Good Medicine

I’m writing this from our back patio right now, while I’m considering going inside to get a sweater or a blanket. And it’s August. In Las Vegas. And it’s all because of the storm that blew in this weekend.

I first heard it during the night, when the rain on our patio roof woke me up. It was perfect – just loud enough to let me know it was there, but not so bad to keep me awake. I fell back to sleep, cozy in bed.

Today I woke to the smell of the rain and cooler morning temps, although the sky above our house was bright and sunny again. That’s how Vegas is – storms often pass through but only show themselves to sections of the city instead of the valley as a whole.

Today I was feeling a little down; my week had been stressful, and my husband was working on what is usually our day off together. So when I heard a few drops outside again I immediately turned off the TV (I was about to sink into an afternoon of mind-numbing Hallmark Channel movies), and went outside with George. The wind was picking up a little, and one whole section of the sky was dark grey while the other part was blue with white fluffy clouds. The few raindrops on the roof sounded like popcorn.

George jumped onto the back of the outdoor sofa where I sat, and I leaned my head against him. My heart wasn’t feeling great. Recent stress was causing the symptoms of my MVP (an annoying heart condition) to flare up a little, and my heart felt tight. In fact, it felt worse than normal. I sat and tried to make my stress go away by taking deep breaths like in meditation. Focus on the breath, ten counts in and twenty counts back out. It didn’t seem to loosen the anxiety in my chest but I did it a few more times anyway.

Then I realized I shouldn’t be sitting under the patio; I should be out in the rain – should get out in nature and let it fall down on me. So I walked around the yard a little bit, raised my face to the sky in time to get a raindrop right in my eye, and I wondered why raindrops aren’t dangerous, since they fall from so far. I liked feeling the rain touch me.

Soon the rain came down more quickly, the drops big and fat. I headed for the sofa again and pulled George onto my lap to get warm during the sudden chilly wind. He and I sat and watched the downpour – it was indeed a downpour – the type of rain that brings people to windows to look outside, the kind that sounded like tympani were being played on our patio roof.

After about ten minutes or so of watching the rain fall in a diagonal toward where we sat, it gradually calmed down again, and slowly the sounds of our neighborhood resumed. A few birds flew by, chirping. A car drove by on a nearby street, its tires sounding wet on the pavement. The rain had stopped everything, had forced all to stop, to sit and observe.

And I realized my heart wasn’t tight anymore. The rain had taken away the tension. See, now, why I love the rain?

Leaves of Grass

Grass is a luxury – have you ever thought of it that way? An outdoor living carpet, it brightens up our yards, gives us a place to run barefoot, and in some areas of the country it grows naturally – all you have to do is keep it trimmed.

But we live in the desert, where grass is something to be cherished. Water restrictions have reduced the number of grassy front yards here, but many people still have a small rectangle of it in their backyards, watered by the requisite sprinklers that pop up four times a day and shower it luxuriously.

When you move into a new house in Las Vegas, the front yard is landscaped by the manufacturer, but the back yard is up to you. This means that while you unpack boxes and move around the new furniture, your view out back is of dirt. And I mean it – all you have is concrete block walls enclosing a flat dirt-and-rock yard.

We know that someday we’ll put in a pool, so we’ve been doing our backyard slowly on our own. (Why put money into it when it’ll just get ripped out someday?) We started on the left side of the yard and installed a high trellis to block the neighbor’s house, then we added a gazebo and outdoor furniture, then a stone path and plants. If you hold up your hand and hide the half of the yard that is bare dirt, it looks great.

The one thing we were missing was grass. We had avoided it because we didn’t know how to install those pop-up sprinklers, but finally I found a solution. I went to the nursery and bought five pieces of sod, which we laid in a long strip next to the path and hooked up to our regular watering system, hoping it would stay alive.

Our reason for adding grass to the yard, albeit a small amount? George. I knew he wanted grass – he often walks around the yard sniffing the plants as if he’s looking for it. And sure enough, I was right. As soon as it was laid out, he ran over to it, walked through it, ate some, then peed on it. He was in heaven. And two weeks later, the grass is still alive (surprisingly) and he runs straight to it every morning, first thing. After relishing his patch of grass, he stands at the end of the path – the part we haven’t finished – and stares at the dirt-half of the yard as if saying, “Would you get off your lazy asses and finish this thing?” (We decided that if George could talk, he would cuss now and then.)

I can’t help but feel that that little strip of grass has made our house seem more like home, more inviting, more…normal. Grass grows where families are, where people enjoy their yards and gather together. To me, nothing seems more like summer than the sound of a lawn mower or the whir of a fan in an open window. You don’t hear those often in the desert. And now, my husband can stand out back with the garden hose and water his very own patch of grass, a testosterone-filled ritual that every man seems to enjoy, like barbequing.

In celebration of our new grass, and in honor of the grass lying in your yard that you usually take for granted, let’s join Whitman, and loafe and invite our souls, lean and loafe at our ease, and observe a spear of summer grass. George and I will join you.

Cousin Larry

This week there has been a lot of activity at the hummingbird feeder outside our kitchen window. One bird in particular likes to sit in the vines growing up our patio cover, and one day he sat there for probably ten minutes, grooming himself.

Have you ever seen a hummingbird do this? He ruffled up his feathers as if he was airing them out, and he kept shifting his weight back and forth, using his beak to clean under his wings. I could even see his long tongue retracting every time he took a break and turned to the other side.

This hummingbird must have had an itchy neck, because suddenly he raised his tiny hind leg and scratched his neck like a dog. He kept scratching, and his feathers ruffled up in scraggly peaks until he turned to the other side to satisfy another itch. I don’t know that it truly was an itch, but I couldn’t help comparing him to George, whose furious neck scratching verges on ecstasy.

We always had a bird feeder in our rural Indiana backyard when I was a kid, and there are many photos of bright cardinals or blue jays at our wooden feeder in the snow, or at our back door where Mom sometimes spread birdseed so the birds would come closer. Now, after a year of filling the feeder at our house in Vegas, we finally have regular hummingbirds. It took them that long to claim our yard as their territory. Every winter I put up a finch feeder (a regular feeder would attract pigeons) and enjoy the feeding frenzy outside our door. I take it down in the Summer, however, so I can get rid of all the bird poop on our patio! (Grandma calls bird poop “bird dirty.”)

When I had my first apartment in Vegas, there was a sparrow who regularly came to my balcony railing to sit and torment my cats. He would face my sliding glass door and sing loudly as if calling to my cats. When they finally showed interest, he would fly away to a nearby tree and then start the game again about an hour later.

Having birds come to my house makes it feel like home, bringing nature to a nature-starved girl. And they connect me to the greater world when they fly far above us, stopping at one house and then another, and then returning again to visit me the next day. They are mysterious, delicate, lofty, yet also ever so simple. They come to my yard and become my little friends.

I think I will name the itchy bird Cousin Larry, in honor of local Hoosier celebrity, legendary Boston Celtic, Larry Bird. Everyone in Southern Indiana claims to be related to him. But he really is our cousin. I swear. Just ask my Grandma.