Tangly Cottage Gardening

September 2025

….. explores how three generations of the village have grappled with the changes of the past century-from the rise and collapse of commercial cod fishing, and the migration of young people away from the outport, to the distant hope for tourism and new industries to sustain a disappearing way of life. With characteristically elegant prose and deep sensitivity, Finch introduces us to Squid Tickle’s inhabitants-a collection of hardy fishermen, vigorous retirees, and close neighbors, as well as the woman who would become his wife.“

It took me a chapter or two to figure out that, because the book is laid out in years, this sentence would never be fully explained, as the drama therein happened before the Squid Tickle story began: “I arrived ….heartsick and heartsore, full of guilt and a pain I could find no release from. I had shattered one life and had not yet built another.“

He lived “in the western part of the town [of Burnside], which was traditionally known as Squid Tickle.” The book will tell you why.

The social life in this small town is different from what I have known here, and consists of folks dropping in on each other, usually unannounced and walking right in! “Unlike most small towns in the States, there are no public gathering places here. People do not congregate and linger at the post office or the general store they come and post their mail or pick up groceries and leave. Coffee shops are still rare in the outports…”

The fishermen reminded me of Ilwaco fishermen: “While most houses here are replaced as casually as cars, ….outbuildings associated with fishing seem to be preserved with an almost religious devotion and are frequently the oldest structures in town.”

If you have lived in an old fashioned fishing town, this will be familiar. “A man’s stature here seems reflected in the number of boats he keeps, and as he relinquishes them, one by one, keeping ever-smaller ones, he seems to contract in his own eyes.”

I always love garden descriptions in a memoir: “He is quite proud of his English flower garden, a large bed of annuals he has planted on the slope behind his house leading down to the sea, placed so that he can see it from the large window in back. It is quite lovely, divided by a grassy path of bedrock and shaded from the afternoon sun by a drooping birch. There are tiny blue gems of lobelia, hollyhock-like mallows, four or five varieties of brightly painted Endicia, large velvet-blue, flop-petaled pansies, and several other species.“

His first spring in Squid Tickle…”The world looks clean and new and fresh outside with tall purple irises blanketing the swales and the fringes of the shore and azaleas like banks of rose flames along the roadsides and the fresh new lime tongues of cottonwood leaves fluttering like a cool green stream at the edges of the clearings.“

As the decades pass, we lose some of the most fascinating characters in the memoir. “The population of Squid Tickle peaked in 1961 with 213. In 1991 it was 68. At my own last count, it was 36.

They know there will be no more youth meetings here, no more local weddings, christenings, or confirmations only funerals.“

The nature descriptions do make me want to read his books about Cape Cod, a place that figures large in two other memoirists I love, May Sarton and Gladys Taber, both of whom I long to reread but keep putting off as new books pour in.

“The raspberry blossoms lining the drive are threaded with the slow-motion buzzing of heavy-bodied bumblebees. It is a timeless moment, and I am all too conscious of time at my back. ….

The first flames of fireweed blossoms by the side of the road are beginning to climb their stalks and ignite the fields.”

Why have I become so attuned and attentive to flowers here?

Where does this urge come from to delineate their form and details in pencil sketches, something I have never done before?

….it is the spring and summer flowers, with their delicate blossoms and fragile supports, their touches of flame and snow across the landscape, that somehow express the essence of life here.“

Advice from an old man….reminds me of how I feel when we drive through Seaview, even though the houses are mostly still there. ““Now, someday, my son, you’ll come back here and it’ll all be gone, and you’ll stand right ‘ere and you’ll say, “Ere was where Jim and Jessie lived, and over there, Christine, and there was the post office stood, I think ’twas there… all at once I was seized by a terrible sense of anticipated loss that none of his more sentimental twaddle had ever roused in me.“

Yes, there lived John and Val, and Glennie Woodcock, and Bev Rolfe and her cocker spaniel, Kelly….Helen Dunn and Tootie Erickson…Bob and Boots Johnson. I miss them all!

I was warned when I moved here not to just make friends of old people, and yet that is pretty much what I did. When the author makes a friend his own age it …”offered us the possibility of creating a life here even after the disappearance of the old people.”

The author, a musical man, becomes a bellringer for the church, an unusual past time which strangely popped up in one of the very next books I read, I think a novel by Lissa Evans, a coincidence I forgot to write down on my list of coincidences.

