Familiarity

5/5/20 Maple Leaf neighborhood

One thing I am grateful for about this pandemic is that it has given me a new appreciation for my immediate neighborhood. Now that walking in the ‘hood has become a daily routine, I’ve picked out my “favorite” houses, gardens and landscaping. Whenever I walk by, I admire certain architectural details or a plant that has newly blossomed. This time of year, of course, the garden hues are like a colored pencil set, and everything still looks fresh.

Coming home from one of these walks, we approached our own house from the west as we often do, and I tried to look at the front landscaping with a passerby’s eyes: Huh. Not one I would pick as a “favorite,” but not chopped liver, either. A nice variety of textures and colors in the landscaping. The blue flowers (whatever they are) are especially luminous this time of year, especially in contrast with the dark red Japanese maple. I can’t remember the name of the yellow flowers, either, but they round out a nice primary palette (you can tell I’m a sketcher and not a gardener!).

As the most familiar house in Maple Leaf, it doesn’t exactly breed contempt. But it’s hard to view objectively something that I’ve seen so many times that I’m nearly blind to it. A couple of years ago I sketched the whole house, and that was even harder. This time I stuck with only the landscaping.