garden | pull up a chair

July 25, 2008

obsessed and, egad, a tad bit compulsive

confession: the scatterings up above–plastic shoes, rubber gloves, old tin bucket and watering can, satchel for twine, trowel, assorted whatchamabobs–they are the first things i pick up in the morn, the last things i drop after dark.

i am, for not the first time in my little old life, a woman obsessed. and when no one’s looking, i might tend toward the must-snatch-that-deal-on-perennials-even-if-it’s-10-miles-away, must-water-the-wilted-now, egad, why-sleep-when-there’s-baby-fleurs-that-need-to-be-tucked-in-the-dirt.

so what if my knee swells and throbs, and my spine scolds me to sit down and haul out the ice pack.

i tell you, people, there are worse things than spending your day (and a part of the night–if the whole truth must be told here) with your wrists buried in mud.

i am fully, completely stricken. i am forgetting to make dinner for my children. i am the last one out of the garden center, finding my wagon by the light of the moon. i am up with the birds, headed out to shuffle around, for the third time this week, the cone flowers and the black-eyed susans. and i couldn’t sleep one wink the night i lay there worrying if the japanese beetles were out in the beds making batches and batches of babies.

ah, but i’ve not dialed for help of the emotional kind. i’ve not even tried to pretend that i’m behaving remotely normally.

oh, no. i am old enough and plenty used to myself and my, er, criss-crossed wirings. so much so that i can, mostly, slap that ol’ swollen knee and get a good guffaw outa myself. at myself, actually.

now, there’ve been times in my life, whole years and years in fact, when i woulda run for the hills should anyone point anywhere in my vicinity with those two old adjectives that loosely defined might suggest “gone overboard,” as in, she has…

obsessed? i shrieked, mais non! i dared to protest if anyone whispered the name of its cousin; you know, the c word, and i am not talking vulgar, merely compulsive.

ah, but that was then, and now i am a wild-haired garden chick who finds the earth my holy balm. it soothes me in these july days of much uncertainty and angst elsewhere in my life.

i am, i think, staking out my claim on my eensy-weensy corner of the planet. i am keeping the big bad world at bay, zeroing in on the few fine friends i find lurking in my yard.

i am making sure a climbing vine gets all the drink it needs to reach toward the sunshine and the clouds. i am sighing with delight as i watch the fairy rose ramble over to where the russian sage is stretching out her lanky arms, her sleeves awash in periwinkle ruffles.

i let the birdsong seep deep down in my soul. i revel in the knowing that she’s so used to me, she doesn’t even mind settling on the branch just inches from my head.

there is a sacred pact in the garden. the citizens of the earth and sky are at peace with those who keep their place in order.

and so, right here in the thick of summer’s bloom, i can think of nowhere i’d rather be, and nothing i’d rather be doing than finding my religion where the hydrangea nod their heavy heads and the black-eyed susans wink at me.

go ahead, laugh at me, trudging up to bed in my mud-caked plastic shoes.

but know that, achy bones be damned, my dreams are sweet and, like my climbing vine, inching toward the heavens.

are you, like me, obsessed? with any thing? is there some pursuit that so fills your soul you could do it every day and every night, round the clock if you had such steam in your pufferbelly? have you, after years and years, come to love the softspots in your soul or psyche? stopped trying to change the odd ways you are? or do you simply like the smell of dirt, and love to dig in your garden?

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July 16, 2008

long way home

it’s been seven summers. seven summers since i potzed around my rambly little garden, the one i couldn’t wait to tiptoe into every morning at the dawn, the one whose curves and inclines and meandering walks i knew by heart, by the tips of my toes and the nubs of my fingers, poking there under the leaves into rootballs and crannies i couldn’t quite see. but i knew them. oh, yes, i knew.

i could still walk you, eyes closed, through my little garden, my garden that grows in the city.

only it’s not mine anymore.

i left it. achingly. reluctantly. with half my heart planted there, most likely under the gnarled little tree with the branches that wound-about and wept.

was like i was leaving behind a part of me. something i’d dreamed, birthed, tilled, worried over, watered, watched through the seasons. something i’d memorized in that way that your mind absorbs, imprints, every plane and surface, every whorl and whatchamabob, of any something that seeps deep in your soul. like a newborn. or a patch of the earth you happen to love.

but then we up and sold the house that lived with my garden. and i had no choice, really, but to leave it behind. although not altogether, not wholly.

i brought one or two things with me, a woodland forget-me-not i couldn’t forget, its leaves all heart-shaped and dappled, its teeny blue flowers floating like mist in the spring when they bloom. and the fairy rock, the one my then-little boy was certain the fairies bathed in during the night, what with its carved-out dip in the middle, where the rain pooled and the dew at the dawn collected, just deep enough for the toes of a wee romping thing to splash in.

i moved north, not so many miles really, but a long long way from my garden. i moved to a house that was old, that felt like my grandmother’s, and that had quite a fine garden. a garden that once had been very much loved. but not in a while. and not by me.

a garden is, oddly, like an old pair of underwear. it is yours and yours alone. you know how it fits, and it knows where your bumps are, where maybe you’ve worn out your elastic.

the garden i inherited with this old house was, well, not one that belonged in my underwear drawer. it was all fuchsia and red, blood red. i like my underwear, and my gardens, a little softer on the eye. more white maybe, with great ribbons of blue, touches of yellow, here and there a french knot of pink. i don’t like plants that are brown–brown on purpose, not because they weren’t watered. and i don’t like spiky things so very much.