I was saddened to find out that the author had died shortly before this book was published, so once again, when I read his other books, I will be reading the words of someone who is gone.

I think I have caught up now on the summer reading and to be fully caught up on 2025, I need time to reminisce about the books of an author I loved so very much last winter, Deric Longden.

For now, those 12 diaries of James Lees-Milne continue to obsess me. I wrote these several reading posts awhile back to give us some breathing time in creating blog posts before the frenzy of Halloween and the gradual relaxation into time off from writing this winter.

September 2025

[I wrote this post several weeks ago.]

This passage well described the growing unaffordabity of life in Portland, Oregon.

“Maybe we’ll buy a house, your father and I tell ourselves, But this is 2017. This is the height of Portlandia. Our two-bedroom apartment goes from $1,100 to $1,600 overnight. Any house we could afford gets snapped up by people moving here from other cities or software engineers with $200,000 sal-aries. Neighborhoods we wouldn’t even hang out in suddenly become cool, unaffordable.

This funky black-box theatre where our friends used to stage shows gets shut down, turned into an artisan deli. Home prices go up and then up some more. The game we used to play over brunch-where we’d watch the tourists walk by and try to guess, Bay Area or Brooklyn? —no longer works: they’re not tourists. They live here now. They own the brunch spot we’re eating at. Gridlock on the freeway anytime after 2 p.m. My commute goes from twenty minutes to thirty, then forty-five.“

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

What it is about….this: “When I was thirty-four, I was diagnosed with a hereditary connective tissue disorder. This diagnosis changed my life, before it and after it. ………Some of Us Just Fall traces how a diagnosis can upturn our sense of self, our plans for the future, and our understanding of the past – our own, and others. It is about how illness remakes time and space as they move through body. It is about living in this other chronic realm hidden within and throughout every place you think you know.” It is also about the author’s connection and rapport with nature and how it does not miraculously heal her.

Polly Atkins recommends some other books on this chronic illness: “Abby Norman’s Ask Me About My Uterus, Michele Lent Hirsch’s Invisible, Porochista Khakpour’s Sick, Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection, and Sonya Huber’s Pain Woman Takes Your Keys.“ And about negotiating health care: “Abi Palmer’s Sanatorium, Jenn Ashworth’s Notes Made While Falling, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizopbrenias, Shahd Alshammari’s Head Above Water, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s The Future Is Disabled and Jan Grue’s I Live a Life Like Yours.” All added to my reading list, which I could never live long enough to complete.

I did not know this about Thoreau: “It is less well known that Thoreau lived with tuberculosis his entire adult life – an illness that would kill his grandfather, father and older sister Helen and eventually, years after his death at forty-four, his younger sister Sophia.” No wonder that his sojourns into solitude were not very far from town and the help of his loved ones.

I do believe this is true: “The [UK National Health Service] has its faults, but its faults are those shared with other healthcare systems – conceptual biases and failures of procedure and imagination – which would only have been exacerbated for me by a privatised system. It is doubtful whether I would have survived this far if I were negotiating the US healthcare system. It is even more doubtful if I would be well enough to be writing this.”

….

“In reading we travel without moving. Through time and space, through minds. It doesn’t matter where we are. Words travel far beyond us, make journeys we could never make in our precarious bodies.”

Reading has become even more important to me now than bodily precariousness has made it difficult to even go garden touring.

The book is set in Grasmere, the Lake District. “The Lake District is famous for its rain, for its unpredictable weather. Within its saturated bounds, the wettest inhabited valley in England lies only ten miles over the fells from my home in Grasmere.”

That is most appealing to me.

She lives in a tiny house, as did I for almost 15 years. “…. after my brother A and his sons had visited that summer, my nephews could not stop talking about Aunty Polly’s Tiny House. So Tiny! We are continually rearranging furniture to try to fit everything we need in. All objects are in constant rotation, like the ever growing and shifting piles of books we both bring in like the cat brings in mice.”

On insomnia, which I share with her: “The horror of insomnia is the horror of repetition. You are meant to sleep every night, and every night comes, and your body still refuses to lie down and stop. To do what it is meant to. You are stuck in a loop, and the loop kicks you out of your proper place and time. You are dislocated from everyone and everything else. You walk through the day like a ghost, haunting your own life, trying to tell it something, but you have got out of time, and you don’t know what the message is yet.”

