I can’t believe how nice it is again today. It was like this last year at this time too. I know that last year on Halloween day we went out in just t-shirts and commented that it would be the oddest Halloween ever because we hadn’t even thought about making a jack-o-lantern and our son was at his grandparents’ house. But we didn’t care because our daughter was only two days old and we were still amazed and drunk with exhilaration.
So now she’s one.
We had an open house for her yesterday and it necessitated cleaning up our patio. I should explain that we live in an apartment building and that in the summer we had a modest container garden. We grew one very nice tomato plant, a container of morning glories and several others of sweet peas. We also have a small herb garden in a nice wooden box container that the previous renters left behind.
The container garden was actually very pretty around mid-summer. We had two of those large plastic Adirondack chairs set out, a couple of tiki torches in tera cota pots (weighted with stone), and the container garden placed around these things like walls. As the climbing plants grew up around the bamboo stakes and string we’d set up, it did afford a little privacy and seclusion. My husband would go out there with cold drinks and talk when the kids were (finally) in bed for the evening. During the afternoons (when it’s very shady on our patio), the kids and I would fill up the splash pool and play with bath toys (well, they played with bath toys and I read books). It was the first summer living in this place where I felt I had liveable outdoor space and I was extraordinarily pleased with myself.
Then they decided to paint the outside of the building.
I have to agree that the building needed to be painted and that they certainly needed to have the patios clear for the huge contraption that they use to scoot up and down the outside of the high-rise. I just didn’t like the way they stacked my chairs and shoved all of my plants together in a little pile right in the most shady corner of the patio. It took about a month to paint this side of the building and after it was over we were so far into autumn that there didn’t seem to be much point in setting everything back out. It was instead time to take out all of the plant material, remove the dirt, stack the containers, huddle the chairs up near the house, and, in short, prepare for winter.
There isn’t much fun in prepping a patio or deck for the winter. It’s important, but not fun. Taking the time now, of course, will ensure a painless transition from barren to beautiful next spring and it will almost guarantee that really nice containers won’t be lost to things like cracking from frozen water (due to neglect this happened to me a couple of years ago). But it’s so boring and sad to take everything down. It needs a perfect resigned yet productive mindset. Or a nice melancholy mood so that one could ruminate on the transitional nature of youth while pulling up plants. There’s no guarantee that a mood like that will come along when it needs to.
Hopefully, you’ll be lucky like me and your husband will just go and do the whole nasty job for you while you’re both cleaning up in a frenzy for the thirty odd guests that are showing up to wish your baby girl a happy birthday.
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