thesecretlifeinmybackyard

A DAY OF GRATITUDE AND MORE

By Diana L. Chapman

Once again, I was complaining to my husband about living in a massive metropolis – an  urban jungle of baking concrete, graffiti plagued buildings, massive freeways peppered with ugly billboard signs and the sheer lack of vision by our city fathers.

I’m not out doors enough, I whined, and am left with the sense here in Los Angeles that if I wander to far around our community, I’ll see that nature has completely abandoned us. 

Or at least, we have abandoned her.

“That’s why  I just sit in our backyard and enjoy it,” my husband responded. “I don’t work. I just enjoy.”

Those words stopped me.

He was right. With a backyard maybe about an eighth of the size of a football field, life struggles and stories go on amid the grass and lemon Marguerites routinely, sometimes, secretly.

We happen to live in Los Angles' most southern tip, a harbor region that juts out into the sea – an industrial area called San Pedro. Wildlife still continues to cling to survival here in these urban wilds.

Roaming raccoons, preening peacocks, chatty squirrels, solo opossums, bird-eating raptors, gabbing crows are the heartbeat of life that goes on daily in this, tiny drop of a square garden plopped in this city with nearly four million residents.

This particular gray-blue morning, I open the back door and call out for my son. Littered across our driveway,  small, soft gray-white clumps, blow about like fallen leaves. My forehead wrinkles with regret.

“It looks like a baby peacock was killed,” I said sadly to Ryan.

He agrees as another tuft drifts past us, carried down peacefully, by a light wind.

Ryan rules out our black-and-white cat, Buddy, “the brute.” He’s known for leaving us with many tailless lizards, he’s captured, mouthed and lost. But the brute has been indoors all night.

We will never know really what happened to our feathered friend. Perhaps a raccoon got it or another cat. It will always remain secret only our garden and the animals will know.

“Sit outside in the yard and just read,” my husband suggested. “It’s a place to relax.”

But it’s more than that, I discovered. Sitting beneath the 50-year-old Montery Pine  reminds me of the smaller wonders in life that most of us have forgotten. We no longer have time for. Our lives are so twisted up with events, work, schedules, errands, texting, e-mailing, facebook, myspace and other virtual chaos technology that those small notes slip by us, mostly going unnoticed.

 And that is what gave me the idea for this new blog – in the hopes that I can bring home and share a place of meditation, solitude and understanding of such small and wondrous things going on in the secret life in my backyard...

Sept. 8, 2010

I wander outside the garden and breath in the fresh morning air signaling the coming of fall.  My bearded-collie-poodle mix, Baxter, scampers around thrusting his curious nose everywhere, in the plants, in the leaves in the peacock feathers.

A blue jay hops on the fence before flying off. As I read the newspaper, a pearl dominant sky moves and shifts overhead. Three tiny birds  swoop in playfully, singing and chirping, before flitting off without giving me the chance to identify them. Perhaps they are finches.

Our summer has come again without much warmth at all. Fall marches steadily in. It’s the type of day many people in Southern California complain about it. Looking up at our pine, I take in its fresh scent; it fills my lungs. Looking skyward, I feel transported suddenly as though I’m in the woods.

It is a day of gratitude and beauty after all.