Years ago, I scavanged bricks from the neighborhood to border a walking path circling our black gum tree. Planning for the time I would plant the flowers, I started uprooting bloodroot and wood poppies from the courtyard of a building to be demolished and transplanting them into our yard.

In the decade since, the poppy and fellow wildflowers have taken over the space mapped on graph paper by our sometime gardener, reaching three feet, and the yard is strewn with dead branches. Our forty-foot white oak fell victim to the utility line clearance crew. Vines are choking the chimney. The inkberry hollies framing our entrance have nearly reached each other, hindering comings and goings.

Ambitious guests have intruded. Spiders have made themselves at home on the ceilings. Ants, June bugs, and crickets have become our familiars, the latter observing my yoga practice. A racoon broke the birdfeeder. A squirrel gnawed its way through the metal screen of the porch looking for birdseed.

The garage has become a storehouse and half-way house for cats and critters looking for shelter in the night. The nails on the back stoop have become undone. Even the visiting cat looking for a meal knows better than to climb the steps.

Still, I love how the pink dogwood, red Japanese maple, honey locust, and swamp oak wrap around the front of the house, keeping our mornings cool, and how out back we are canopied by the magnolia, wild cherry, and walnut tree, the nuts whose thump I love to hear as they drop to the roof of the porch.

I love the dawn chorus of birds that flit through these trees and bathe in the makeshift birdbath. And I miss the groundhog that ate the sunflowers our son planted and the one with three chucklings we looked for every day.