Six on Saturday

Earlier this week I reread Elizabeth von Armin’s garden vignettes from The Solitary Summer, which I tend to think of as her “lost summer.” That solitary summer at home was meant as a personal holiday of quiet in relative solitude, no urgent responsibilities intruding, with only the cook and one house servant, an out-of-sight head gardener — and, of course, her three little girls named for their birth months: April, May, and June. Didn’t happen. Instead, guests from town chose that summer to drive out for a long weekend in the country. Then military manoeuvres* interrupted September’s tranquility. She fled to the “fartherest recesses of the garden” to hide.

These days of early April, I escape my chilly house to a sunny corner of my courtyard and sit at a glass-top table, cracked from winter’s heavy frozen snow for weeks on end. We shall have to replace the glass before summer. In the meantime, it’s sturdy enough to withstand a book and a mug of tea, a writing journal where I’m copying out a few favorite passages to share with you.

(1) “. . . a feeling of hardly being able to bear their beauty . . . ” (213).

(2) “. . . punished every day by that “two-o’clock-in-the-afternoon feeling to which I so much object, and yet cannot avoid” (216). To her, it’s having to leave the garden in order to see about lunch like a respectable wife and mother; to me, it’s having to abandon a lovely sunny day to succumb to a nap when unbearable drowsiness overcomes me.

(3) I am growing into a placid life more suitable to my advancing years so that “the days are sometimes for more like a dream than anything real, the quiet days of reading, and thinking, and watching the changing lights, and the growth and fading of flowers, the fresh quiet days . . . but think of the edification!” (228).

(4) “. . . the Being they call lieber Gott pervades the garden, and is identical with, among other things, the sunshine and the air on a fine day” (243). I’ve thought that, too, from my childhood.

(5) “. . . if Eve had had a spade in Paradise and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that sad business of the apple,” von Armin writes in another essay journal, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, under her own name Marie Annette Beauchamp (11).

(6) I am still reading this little book, but here’s one more SOS, a word of wisdom. “Humility, and the most patient perseverance, seem almost as necessary in gardening as rain and sunshine, and every failure must be used as a stepping-stone to something better” (28).

• English spelling