Park West is petite. It's at least 3000 square feet smaller than the original Park, and the house sits more centrally on the lot. The old house was at the tip of a cone, which left us a giant back yard with different zones to make up a nicely varied Park. When we bought this house, our real estate agent raved about how big the yard was, but we have had much more circumspect reactions to its size. We will refrain from judgements on it until we've had a chance to live through a few seasons here, and had a chance to modify and terraform. I've told you of our plans to move the vegetable garden and put up a better fence. Today we went out and bought our first two trees, an apple and a cherry. Let the terraforming begin!
We lived in New Mexico when we adopted Elsa. She actually was one of my mom's Oklahoma rescues, where she had been wandering the streets, assumably eating every bit of refuse she could get her mouth around. I drove out to pick her up in September of that first year, three months after we had moved into that house in the middle of nowhere. In its giant yard (a half acre in a drought-prone area, yay, us) there was a huge apple tree, half dead with blight. The man trimmed out most of the damaged branches, and the good half of the tree was heavy with thousands of apples just starting to ripen as the weather cooled. We had picked several buckets of apples by the time I drove out to Oklahoma to adopt Elsa, but there were countless of them that had hit the ground and stayed. I'm not sure in that first year, any of us realized the effect of putting a starving dog in a field of sweet treats. The second fall, when Elsa was not quite two years old, I finally saw what she was up to. She had driven us crazy with how quickly she would wolf down her food, never chewing, never pausing. But there that dog was in the yard, holding apples still against the ground with her front paws, delicately biting, chewing, turning the apples to nibble on the other side. She was actually savoring a food item. In the years since, I think I've thrown away fewer than five apple cores into the trash or compost. She has eaten all the others, except for the few that I bit into pieces to split between the dogs.
We swore when we moved here that we would buy a house with a well-established apple tree already growing. That didn't happen. We're doing the best we can under the circumstances. I wanted a tree that could keep Elsa happy for the rest of her life, and I didn't want to have to wait until a young tree matured, because Elsa isn't a puppy anymore. I have faith that the tree we bought today will be big enough to provide a few apples a year from now, but it's not going to be quite the bounty we had the year Elsa was a baby.
The new Park may be small, but there will be plenty of room to create zones and to grow fruits and vegetables and flowers, if we work on a smaller, tighter scale. If people can make fairy gardens, and they look elaborate and complex and wonderful, imagine what we can do with seven thousand square feet? A garden for fairies, gnomes, pixies, and me. And maybe that weeping spruce that looks like a woolly mammoth that I saw at the tree nursery today. Can I have that?
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