After three suicide attempts & a stint in the asylum, the poet Cowper retires to his Garden & the company of his rabbit

So here it is, August nearly gone, and this is almost the first time this year I have had a moment to sit quietly in the garden and write.  What has gone wrong in my life?  At my age, life should be slowing down . . .

The poet Cowper, for instance, managed it nicely.  Recovering from three suicide attempts and a harrowing stint in the asylum, he retired undisturbed to his garden where he labored endlessly on  meditative poems in blank verse, interspersed with idyllic days of doing nothing but puttering among the shrubbery in the company of his rabbit.

If Cowper could so neatly arrange his life, why can’t I?

the poet Cowper, puttering among the shrubbery in the company of his rabbit

But if I have lacked time for reading & reflection in my garden, I have at least had the solace of working in it on my infrequent days off and, by such tending, maintaining it as a proper haven for that hypothetical interlude of blessed inaction which never seems to come.  And if it is true that I have scarcely employed it for this purpose myself,  our particular genius loci–  the good Mr. Chumbles–  is always there with his sure instinct for locating the perfect meditative niche.

Along with the usual quotidian garden chores, I began painting the house this summer. Not that I got very far . . .

I began with the front porch which looks out over Oak Grove Cemetery, affords a glimpse of the Monongahela, and of the wooded hills rising on its opposite bank. The porch is almost a garden in itself, clad in English ivy and painted in Mediterranean hues. At Marian’s insistence, I even gave the old wicker furniture a new coat of color.

 

 

Of course, once the front porch had been resurrected, Mr Chumbles was quick to insist that similar efforts be applied to the back porch, which is his preferred haunt. I never did get around to painting it, but did clear away several summers’ accumulation of rubbish and junk and imposed a modicum of order on the place. Chumbles settled right in and has added one more title to his growing list of grand appelations: namely the ‘Back Porch Pasha’.

back porch pasha

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Yet in Eden, all is not well . . .

From yon far country, an air that kills . . . . to paraphrase Housman.  Although in this instance the air that kills is not from a far country at all, but rather from a recently clear-cut hillside just a half-mile upriver–  while the source of the lethal air– which promises to cast a debilitating pall over our garden and home–  is a pair of sinister Marcellus gas wells, within sight of our neighborhood.  The figure of Death sitting in a garden chair.  Et in Arcadia ego.

For the whole of the past summer and spring these wells, and thousands of other gas wells across much of rural West Virginia and Pennsylvania, have kept me preoccupied.   I have joined with others in the community to fight their appearance directly across the Monongahela river from the intake pipe from which all of Morgantown gets its drinking water.  Our efforts to stop this well, and to resist Marcellus drilling generally throughout the Monongahela watershed, are chronicled in a new blog which I established this past spring, entitled Gas wells on the Monongahela: hydrofracking in the Monongahela watershed, a grassroots view. 

These wells, situated on the river, will be spewing unregulated clouds of highly-toxic pollutants directly upwind from our neighborhood, and as the air currents are contained and funneled by the river bluffs, the entire airborne discharge will wash right over us.  Two wells are drilled already, with more slated for the near future.

But that dire development still lies several weeks into the future, when the hydrofracking is slated to commence.

 For now the Red Queen and her faery consort still watch over the pool in the ivy.  The catbirds and mockingbirds still harrass Mr Chumbles at every opportunity– an annoyance he scarcely deigns to notice– and our backyard Arcadia remains a haven of arborous tranquility fit for the Goddess Flora.  How long it will remain so is a matter for the Fates and the Marcellus gas industry.