"Sun smudge on
the smoky water."
Archibald MacLeish, Autumn
My small town
orbits like a satellite a typical American city in SoCal. El Cajon is a former
frontier town, one that ruthlessly vanquished the “primitive” natives barely
three generations ago. As the culture of our big city oozes out to us, we become
another cookie cutter suburb. This is the place where Tom Petty said there’s a freeway
running through our yard. Our
public landscapes are designed mostly by gringos now.
Everywhere, the
crepe myrtle blossom effortlessly. I remember only the almost salmon red ones
from my east coast childhood. Here and now, they seem mostly the softer and
cleaner pink, delicate lace-white, and my favorite lavender ice.
Here and now,
crepe myrtles come in two basic styles. First, are the rustic unpruned tall
bushes with multiple graceful trunks tall open shrubs you see in peoples’
yards.
The second
landscape style could be called Early Twenty-first Century Urban Street Island
Low Bid. This version features slightly embarrassed and pretentious plantings
grown into standards – single-trunked bushes striving to be tiny trees. They
are all more-or-less pruned into bloated baloons and lowish lollipops that would offer scant shade to a goat.
These small
standards are often alternated with bright pastel varieties of oleander - that
go-to barrier strip bush that seemingly evolved to stop a crashing car going 65. Another companion planting are Natal Plum bushes, with
stars of fragrant flowers winking whitely amid the shiny dark foliage. These
rigorously clipped hedges surround strip malls, seeming to try with their thorny limbs
to contain the despair leaking out from the vacant storefronts.
Typically,
within blocks of freeway exits, my neighborhood is still mostly suburban
roadside and choked drainage ditches beneath dry and crumbling banks and
hillsides covered with flammable dead undergrowth. Here often grow ubiquitous
naked lady flowers who have, unfortunately, lost their virginal pink glow. They are
growing old, and seriously, who wants to see their anorexic beauty that has withered
them into naked old ladies.
Despite these
borderline relentless flowers, every small garden bush, summer annual, and most
of the background landscape seems to me to be accepting that it isn’t growing
gracefully like grandma did. This isn’t where my grandmas lived and died.
The world has
changed around me. In the half-life of my time here in Zone 9, a mere 30 years,
it has become hotter and drier.
Even the allegedly low-water plants like Sonoran Desert natives and
similar Mediterranean Climate plants (natives of west-facing coastal climates
in earth's plump midsection, like South Africa, South America and Western
Australia) - all are fatigued having spent their summer energy. But all are still here. All of us seem to be entering late middle age and seem, in this dry autumn season before our rains begin, to be growing old disgracefully.
3 comments:
The world you describe is an odd one; almost nightmarish with its smogs and (sometimes) fires, yet with this beauty laced into the urban awfulness.
Esther
The Crape Myrtle is my city's street tree of choice. My favorite thing about them is the way they festoon the sidewalks, streets, gutters and cars with pink and purple petals after a storm, like a parade just went by. As for growing old, disgracefully or otherwise, I prefer it to not having the opportunity.
Ah, a return to philosophical musings using nature metaphors. Did not realize how much I missed it. Hope it implies some regained equilibrium after a year of challenges.
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