the best so far this year

Sweet sweet heaven, the most perfect place on earth - my garden on June 2, 2011, 5.45 p.m., sunny with a fresh breeze and birdsong. This was the first long work-in-the-garden day - Scott who helps me sometimes came in the morning, and we spent two hours transplanting and planting, tidying and edging and staking up and cutting back - yes, cutting back already, because in the last week, everything has gone mad. The roses are exploding. What's especially wonderful is seeing the plants who survived the dark, boring winter inside thriving in their bright new sky-blue room - the bushy hibiscus and geranium, the oleander now eight feet tall, the jasmine with tentacles reaching out everywhere, and the camellia, my gift from Mr. Choy, covered with buds ready to burst. I'm looking down the vista now at green, green, green with splashes of colour from the impatiens we planted today - and watching as parent birds feed their squawking young, who are hanging onto branches and electric wires.

In the middle of last night, there was a madness of sirens, for hours it seemed, screaming in the night, and so I awake with them. My son has moved in for a month, with his baggage literally and figuratively; he is a joy, he is very tall, he needs and takes a lot of room. There is shaving cream and Old Spice deodorant in the bathroom. How lucky I am to have this time with him, perhaps our last time of living together like this, the sweet young man who cooked me supper last night and cleaned the kitchen today, the very long tattooed person lying in my living room, eating take-out Thai food and watching 17 channels before going to work.

And in 3/4 of an hour, my Thursday class comes, we will sit in the garden and think about words. Last night at Ryerson, a class suddenly leapt into the unknown, took huge risks, one after the other, wrote so bravely and beautifully that we all gasped together.

Who could be luckier than a woman who loves her work, loves her children, has lived to see another June 2, and has a garden to sit in and celebrate her gifts?