served its sole purpose for a single season.
When my mind wandered from the book to my surroundings, it would also imbue the gentle trajectory of my float’s journey around the pool with fantastical notions of cruise ships stopping at various Ports of Plants – beginning with the Japanese cherry tree, moving through the grove of arborvitae, and rounding the corner of the weeping larch. We’d pause for an excursion through the side garden, beneath the coral bark maple and the climbing hydrangea, before re-boarding and sailing past the potted angel trumpets and feathery-topped papyrus.
The water would push us along to the next stop at the main gardens, where we would disembark for a tour of the shade border, rife with hosta in bloom, Japanese anemones in bud, and Japanese painted ferns in full splendor. A variegated Chinese dogwood still held onto a few of its creamy bracts, while its non-variegated cousins provided welcome shade beneath their handsome green canopies. In the main garden bed, an explosion of fountain grass rose to the sky, matched by the brilliance of a stand of cup plants. The latter hosted butterflies and bees in a busy flower market; one had to look closer and delve deeper to find a lavender-hued lace-cap hydrangea hidden beneath a dogwood and slightly behind the fountain grass. There were some special singe-flowered peonies there too, but they had long since passed their blooming period.
Back in the water, floating over the deep end, we would proceed to the Forest of Ostrich Ferns, which hadn’t quite decided to start their typical scorched decline just yet. A few stalks of Joe Pye weed rose above them, taking advantage of the extra water the ferns got, and the way they shielded the soil from drying out too much. A Korean lilac drifted by, or rather we drifted by the Korean lilac; once in a while it would throw out a welcome re-bloom with the fragrance that brought one back to the very beginning of the summer season. Here we were already a month solidly into it, and that gone too soon.
A stiff upright stand of zebra grass rose behind the pool ladder, then we sailed into the welcome shade of a seven sons’ flower tree, just sending out its late-season buds of sweetness. They would soon open their tiny white blossoms to the giddy intoxication of bees from all over the neighborhood, and as I returned to the spot where my cruise-float began its journey, I was relieved to think there was still much summer to come.
On another song from this album, Sia sang of a sweet potato, bringing to mind the ever-fresh chartreuse shades of the sweet potato vine. There were dark burgundy varieties that some planted to contrast with the lighter green, but I was never a fan. I wanted things to be fresh and bright always, to keep the beginning of summer and not let it deepen too much. There was enough of that on the oak leaves, already deep green and leathery, and the acorns that were forming and just beginning to fall. Ahh, that word. It’s been said. Let us not utter it again.
Back in the pool, there was more summer to be had. My cruise around its perimeter left me dizzy from a sun-baked haze. The undulating water threw shards of reflected sunlight back at my face. There was something disconcerting yet giddy about this in-between state. Between solid and liquid, between light and shadow, between sunlight and water, we rode the little waves as a song about a sweet potato played in the background – a mesmerizing siren call that left the listener doped in a sweet trippy state of aural intoxication.
