nawl

On saturday morning a pair of giggling girls showed up in our backyard with champagne, strawberries, and whipped cream. We were peacefully eating breakfast in the sun in our porch-dining room. They were here to use our hot tub.

Over the next several hours the hot tub was continuously occupied by a rotating phalanx of mathematicians and physicists.

We found a couple of rakes and started raking up the leaves still in the yard since whenever they fell. It was slow going. Ivy has completely overtaken the front and a good portion of the back, but beautiful little flowers are peeking through.

We uncovered stepping stones, paved walkways, overgrown planting beds with little buds shooting out, little stone statues tucked away in corners, hidden in the bamboo forest.

Already the garden had surprised us a few weeks ago by suddenly throwing up clusters of daffodils and lovely purple flowers out of the nondescript sea of ivy in the front yard.

"It's like the freaking secret garden in here," said Clay.

We found a rotting clothes line tied around a planter, clothespins still attached, and strung it back up across the yard. We discovered the bottom of our murky pond, coated in leaves, is actually sand.

There's a fake wishing well smack dab in the middle of the backyard, complete with decorative bucket. Vivek and Sam vigorously deny the existence of any such wishing well, on the grounds that it clearly can't exist.

Here's a picture.

The rectangle in the back right corner demarcated with bamboo poles remains a mystery.

On Sunday we ripped out the weeds from a planting bed in the back, turned the soil, and planted some vegetable seeds. I know nothing about gardening. We'll see if anything grows. The weeds seemed pretty happy.

This is my first step into middle age.

The more time I spend here, the more I like it. It's like your grandma's house, except taken over by college students who think that decorating choices like a basket chair room and an indoor hammock are a good idea.

After a prolonged winter, everything is exploding in flowers, sunlight, birdsong. The magnolias were frozen in half-bloom for three weeks as the weather dipped back into winter, then suddenly exploded and fell in a day.

You can practically see the leaves coming out on the trees, little buds in the ground unfurling into leaves as you watch.