It used to be that I could not go to sleep. Now, no matter when I go to bed, I wake up after five hours and about half the time cannot get to sleep. This causes more anxiety and wakefulness each time it happens.

This reminds me of moving from Seattle to the Long Beach Peninsula, especially back in the 1990s when even the grocery store closed early and even now, no bus runs after 7 P.M.. “After years in London, where there is always a shop or takeaway open, always a bus running if not a Tube, this new place with its handful of buses a day and shops that shut up before dark in winter was like moving to a different time.” I still miss the city for those conveniences and for the social life that evening buses make possible for non drivers.

Once in 1993 when I was living and working at the Sou’wester Lodge, Nicola Luttrup of the then-renowned Lamb Nursery came to stay, with Aimee who now lives here, arriving after dark, finding no grocery store open and drolly asking me, “What are we supposed to eat, sea toast?”

I moved here because on vacation, I felt about the peninsula like Polly did about Grasmere. “The humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan coined the term topophilia – love of place – to describe just this kind of feeling.’ He recognised how we can have a strong feeling for a place, not just a visual appreciation or abstract understanding of it, even though no complex experiencing is possible’, that we can fall in love with places at first sight. ° I knew nothing about Grasmere, about what it would mean to live there, but I knew I wanted it more than anything. I knew it would change my life.”

………………

I feel the same as she does walking down stairs. More and more as it gets worse and worse, to where I now back down stairs holding the railing, I marvel when I see in a film or show someone walking down a set of stairs without looking. HOW do they do that?

“Often, I lose proprioception walking down stairs. I have the sense of myself as footless, suddenly, or the stairs as a viscous liquid, or a treacherous cakewalk in an old-fashioned fairground. I find myself clinging onto the banister, inching one step, one leg at a time, and not just because of the pain of bending each joint.“

Another book to read: “When I read Susan Cooper’s novel Seaward...” I loved Cooper’s Dark is Rising series so much that I already have Seaward at home in my library pile.

The unhelpfulness of some doctors: “When the young male gynaecologist does his ward rounds, he tells me it is hard to work out what might be causing abdominal pain in women, because there is just so much in there.

I imagine radiologists poring over CT scans of women’s abdomens stuffed with space junk, tin cans, old bicycles, the Loch Ness monster, an actual kitchen sink.“

So about the Katsura tree, which I mail ordered and which is languishing in too dry a spot and will be moved as soon as rain returns (it is HOT again, greatly to my disappointment) and also when I feel well enough…[It did get moved to a more auspicious spot.]

“We are told we cannot think of leaving before we see the toffee apple tree that grows behind the hall. At this time of year, and this time only, the tree gives off the scent of caramelised apples.

We smell it before we reach it. Walking along the back terrace of the garden, we hit a wall of sweet and buttery fragrance. The tree stands a little by itself, right at the end of the walkway, its gold and pink leaves vibrating with luminosity against the damp green of the lawn and the heavy grey of the sky.

The scent, like lychees and butterscotch, floral and sharp and sweet, is so delicious I want to bathe in it. I climb over the wall of the terrace to stand in its drooping branches, amongst the heart-shaped leaves, and breathe it in.“

After several fascinating pages about its history, she adds “In Japan ancient multi-stemmed katsura hold monument status. It is a sacred tree, linked with deities of moon, mountain and water. katsura trees are places of meeting, of the gods with the mortal realm, of the gods with each other, of the mortal realm with higher realms. Legend tells that a great katsura grows on the moon and a man of exceptional beauty tends it, trimming the golden leaves which shrinks the moon’s orb as it seems to us to wane each month. The light of the moon is leaf-light, tree-light.”

I recently read elsewhere that the Katsura scent is released by drying leaves or fallen leaves in autumn, and my hopes are somewhat dashed when she writes, “Not everyone can smell katsura’s delicate, sweet fragrance. It is the chemical compound maltol mixed with sugar released from the turning leaves that makes the distinctive aroma in autumn. But maltol, used in food and perfumes for its caramellic properties, is not perceptible to everyone. To people who lack the scent receptors, the katsura in autumn is just a pretty yellow-leaved tree, nothing more enchanting.” I hope my tree survives the move and grows and releases a scent that I am able to smell next autumn.

Something amazing to read about sent me down an internet search path which you might want to follow: The caves of Nottingham.

