Gardening

Now, that is what I call a snappy lead in post. Who doesn't go nuts for gardening?

I have always had a knack for plants. Well, not when I was a teenager. I was never excited when my Mother would get me up early to come out to the garden and pick peas or beans or whatever. I was even less excited when every damn time I sat down, she plopped a bowl of peas to shell or beans to snap into my lap. 

But, when I was older, I began to see that I had inherited my Dad's talent for growing flowers, plants, anything. My Mother had been a passable gardener, but I don't know that she really enjoyed it much. My Dad enjoyed it. It was all over his face. I once came upon him talking to some bluebells. He was talking about music. About how he liked the lyrics of some song and then he sang a bit of it. He turned around and caught me watching him. He didn't look pleased at first, but then he smiled. I guess he figured he was busted. 

"Flowers do better if you talk to them," he told me. "And they like music." 

I never asked him how he knew this. I just assumed he was right. My Dad was never wrong about anything that I could see. 

Now I talk to my flowers ALL the time. And they grow like mad. A tiny succulent that my sister gave to me went from being about two inches wide and tall to being as big as a cabbage and is now in my back yard. I'd never had a succulent before. I'd seen them in stores and thought they looked pretentious, so never bought any. But, this one is gorgeous. I once bought a tiny jade for my office at work only to have it grow so large that it now looks like some kind of people eating plant. It sits on my dresser, hogging up the whole top of it. It sits against a window and when the moon shines just right, it makes monstrously beautiful shapes on my floor. 

I used to have a huge vegetable garden each year and a smaller herb one, plus all of my flowers. I did this year after year, cultivating cuttings in my basement and then transplanting them in the Spring. That is done now. My planting screens and greenhouse lights sit unused. Too much work for me now and T never had much interest in it to begin with. 

So, I must be content with my small garden of herbs and the old fashioned, but cherished flowers that were here when we bought the house, plus a few that we planted early on. Even this is almost too much for me now. I limp around with the hose, deadheading and pruning. I run my hands through their bounty, pleased. Balmed. Comforted. Plants just give me peace. They are doing almost crazily well this year, thanks to an abundance of rain and warm, but not too hot weather. 

I do so love plants. They ask so little of you. All they really want is to be loved, treated with kindness. Admired. Vegetables pay you back in huge manifold. Flowers in eye candy. And my Dad was right. They like being talked to. They like music. I have my best conversations in my garden. I have cried in that garden more than once. Flowers, vegetables, herbs....they understand the cycle of life and death and are one with it. 

I see so much more now with this sword of damocles dangling over my head. I sit in my garden and hang my head back, staring up into the trees. I listen to the hushed roar of the lawn mower; I smell the newly mown grass. I look up into the leaves of our huge backyard oak tree, lost in the sun dancing through it. I can hardly bear the beauty of it. 

I often think of this scene from Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Emily has recently died and is homesick for her life back on earth. She asks the narrator if she can just go back for one day of her life. Her dead mother in law advises her to choose an ordinary day, knowing full well how hard this will be for her. Instead, she chooses her twelfth birthday. 

She finds herself back in her 12 year old body. She is putting a ribbon in her hair. She is enthralled with what good health feels like. She hears her Mother calling to her from the kitchen that her breakfast is ready and bounds downstairs to see her. She is immediately besotted with sheer love for her mother's non gray hair, her young face, her voice. Yet she is also dismayed at how her mother is busily getting breakfast on the table, barely looking at her. She sits miserably at the table, thinking that her mother is so beautiful, so young, so PERFECT. Why won't she look at her? Really see her? She is so busy making eggs and bacon, preparing breakfast, rushing around that she barely makes time to kiss her cheek. 

And then it happens. She hears her Father's voice. 

"Where's my birthday girl?"

And it is all too much. She knows that she cannot stand to see or hear her Father because he won't really see her back properly. He is a small town doctor and a very busy man. She tells the narrator to take her back. 

Later, she asks him if this is always the way it is. Does anyone really realize how beautiful life is while they are living it? The narrator tells her that rarely do humans realize it while they live, maybe in small fits and starts, that maybe a few poets are able to do this, but no....not most people. 

One of Emily's last lines is, "Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to ever realize you." 

I think that when you know you are dying, you suddenly see things differently. You realize how incredibly beautiful everything around you is. It almost hurts at times. 

I sit in my garden, a book in my lap, a bottle of cool water at my fingertips. I am content in a way that I have never been before, but sad in a way that I have never been before, too. 

Life is truly beautiful. 

And so incredibly swift.