“July is the year at high noon, a young matron with hazel eyes, sun-bleached golden hair and a cloud-filmy red, white and blue scarf with spangles. July is festival and celebration and long remembered holiday as well as full moon and fireflies and smell of sweet clover at the roadside.

July is gray-green of oat fields turning to gold. July is meadows frosted with Queen Anne’s lace and daisies, and night hawks in the evening sky, and fledgling robins, and half-grown rabbits eating the lettuce in the garden. July is lightning and thunderstorms that jolt the hills, rain like silver threads hung from the high, dark clouds. It is field corn reaching for the sun and glistening with the morning dew and thrusting its gold-hung spire of tassel up for the dry winds to kiss and bless and make fertile the sprouting young ears beneath.

July is weeds grown lush, horseweed in the waste place, and milkweed and nettle and forbidding thistle; and pigweed and purslane and rough-leaved German weed in the garden. It is string beans prolific, and bean beetles; it is squash flowers, venerable symbol of fertility, and squash beetles; it is tomatoes coming to fruit and horned tomato worms which turn into sphinx moths.

July is get-up-and-go, vacation time, the shore, the lake, the country, anywhere but home. July is hot afternoons and sultry nights, and mornings when it’s a joy to be alive. It’s fresh cherry pie. It’s first sweet corn. It’s baby beets, well buttered, please. July is a picnic and a red canoe and a sunburned neck and a softball game and ice tinkling in a tall glass. July is a blind date with Summer.” –Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons

Pics taken at Ocean Grove in early April. I’m sure the beaches and boardwalk are packed with people this weekend. Most locals don’t brave the beaches until after Labor Day.

My friend Michelle sent this along to me tonight – can you imagine watering all these pots? And how to get the hose to reach them all? At least they’re geraniums – which don’t need water every day! I wouldn’t mind the watering so much if I got to spend time in this beautiful courtyard.

I don’t know which one of us named it the “Door of the Moon”. It’s possible that we were influenced by stories of pirates and hidden treasures, or something similar read in some book. In any case, none of us fully understood the name, but it contained all of a secret world, separate and absolutely ours.

The Door of the Moon was a place, a cliff, a sort of stone platform that stood out from the mountain named “El Sestil” that was behind the house. That platform was capable of holding three or four children, canteens of wine, weapons, some frisky and affectionate dog, part of an old army tent, and a variety of more or less precious and indispensable objects.

Although the Door of the Moon was a magnificent observation point, it was also the perfect hiding place during our childhood because it was hidden between the hawthorn and bramble bushes. It was there that we went to escape punishment or when we simply wanted to be alone. Later I found out that our hiding place was also the secret legacy of my mother and her brothers, and later it was used again by my little sister and her friends. But none of us ever told the secret. Each batch of children discovered it on their own and each group gave it a different name.

As I said, many times we went alone, one by one, under different circumstances and in different states of mind. I remember now with great nostalgia the solitude of sitting there on the cliff looking out between the leaves and the hawthorns on the mountain. There below in the house, the adults were like multi-colored ants. Looking at them caused a strange thrill of tender, condescending superiority. The comings and goings of the servants, the messenger boy… that was complete and splendid solitude. Sometimes from underneath the buds of the hawthorn bushes, I would turn my face up to the sky to see it broken through the branches. You could hear the ravens that nested close by in the ramparts on the cliff, among the bats and the black butterflies. It was dim and luminous at the same time. I think that all the children of the world need a Door of the Moon.

When I came back to see it everything was flooded. I looked with my hand over my eyes to the other side of the marsh, for that marvelous place. The water hadn’t touched it. From the other side of the bank I made out the stone platform, the wind among the leaves, the cries of the crows and the ravens. I recognized it the way you recognize a friend, a bridge, or a tree. The Door of the Moon appeared desolate without children’s voices, or whispers, or the solitude of a child beginning to think and to grow.

Nonetheless, we still have the Door of the Moon. We recover it, I know very well, in the hour of solitude we all look for during the course of the day. That hour of solitude we all ask for and need in the course of months and years. At the Door of the Moon, children grew slowly, inside themselves. In our hour of solitude, the Door of the Moon takes us back to the child who still wanders around inside of us, searching in vain for doors and windows to escape through.

The above essay is another small piece from “El rio” by Ana Maria Matute that I translated from the original Spanish as part of an undergraduate project many moons ago. I’m including it here, and cross-posting at whorled leaves because it relates to the first essay in our July book, “The Geography of Childhood” in which Gary Paul Nabhan discusses a child’s sense of wildness and relates the story of his own children’s secret hideout and the importance such intimate, wild places have in the lives of children.

While sitting here waiting to see if Blogger would take my pics tonight I was deciding what to do if it wouldn’t. The wait was forever and I actually started composing bad cinquain poetry in my head while the minutes ticked by. Be glad the pics loaded! I’ll have to file away my awkward ode to Blogger for the next time it goes wonky on me. I tried adding these pics to last night’s post earlier this evening and they still wouldn’t take. Yet I can add them here. Very mysterious.

Plenty of folks blog without pictures and those that do a good job of it are able to write well. I hope somehow that my mediocre pics and mediocre writing somehow make up for each other or cancel each other out or whatever.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand – Nasturtiums. Both the leaves and flowers are edible; at one time even the flower buds were pickled like capers. I’ve read that they are sometimes planted beneath fruit trees or tomato or squash vines to trap insects that would like to munch on the more valuable property above them. I plant mine in pots on the front steps with some other herbs like dill and pineapple sage. They have a peppery taste that I like in salads mixed with sweeter greens and the flowers make a pretty garnish.

They are easy to grow from seed and like sun and moisture, but not a rich planting medium as too much fertilizer will keep them from blooming well. Aphids seem to love them and the older leaves develop a strange mottled appearance, so I pick the young leaves for eating. Snails and slugs like them, too. Books say that they’re also favored by hummingbirds as each flowers holds a small well of sweet nectar inside it. Last night I added some fresh-picked flowers and leaves to the salads for the bunnies – these and dandelion flowers are a favorite treat.