We walked up Hilton Rd, past an old cottage with a new "Cube" parked in the overgrown yard. A bird had usurped their mailbox by the road for her nest inside. Here and there small houses had tomato plants full of ripe fruit growing at their back doors. Alice Hilton, my grandmother, used to keep a kitchen garden outside her kitchen door with tomatoes, peppers, eggplants (we called them cackleberries) and Jerusalem artichokes. Traditionally, the kitchen garden was nourished by basins of used dish water thrown out the kitchen door.
Boofa and I walked down the wooden steps out onto the wide rocks below the old Glendale Mill Spillway and stood for a while breathing in the cool mist of the splashing water under the morning's buttermilk sky. A pair of ducks were preening, cleaning their feathers and taking sips of water on top of the spillway. We took the bridge and met a man with binoculars watching them.
Not a soul was up and around this morning as we passed the old houses with gardens full of blackeyed susans, cosmos, zinnias, butterfly bush, canas, lantanas, chaste trees, coriopsis and rose of Sharon. I saw a hummingbird among the flowers.
Back near the bridge, there is a 10 ft black metal sculpture of a magnnolia. The bronze plaque tells me the artist was Barry Bate, done in 2000 and I paraphrase the legend:
"Listen to the waterfalls cleansing the river, just as the communities along its banks are renewing themselves again and again. Like the magnolia whose secret is renewal.
The sculpture is called "Rebirth".
Again, curving back along Hilton Rd, there is a kind of spa with a Zen garden. No one is there so early on a Sunday morning. There is a kind of Zen garden with a metal bench on an outcropping, overlooking a stone fire pit with stone benches and then the river below.
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