There is so much more in Some of Us Just Fall than my excerpts about plants. Especially if you are a lover of Wordsworth and the Lake District. And even more especially if you are living with disability.

Sunday, 2 November 2025

mostly at home

In dismantling the exterior decorations of plant life, I found, as I chopped up the corn stalks that Mads had brought us, the prettiest corn inside inside the immature cobs.

A neighbour strolled by while I hauled plant material.

Later, while hauling branches to the debris pile at the south end of Alicia’s back yard, Allan saw this neighbor.

Gathering up leaves from the driveway, that I had strewn for Halloween…

…was the most tedious task, fortunately in bright sunshine and dry weather that we wish we’d had on Halloween evening! I filled four cardboard boxes and dropped them into plastic bins. The cardboard boxes will, I hope, last long enough to keep weed roots from infiltrating the leaves before next year.

I have been thinking about moving because of the new weekday afternoon wall of debilitating sound from just south of us. Oh, it is too hard…the very thought of moving this boat, not to mention the two other boats inside the garden just makes me want to lie down and die.

And what about the boat shapes that back up the compost bins?

And the concrete vault planters in the front garden, which are so heavy, not to mention my precious full sized trees and shrubs that I have planted. Even though I had been looking at photos of an odd little house in Seaview that we could actually afford [turns out it has structural problems and has water and electricity turned off], I think we must not give up yet, even though we have too many medical things looming in the near future [that will be happening by the time you read this] to do anything but record the intensity of the noise now and actually deal with it later.

I value this comment from a friend who watched our four minute video of the noise and who is aware that it was said that any resident who questioned the design of the proposed facility must hate children.

“I wish people’s knee-jerk reactions to any comment about children and noise wasn’t instantly to assume that the person commenting “hates children.” I can object to the sound of continuous barking without hating dogs. I can object to the sound of backfiring and screeching tires without hating cars. I can object to the sound of fireworks without hating freedom. I can most definitely object to the sounds of high-pitched continuous screaming and banging without hating children. Noise pollution is a real thing.

As to drowning it out, that’s so loud you’re gonna need the 1812 Overture.”

Pondering, I went two doors down to the Norwood garden to do a bit of trimming. Last week I walked to the end of their driveway where the noise was also very loud.

Allan blew leaves.

I love the ash tree…

…and the hydrangeas.

Home again, I walked to the willow grove, past a beautifully autumnal corylopsis…

…and a new path…

…and moved a young redwood (or some such nice fast growing evergreen tree that was given to me by Tony Tomeo) to a spot that matches another one and might someday block some sound (probably too late for Allan and me).

The deep path has filled with water and might stay full all winter. I never got around to widening it in summer while dry.

I pondered the noise situation, realising the big big problem is that the big BIG square hole in the wall next door blasts yelling, both child and adult, and pounding sports ball noise into our garden like a giant speaker…

…and it could not have been more thoughtlessly or carelessly designed to blast the noise right up the two-bridge center path and into the garden. I spent YEARS perfecting that path design and do not want to fill it in with trees that would not even be tall enough till after we are dead.

The arbor at the end of the second bridge is a remnant of the previous fence line and THERE is where we could install a tall metal wall, with all our energy that we have in our 70s, with strength-sapping health problems and not much money. With flying buttresses (?) on the inside of the panels to keep the whole darn thing from blowing over. By closing off the end of the bridge, putting a mirror on the inside and maybe making the end of the bridge a sit spot, putting huge metal panels (or overlapped pieces that we could manage to lift) to each side… would it work or would it be all that work for nothing?

The route to the willow grove would then turn left or right to an entrance at each end, by the east and west fence (west end would need another bridge or a lot of fill), to access the willow grove which is the southernmost ten or fifteen feet width of the garden and would be beyond the metal wall.

I showed Allan all about my idea and he seemed to think it worth pondering. He noticed that the willow that the raccoons like to play with had finally been broken in half.

We are not anything like well enough make a metal wall now, and in a just world, we wouldn’t have to. I can but dream. A better dream is that while we are ailing, someone steps up for us and makes the new facility mitigate their incredible noise that is just as bad, it turns out, for another neighbour in a different path of the noise as it is for us. That would be the fair and the right thing. I feel I have given years of volunteering for this town, from a decade of volunteer social media (creating and running their Discover Ilwaco page for ten years), to organizing the “cash mobbing” local businesses, to creating and maintaining volunteer gardens, and I wish now for someone in authority to care for us so we can age in place and in peace. That hope might be just pitiful.

