We Got Company: Gardening Is Never Just a Solitary Business

I am not alone in the garden. A whole community of winged and footed, creeping and crawling folk join me on my daily rounds of the beds. The bees are back, sluggishly prowling the beds looking for lunch. I laugh as I spot one especially rotund fellow weighing down the purple flower head of a silver dollar plant. Signs of deer tracks are becoming fewer and farther between in recent weeks. New growth slowly has begun to wipe out the evidence of their epic pig-outs on my tulips and euonymous. What can I say, I love frogs. And I have to admire the tenacity of that anonymous squirrel that keeps climbing up on the window box outside our door to unearth a nut the poor guy already retrieved weeks ago. On a sadder not, a circle of wispy feathers next to one of the beds told  a tale of stealth and violence, though the creature responsible for that dark-of-night aggression left no clue to its identity. Bird songs fill the air as I linger behind for a while pulling weeds. Most of the time our lives pass each other like proverbial ships in the night. Still, I am tickled—reassured even—to know that I am not alone out there. . .that others, too, call the garden "home."