2003-06-21 - 11:03 p.m.
Big Sigh..... I have been away from writing for so long, I hardly know how to begin. I have been in an action rather than a contemplation phase for a few weeks. Getting a lot done, but....(Someone who was critical of me once said "You are such a Phase Person." And I can't deny it.) And whatever phase I am in, I am always missing things about the others. My middle name should have been Conflict. Sometimes I lose the feeling that my daily life has any cumulative value, so much of it is activities to be processed over and over. Sometimes I get kind of obsessed with that-- how life is really just doing things over and over. And some of us fight to create something that will last, or at least create a product we can hold up and say "Here. This is what I did with my time." But even those things seem to fade, break, crumble, dissolve.
So today I spent my whole day doing probably the most ephereral of all work: gardening. I mean, how long does a good weeding job last? I am not a master gardener. I have killed far more plants than I've ever successfully raised, and every summer I find myself in the jaws of the deadly gardening paradox. I love plants and want a nice garden, but I resent the time and money it takes and the emotional energy it extracts from me. Especially when, despite our best efforts, nothing seems to thrive here.
But...and this is a Big but....this year things seem to be turning around for us. Maybe it is the chemicals (I discovered weed killer and insecticide and fertilizer!). Or maybe it is that we have learned something about gardening through all that trial and error (mostly error) and we finally have some realistic expectations. Or maybe the Gods of Gardening just decided to quit having fun at our expense and let us have a little success before we gave up and moved to a condo. Whatever the reason, things are growing. Good things, things we planted, and not just weeds. The grass still is mostly crab, but I'm feeling more confident that we will figure that out eventually.
So gardening is a lot more fun when it works. And today, I really got into the gardening flow. The day was warm but not too sunny, and thanks to the miracles of modern chemistry, I was not distracted by being eaten alive by any sort of bugs. I was out in the yard for seven hours, cultivating our tiny plot of land, and only when my back began to hurt did I stop and realize that I had been so focused for so long.
I came sort of late to the gardening thing. For so many years, I resisted, or lived in places where it wasn't feasible. Secretly, I thought puttering around in the yard was for people with no life. I remember a lady who lived next door to the house where I had a little apartment when I was in college. She must have been in her eighties, and she walked stooped over and painfully slow, but every day I would see her outside in her garden. I always wondered why she would spend so much of her energy on that garden when she could barely even get around. But the older I get, the closer I come to knowing. There is something satisfying about taking part in the whole growing process, something life affirming.
Today I was thinking about my grandmother because I have planted some of the flowers she used to grow. The snapdragons are blooming in multi-colored profusion and pouring over the little fence we have in front of them. When I was a child, Grandma leaned over a similar fence and showed me how the snapdragons have a little "mouth" that opens up. When I tend them, I always gently open up one of the blossoms and let it "bite" my finger the way she did. And another old-fashioned flower, the hollyhock, reminds me of visits to my grandparents' house in the country. There were so many hollyhocks growing on the hill of the cellar that nobody minded when we (the girl cousins) picked them and made hollyhock dolls. The flower became the skirt and a green bud was attached (with a toothpick) for the head. A broad, flat tree stump became the ballroom for all the dolls that danced and wilted faster than Cinderella.
I have two sturdy strawberry jars full of "hen and chicks" that came from my aunt, via my mother.... another plant grandma used to grow. I always think of it as a family plant, because of the name, and the way the little plants grow from the bigger ones, but stay attached, like children. I could never grow them before, and now for some reason I have found the right combination of pot and soil and sun, and they are fat and healthy.
When I visited Grandma, in her later years, she would take me on a tour of the flower beds and show me what was planted, what was growing. She walked slowly and a little stooped, but the beds were always immaculate and the flowers would be blooming their hearts out. I wish I had made the connection then, understood the joy she took in making things grow, but I was still young and full of myself. But I did remember, and sometimes memories sit quietly in your mind until you get to the place in your life where you understand them.
If nothing else, I have learned that a consistency of attention is better than occasional but elaborate attention. I wonder if that is one of the developmental lessons of middle age... or perhaps it is for me, Ms. Phase. I am sure it must also be true of other relationships, but right now my relationship to the world of growing things is, well... growing up.
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