Still, I was pleased to maybe have come up with an idea that, if it comes to that, would be cheaper than moving.

I returned to the last of the leaves and debris clean up.

In the front garden, I gathered all the painted bamboo to put in the garage for the winter.

I might get one more year out of some of them. I must remember to not hurt myself on the rebar that the poles fit over!

Compost bin one is full of Halloween plant debris and topped off with boxes from the pizza Alicia provided for our trick or treat evening.

How would I ever move my compost bins or leave the 15 years worth of compost and soil amendments I have added to this garden? I would rather lay down and be buried in the bin.

The garage as it looked this morning, and this evening before Allan put the tables away…

In the shuffle of many trick or treating photos, this one got added late after some had already read the post. It’s an especially pleasing costume since kids were so pleased with our ramen giveaway so here it is again.

I am planning to take a blogging break for at least a short while. Next up will be three book posts that I wrote a couple of weeks ago.

Music notes

The ironic thing is that in this day of blissful quiet, I have music running through my head now that I have started listening to it again to drown out the noise. It is not really the mood I planned to evoke in my garden but it’s a kind of noise that I enjoy when in a dance club. (Warning! Flashing lights might cause seizures??)

“Awa, a place to stay,

Get your boooty on the floor tonight,

Make my day…

Make my day
Make my day
Make my day
Make my day“. etc….

My musical tastes are not very refined, I guess. A lot of shaking one’s booty, getting one’s booty on the floor, pumping up either the jam or the volume, and so forth. It would be more fitting in a garden to listen to something softer. If only a softer sound would drown out the noise, I would not have to listen to music at all and could return to the perfect soundtrack of birds and breezes with sometimes a distant and amusing sound of children playing.

Saturday, 1 November 2025

I looked at the explosion of Halloween decor in the garage that got piled up,late yesterday evening and simply could not cope with it today.

After taking down more of the Halloween decor that looks tawdry the next day (ghost sheets, mostly) and leaving the plant decorations for another day, we headed out for a 1 P.M. food drive rally organised by the Good Trouble Gang.

Faerie and Skooter were snoozing when we left.

downtown Ilwaco

A tent for collecting food donations was set up in the Ilwaco city hall parking lot.

The rest of us held signs across the street and at the stoplight intersection.

“Good Trouble strikes again,” wrote one of the organisers afterward. “We collected $1,180.57 for the food banks and approximately 500 pounds of food! It was awesome! We are a winning team! Thanks everyone. We fed a lot of people today.”

Next food bank rally is scheduled for November 15th at the Sid Snyder Drive stoplight in Long Beach. Our weekly Save

at home

After a trip to the library, which garnered me the new Elizabeth George mystery and a Lees-Milne memoir, I found Faerie and Skooter still snoozing.

Later, when I went to water in the greenhouse, Skooter meowed over a Halloween decoration that I had forgotten to put out.

I took a short video of the garden the way it has sounded for the last fifteen years and probably decades before that, which you can view here on Facebook. Somehow, I have to learn how to bask in the quiet times, instead of being filled with sorrow that I have lost so much of it, and I do not know how to do that yet.

I worked hard in the late afternoon and evening on three blog posts, and so did Allan editing and sending me his photos.

Friday, 31 October 2025

Ocean Beach Hospital

At a little after two, Allan went to the weekly rally by the intrepid, weather resistant Good Trouble Gang at Ocean Beach Hospital to take photos and stand with the group for awhile before going around town to take Halloween photos. I couldn’t go because by then (2 P.M.) we already had the garage door unable to close due to decorations that could not wait for the last minute.

at home

We had started decorating at mid morning.

Margarita came by to deliver a cute ceramic ghost for our permanent collection. Fortunately, because it was a heavy item, Allan was at home briefly before going out to take photos all over town (which will be our next post).

Across the street, the J Crew Cottage clan prepared for the predicted heavy rain and wind from the south which would hit them full force.

With a deadline looming to have all ready by 3 P.M. (when on occasion a few first trick or treaters arrive), I had got my decorating mojo back just in time.

At two in the afternoon, the rain had not yet begun…

Allan had hung the window films from the garage ceiling as a backdrop and to hide the three tables where we pile treats and decoration stuff. My friends and I, sitting behind the table, would hide the lower layer of clutter. Bags of dry leaves waited to be strewn at the last minute.

