The Fence Between the Yard

THE FENCE BETWEEN THE YARDS

“They are beautiful,” my mother would say, pointing to the flowers on the branches of a pear tree seen through our kitchen window. If at the table, Dad would agree with a smile and a nod of his head. The combined action of both parents transmitted to their children a sense of good fortune. The tree grew in our neighbor’s yard and I later in life came to recognize the curving of the branches and the graceful spacing of the flowers as similar to those in Van Gogh’s paintings of apple blossoms and those I am told being further based of Chinese, or Japan, paintings.

 

We were Italian and our neighbors were a wonderful English family, nor should I fail to relate our neighbors off the other side yard were German. A truly cosmopolitan universe in what was considered to be an Italian neighborhood. This in an urban setting, but the true ambiance was one of a house in the middle of a country setting. My parents built up the city soil over the years by adding the ashes from our coal furnace and compost made from kitchen byproducts such as coffee grinds, vegetable stems, and fruit skins. The addition to the soil was such that eventually our side yard was a foot higher than our neighbor's with the pear tree.

 

Those avid gardeners more than made up for any lack of a soil fertility program by giving long hours of detail work to the plants and shrubs which made their eight-of-an acre so pleasurable to observe. Along this border my mother grew lily-of-the-valley and begonia due to the shade. Where the sun began to reach further along the line she had iris and then the roses. Towards the front of the yard, a shrub I think of as the First Holy Communion bush because it was in bloom at the May event of that religious heritage, with blooms of pure white clusters of individual tiny flowers, grew straddling the fence between our yards. This shrub, by the way, is not the bridal shower I have out front in my yard today as this has individual white blooms growing along the stems, not in ball-like clusters. The location is the same, out front by the street and on the same side of the house.

 

Along the fence, all summer long, grew the morning glory. Each summer day I took a keen interest as to which colors of glory would be on display. In the evening I would then be quizzically puzzled as to the morning glory’s propensity to close up and hide its most obvious adornment. In retrospect, this fence between two yards, the people on both sides who so appreciated nature, and the snapshots and snippets of that universe, all provide generous amounts of remembrance of a time and place filled with grace and a more precise awareness of itself.