The Understory

Between here and there, what lies between.

Let’s talk about endorphins. No, wait, wait, before we do that, just this one thing: Raise your hand if you have a 94 (okay 93 ½) – year-old father, who upon reading your Substack posts, decides to give you (good) advice about sleeping better, handling stress, and breaking old habits. You’re not raising your hand? I didn’t think so.

It’s never lost on me how lucky I am to have my father still in my life, acting pretty much like he always has, even when – or especially when – he wishes his daughter would do things differently. For instance, when I heard his voice at the other end of the telephone line the other day, I could tell something was wrong. It just took me a few seconds to realize that what I was hearing was concern – about me. (Well, it had been far too long since I’d called him.) For a minute I felt like I was 10 or 12 years old again, and that I’d done something, shall we say, less than smart. Something that in the long run was not going to work out well for me.

In those instances, Dad would approach the conversation with an even tone – not angry – and you could tell he’d given the subject considerable forethought. (It was always preferable to have an audience with Dad, rather than Mom, who was prone to anxiety-driven outbursts of dismay and disapproval when things went awry.) Then he would carefully steer you towards understanding why you might want to do things differently next time, without making you feel defensive.

That night, thinking about my conversation with Dad, I went to bed at 11 p.m. and got up early the next morning. I took his advice. (Most nights I don’t make midnight and many are 1 a.m.) I’m trying to get off the computer earlier. Unless there is an immediate deadline (which does happen one or two times a week), I’m trying to set a time where I just stand up and walk away from my desk. If I do that at 10, I can still get some reading in.

And waking up earlier gains me an hour or so of pre-desk garden time.

An hour gardening in the morning, an hour walking in the late afternoon, an hour working in the hoop house in the evening — I’m getting greedy about my outdoor time. And that’s all about those endorphins I mentioned.

Friday, I experienced a 180-degree change in my mood in the space of a few hours. I’m not kidding. (And no, I’m not manic). I was so grumpy in the morning as I bounced from one email to the next, discovering with each one some new task that needed follow-up. Then I tried to settle into my to-do lists, but I couldn’t figure out what to do first. Bah Humbug! Finally the afternoon blessedly crossed the halfway mark and I could permit myself to open the front door and dive into the big fat warm fluffy sunshine. When it has been cold for seven months straight, the relief of a warm day is like pulling a thorn out of your foot. (It’s still 10 degrees colder here than on the mainland, but it’s all relative.)

First, I walked from our house down to the water with my husband. To get all the way to Tisbury Great Pond – through the woods, along the hay fields, past the cow and sheep pastures – takes 35 minutes. So it’s a 70-minute walk that I normally can’t do on a weekday. But Friday, yes. I marveled at how tall the grass had grown in the hay fields and how robustly the hedges had filled out with blooming honeysuckle since I’d been by last.

I am forever dawdling on our walks, using my plant app (Picture This) to identify yet another wild plant. To the uninterested eye, the woods and fields look simply like random vegetation in varying hues of brown and green. But to me they are an increasingly captivating cache of botanical trivia. I’ve become obsessed with learning more about this environment I’ve been walking through for more than three years.

This week, my app has logged 49 species: Swamp dewberry, early goldenrod, Yorkshire fog, wild indigo, wrinkleleaf goldenrod, Pennsylvania sedge, rockspray cotoneaster, American holly, mugwort, sweet vernal grass, bird’s foot trefoil, rough hawkbit, ribwort plantain, linden arrowwood (viburnum – it’s all over the place!), bear oak, bracken fern, Eastern white pine, sweetfern, dwarf cinquefoil, bulbous buttercup, wild sarsaparilla, autumn olive (NOT native – more on that another time), common hairmoss, northern bayberry, twisted moss, oxeye daisy, black huckleberry, eastern red cedar, pitch pine, downy serviceberry (shadbush), black oak, Japanese honeysuckle, Morrow’s honeysuckle, hillside blueberry, red clover, black chokeberry, northern pin oak, Parmeliaceae (lichen), pincushion moss, sheep laurel, Scotch pine, black cherry, azure bluet, common speedwell, Virginia pepperweed, wood anemone, lowbush blueberry, multiflora rose, lady’s slipper.

But on our walk to the water, I tried to keep my head out of the understory and enjoy the blue sky and the hypnotic effect of the breeze pushing the waves of grasses along.

It seemed important to get to the water on a day like this, and I knew why once we reached it. Looking out at the pond and the barrier beach with the ocean beyond, I saw that the horizon had the particular haze of a hot day – that scrim of light that mixes just enough yellow into the blue of sea and sky to make the color of summer. Both of us turned to each other and said, “Winter is over. Summer has begun. Spring was just a wish.” That is how it goes here.

After the walk back, I had just enough time to do a few garden projects before dinner. I transplanted my sweet pea seedlings and some of my lettuce seedlings into the fenced garden.

I went back and forth to the hoop house with my new garden cart, taking the last of my seedlings – 200 zinnias! – out from under the lights inside, where they joined the 100 dahlias I’ve been potting up – and 100 tomato seedlings I’ve got to move into 4-inch pots. (I’m about a month behind where I was last year.)

These last bits – digging in the garden, traipsing around, fiddling in the hoop house – rounded up my endorphin-inducing spree to the point where I was simply a different person by dinnertime, full of energy, exhilarated, satisfied, happy.

I picked a few of the apricot At Last roses to make a little bouquet for the dinner table. I reminded myself that anything I can do to spend more time outside now – to absorb the sunshine, exercise my body, get the blood flowing, and the synapses connecting – is going to boost my mental and physical health.

I’ll have to tell Dad, (well, he is reading this, so, hi Dad!), because after all, he’s the one who gave me the gift of gardening, the love of plants, the desire to be engaged in something meaningful. And a whole lot more.

🌱