I had found most but not all of my spooky book covers yesterday (which had been a low energy and depressed day due to our new noise problem in the garden, see yesterday’s post for video of that).

I didn’t find All Hallows’ Eve by Charles Williams during yesterday’s low energy book quest.

The spooky cutouts belonged to Allan’s mom, as did almost all the ceramic ghosts and pumpkins.

We got the scary chipper shredder tableau set up in front of Alicia’s porch, but I realise now it was not very effective this year. It should be closer to the sidewalk, and we forgot to light it up after dark (and it was raining so hard some of the time that putting a flashlight inside might not have worked).

The legs need to stick up straighter next year, I should have stuffed branches under them, darn it!

By three, we were ready. Alicia was driving in from Portland. As soon as she got here, she would bring over a nice set of shallow wooden bowls to display the stickers (instead of cardboard boxes).

Two other dear friends would not be able to join us, one from a family crisis and one from a very painful back.

I felt quite glum and feared we would only get the smallest trickle of trick or treaters because of the rain and strong wind.

I put the leaves out just before three, along the sides in drifts. I usually like to have them all over the middle so trick or treaters get the feeling of walking through the woods, but with the rain, I was afraid they would get too slippery, so that perfect crunching sensation did not happen this year.

Madison and Allison had brought corn stalks and would return later to help hand out treats (really the most exhausting part of the show!).

Although the decor looks like a lot of clutter, we find kids like looking at all the details while waiting in line. It’s all for them, not high falutin’ good taste. And we do sometimes hear “It’s my favorite house!”

Alicia arrived, making things better right away, dressed as Greta Thunberg, saving the planet.

We sat and waited and I wondered if it had all been for nought when no one had showed up by four. Then I found Allan’s spread sheet from previous years showing that last year, when we had over 900 tickets or treaters, only three had come before four thirty.

At four thirty on the dot, here they came! In Ilwaco, we welcome folks of ALL ages to get treats.

Alicia’s speil: “Here we have a Halloween smorgasbord. You can have a candy, a dum dum [lollipop] and a sticker.”

And we had a bowl of ramen packs, 44 in all, which made the teens very happy. “They have ramen!!”

Madison and Allison showed up just when Alicia and I were flagging in energy and took over handing out treats for awhile. Allison was “eye candy” and Mads was “dog on fire”.

When I said to the guy below, “The Crow!”:

The best part for me that filled me with joy is that I had on my new playlist on my new speakers and some people, including adults accompanying kids, were dancing in the driveway while in line for treats. I could catch their eyes and we danced together from a distance.

music notes

I said to Alicia that I had been unsure how I would feel when I again heard a song I used to love, Every Day by Kim English. I had listened to it many times on my Stairmaster during my single years of July 2003 through December 2004 and the lyrics spoke to me then: “I’ve got my health, I’ve got my strength, I’m in my right mind.” I can hardly say I have the health and strength that I had then, but the lyrics go on to say “I still have breath so I have hope that love is on my side.” I had remembered it as “time is on my side” which it most certainly is not like it was when I was 49! (This made it extra sad when I learned today that Kim herself died at age 48.) In the song, Kim English sings on, “It is a miracle that I am here to see another day”…and for me, another Halloween.

Thursday, 30 October 2025

Allan watered and trimmed Wendi’s planter and photographed her Halloween window.

He collected leaves for my leaf bin from next to the physical therapy building near the hospital.

at home

I had to play the loud music again to block loud sounds that started at 12:30. To the tune of Rock the Casbah, I dug this path out more level.

Allan repaired the railing of a bridge.

I photographed the building from which the sound emanates, a wall of noise that is being thrown directly at us coming out of that square opening from a roofed “outdoor” play area, which on the approved plan is called a much more quiet sounding “outdoor classroom”. Sounds so innocuous and nature-loving. I had been surprised to see a roof go on it. Now the facility, in a newspaper article, is calling it a play area, not just a “classroom”.

Allan made a video tour of the autumnal garden, four minutes long and well filmed. You can watch it without the sound to see the garden beauty or with the sound to see why I am in despair and almost too depressed to decorate for Halloween.

I felt immobilised and sat for awhile, called a friend and wept, then made myself get back to decorating, which must be done even though a forecast of 2 inches of rain and 30 mph winds and maybe even lightning might make the expense and effort useless.

