My Garden

[This is a difficult post to write.]

It's odd to me how an event can somehow manage to divide my life into before and after, how thinking about the before and after makes me uncomfortable and nervous and shaky, as though acknowledging it does--what?--gives it even more power? And I know that life is full of befores and afters, that every day, every moment, is a before and an after, and that somehow we all manage to keep going...But still, it's uncomfortable to write about it.

When Richard and I married we bought a house down in town. It had a California-sized backyard, which is to say, not very big, at least compared to Michigan standards. But I immediately started gardening. In fact, now that I think about it, even when I moved to California for my first teaching job at the tender age of twenty-one I rented an apartment that had a little mini-plot next to the back patio, which my mom and I planted during the week she spent out here helping me get settled in... And now that I really think about it, I even wanted to grow plants while I was at Michigan State. I remember during my senior year I potted a red geranium to sit on my bedroom windowsill (I love red geraniums in terracotta pots). It failed to thrive because we lived in a basement apartment, but the urge was there.

So I'm a gardener. Or I was a gardener. But I want to make the point that I've loved gardening for a very long, long time.

When we moved up into the foothills, I changed the pasture fence to create a large space for a garden, with paths and benches and birdbaths. I fell in love, absolutely totally crazy in love, with antique roses. These roses, the musks, bourbons, teas, chinas, and damasks, are the graceful, perfumed older sisters of today's gawky hybrid tea roses. They've lovely names, like Madame Isaac Periere, Louise Odier, Souvenir de la Malmaison, and Arrillaga, and the flowers take your breath away with their scent and their beauty.

And I didn't just love roses, oh no. I loved lavender, with its dusty grey potent leaves, and all of the sage family, with its scented leaves and purple or magenta flowers, and the sedums, with their heavy waxy leaves and glowing flowers late in the season, and some of the ornamental grasses, whose fronds waved delicately in the afternoon breeze of the foothills...

I was in love. Every spare second was spent in the garden. I belonged to the evening garden club, and even hosted a meeting when I was pregnant out to HERE with Jenny, just so everyone could see how lovely the garden was in the fall... And I hesitate to write this, but there was more to my gardening than just the plants or the scents or the beauty--in every moment of it, there was something profound and spiritual, deeply moving and satisfying...

And then came May of 2001, when I went to a garden tour in another foothill town north of here, saw a beautiful and magical garden, and returned home to find out that my mother had died.

And though it sounds unbelievable to even write the words, that was the day I stopped gardening.

I just stopped. And I know, there's no rhyme or reason to a decision like that, born of grief and who knows what other emotions. But there you are, I stopped gardening. My husband helped the roses survive by watering a few times each summer, as we get NO rainfall here from May till November, but I did nothing to keep my garden alive. I didn't even wander down to the garden to look around, although I do remember looking out the kitchen window every spring and fall to see the glorious riot of blooms on the roses that bordered the edge of the garden...and I'd smell the lilacs that bloomed every spring along the edge of the pool deck...and I'd enjoy the scent of the honeysuckle that wound its way through the tangle of roses alongside the patio...but actually garden? No.

And today? Why am I writing about all of this today?

Well, today I ventured down into the garden, where the paths are obscured by long spring grass, and took the clippers and pruned back some of my beautiful roses that have suffered so for the last seven years. I apologized as I cut, and felt them breathe a sigh of relief as I reached bare hands in amongst the prickly canes to pull the weeds growing so thickly around their necks. They've survived without my love and attention for so long, but amazingly I feel as though they've forgiven me for my desertion...

I feel as though I've come home after a long, long absence, and been welcomed back with love and forgiveness, the prodigal gardener, so to speak. And in this return is maybe, maybe, some healing and growth for my spirit as well as for my beloved roses. Maybe...