“The Huchera will line this pathway, “ I said, as I motioned towards my latest floral acquisitions of the season. “I’m not a big fan of lariope. I continued. “It’s okay for arcs and curves, but I wouldn’t want to line a whole bed with it.”
“Humans walk in straight lines,” he said to me.
As I puzzled over what he meant by this, he went on to explain that his daily treks to the back corner of the yard to retrieve his bicycle from the shed, and return it there at the end of his rides, entailed too many pathways, twists, and turns. What he wants is a more direct path through the organic lines of my backyard canvas. (Not that he doesn’t appreciate its transformation over the past two decades since he moved here as a bachelor.)
“I don’t mind if you walk your bike through that bed. The creeping juniper can bear some traffic,” I offered.
We briefly resurrected the idea of constructing a combination bike/refuse shed, or lean-to, against the recessed kitchen wall just beyond the mud porch door; a tricky project, we once discovered, because attaching it to the house wall would require submitting plans and pulling a permit, and by code we might even have to relocate the crawl space vent if we close in too much of the structure.
“There is no such thing as a straight line,” I thought to myself as we headed inside to get dinner going.
It sounds like he may have to continue his zig-zagging route. It sounds beautiful back there!
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