Tomorrow, we finish decorating and hope someone shows up. If the trick or treating is washed out, I will be sad, as I was hoping for an extraordinarily high count what with it being a Friday night. Sometimes forecasts are wrong.

As I was writing this, I got a call from an acquaintance, someone so affected by the new play area noise that he is saying he will sell up and move away. So I am not alone but…with our house surely seriously devalued now, and being old and tired, and with a garden I adore, I feel stuck.

Wednesday, 29 October 2025

at home

Too many words today. Am too tired to edit further so apologies in advance.

In the garden before play noise from the new facility just to the south of us began…

In the willow grove, I planted a Leyland cypress, yes the dreaded conifer, which I had picked up for ten dollars yesterday while across the river for an ear appointment.

It is all squeezed in by a palm and a eucalyptus…

…which I like best but do not baffle noise.

Do you think there is any chance I could move this schefflera without killing it? I have conifers planted around it, too. Maybe I could start it from a cutting?

The frog bog, just south, the area we managed to save from development, is gathering water.

Despite have over 100 feet of densely planted garden between us and noise, the plants don’t seem to be helping much. I have planted many the conifer, just small starts because of budget constraints. I used to not plant any evergreens because I wanted to see the buildings and boat masts and horizon at the port, a block and half away, in the winter when deciduous leaves fell.

The play area noise started as I was planting the tree, so I had not had much peace. I was ready with my speaker, which had to be at 70 db to drown it out. That is LOUD. I used my decibel tester to walk around and make sure the level dropped to 40 next door, then listened to my playlist, which happened to be songs I adore and have not listened to in years. During 2004, single after divorce, I listened to dance songs while using my stairmaster, a machine I loved but had to give up as my right knee gave out. When Allan moved into my small house, I was self conscious about using it and it faded out of my life and so did music, again.

From the mid 90s July 2003-December 2004, I had avoided music because its use by my then-spouse to keep me awake all night made me crave silence more than anything. After I gave up the Stairmaster, I stopped listening for 21 years.

My ear doctor asked had how the play area noise was and I said terrible, and asked if he really had meant I could not wear headphones ever, and he said that is true, with my ear problems, I must never ever wear them because my ears need to be aerated.

I hadn’t even wanted to turn on the speaker today, but needs must. And the first song, One Day, by Bakermat, pleased me, but when my old Stairmaster song Cascades of Colour by Ananda Project followed, I felt in heaven. You can listen to it here, if you like. The ironic thing is that it begins with birdsong, which I can no longer hear in the garden during the many noisy hours.

A schefflera by the fire circle is blooming.

I went across the street to the J Crew Cottage to visit for a bit while they set up this year’s Super Mario theme.

I then dragged some branches forward to start our Corridor of Spooky Plants or Into the Wood halloween theme. Allan helped me place them.

The garden had become quiet as the play moved out to the field west of the building, where it was a pleasant background noise from here while I sifted some compost from the kitchen waste can.

Emptied the galvanised can and only got this much rich compost…

…which I spread in a few places front and back, by which time the noise was louder and the speakers came back on. I dug deeper on a new path during an extended and invigorating rendition of Running Up That Hill.

In the front garden….

…I planted a hebe start from Kristen’s huge specimen, and probably did not give it enough room. As I looked through toward the new sit spot (hebe went into the compost enhanced spot to the left) I could see the white couch not peeking out too glaringly.

Eryngium pandanifolium in the back garden…

I still had some joy in the music I had to listen to, keeping the speaker close to me because if I walk away the wall of yelling sound recurs. My joy faded when Allan worried the speaker was too loud for the neighbours. The last thing I want is to be a bad noisy neighbour. Fortunately, the next day decibel testing told me it was ok, and so did Jodie.

FOOD DRIVE & RALLY FOR OUR LOCAL FOOD BANKS!

SATURDAY, NOV 1st, 1 pm – as long as folks are waving signs
ILWACO STOPLIGHT (1ST & SPRUCE)

All cash donations and non-perishable items will go to help the Food Banks on the LB Peninsula feed our neighbors and friends.
Please swing by to honk, donate, and join us!!!

Sponsored By The Good Trouble Gang

(I am a little unclear at this point about whether the signage at the intersection will be just to direct people to a drop off point by city hall. Details will be added when/if I learn more.)

Lower circle is intersection, upper circle is city hall.