My sister always asked me why I had to walk around my garden with a glass of wine.  Why couldn’t it just be tea or sparkling water.  Tea? Sparkling water?  On a warm summer day after you have spent three hours weeding, potting, replanting.  Mowed your own lawn… wearing that awful surgical mask (I’m allergic to grass).  After all that hot sweaty work.  You want a glass of wine, a very cold, almost icy wine in a very beautiful glass with a long stem.  Very thin glass, delicate.

You shower quickly put on a clean crisp shirt, a little makeup.  And then you pour a nice Reisling, or Sauvignon Blanc and you walk out into that garden, the lawn smelling like watermelon, the roses and lilies, the irises, all driving you crazy with their beauty.  And you walk like a King surveying his kingdom. But instead of beautiful ladies in waiting you have a dazzling array of ethereal beings in pinks, blues, lavenders, yellows, chartreuse, salmons and orange.   The lawn like a sheared lamb waiting for your footsteps.   And you walk and walk and walk around your suburban plot that is more dear to you than Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top.  Because it is yours.  And you pour the fragrant wine down your throat and feel the coolness rushing down like clean water from rivers long ago…

I wonder often, what does clean water taste like?  Really clean pure water from two hundred years ago?

That was some summers ago.  I look out the window and the wind is blowing.  The leaves are gone from most of the trees.  The smoke bush is still hanging on– a deep purplish mahogany.  A lone rabbit munches my grass and clover.  Oh I wish I had some wine– a Bordeaux something very old and good.  Wine smelling of earth and mushrooms and old wet leaves.   I would join that rabbit and wander around in my still Kingdom and enjoy even the cold wetness of it all.  Maybe some tea….but I won’t walk around the garden with it.