but apparently, the same woman who liked her bathrooms in brown, and her odd-colored tile running over the floor and straight up the walls of her kitchen, liked gardens in dark, deep colors too.

the other thing was that my old garden, as i said, was little. this one spread over a whole leafy yard, twice the size of my old city lot, and, by the time i got to it, it was unbearably overgrown. i could see through the weeds in plenty of parts. knew hard work had been done.

but it wasn’t mine. and it overwhelmed me.

i nearly broke out in itches when i walked out the door and saw all the weeds, towering, climbing, trying to swallow me, i was often convinced.

i couldn’t for the life of me find where the starting line was. mostly, i pretended the weeds were there on purpose. for shade. and shadow. occasionally, one of the weeds sprouted some color. purple. or pink. or great masses of gold. except for the sneezing, no one minded when i brought them into the house.

and for the last few years, i’ve been a little preoccupied anyway. by the sound of hammers and buzzsaws. not much point in trying to dig out from under the sawdust, was how i saw it all.

but then this year came. this was the year, i’d been telling myself. and my very dear friend, who long long ago got me started, back in my little garden.

her name’s marguerite, and i call her my fairy gardenmother. last time, after we finished digging, and tucking wee things here and there in my old city garden, we decided the very last thing it needed was a blessing.

so, we called up her mate, who happens to be a rabbi (though now he’s mostly a deep thinker and therapist) and who, along with my fairy gardenmama, lived just down the block.

he, along with marguerite, came one late summer’s night, with candles and prayers. we blessed that old garden. asked it to be fruitful and multiply. funny thing is, after years and years of hoping and trying and plain giving up, i turned out to be the one who got fruitful and multiplied. my little one, i always laugh, came from that old garden blessing.

hmm.
anyway, ever since i moved here, my old friend marguerite wasn’t so keen on crossing the city line. didn’t want to come north where it’s leafy. said she’d need shots and a passport.

but finally, she came. with her truck loaded down with all sorts of grasses and ferns and flowers in white and all shades of blue. she came with a tree that weeps, and another one that is bent, like an old lady’s backbone, all crooked and twisted.

once again, she waved her magic wand, and next thing i knew i was finally home. i have my old garden again. only it’s new, and it’s here in the north. it’s only a swatch of the yard. but it’s stitched like a tapestry with textures and smells, and already my toes know the way to meander from the stepping-stone path up the slope to the sweet little tree at the top. and off near the pines, we moved all the birdhouses into what i now refer to as the subdivision.

i can’t much sleep these days so i tiptoe out at the dawn. i see who’s standing and who’s fallen down. i haul out the hose. i water and water. i find my cat curled, trying out plants, apparently. trying to decide which is the best fit. or the one that least scratches his bottom, perhaps.

it’s all rushing back. like a river inside. the whole link to the earth. how it soothes me to tuck little things in the mounds of fine loam. how it startles me, makes me stand at attention. how working down low to the ground, i hear a flutter of wind, look up, and there’s mama robin plucking a berry. or i dig, and find a fat worm.

suddenly, i seem to have discovered the starting line here in my garden. i’m heaving rocks, cutting back limbs. i am weeding and cutting, and transplanting here, there and everywhere. i am imagining white picket fences and wind chimes, and rambling roses. i am covered in mud. and i like mud.

but the very best part is what it’s all doing to my soul. i feel it rustling awake. i find myself dreaming again. i’m plotting a land of enchantment. of where to tuck what. and who will bloom next. i wonder, if i was a butterfly, where i would land.

the thing i love most about every garden is how each is a story waiting to be told. it will take years to turn all the pages, to find out who blooms and who dies. who will climb walls, sink into the mortar of this old place that is ours now, utterly ours. and, come springtime, which crook in the limbs will be home to the robin’s nest.

i know–because a garden is equal parts breath-taker and heart-stomper–that winters will take their toll. and stormy nights. and soccer balls, too.

but there is wisdom deep in a garden, and lessons waiting their turn.

for now, though, the lesson is this: when the road home is a long one, the welcome is sweet, all right. succulent, really. so fine, the juice drips down your chin. and you lick it. and the taste comes tumbling back at you, a taste you remember all over again. and now, this time, you won’t give it up.

not ever.

seven summers without it, is far, far too long. you realize, at once and at last, just how famished you were.

oh, and one other thing: when yours is a garden not in the city, buy an extra long hose.

do you find yourself enchanted by what grows in your garden? have you moved from one plot to the next, but found it took some time till your heart found its place in the new place? if a garden isn’t the thing that stirs you to dreaming, what is? if you had to pick one plant from your garden to pack up and tuck onto the moving truck, which one would it be?

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June 4, 2008

storybook gardener

since the day i moved here, five years ago now, the storybook cottage up above has held me in its spell. oh, i don’t live beneath its shingled roof, don’t know my way from room to room, have never even turned the front-door knob.

i only wander by, and cast my wishes in its woodland garden, where trillium, in spring, bumps up against the jacob’s ladder. where snowdrops are the first to come when winter will not take its graceful leave. and where, in autumn, tall grasses swish, the wind-borne lullabye before the garden slumbers.

i wink sometimes at raggedy ann, peeking out from up beneath the turret’s peak. see her? just a wisp of her, in the upper eastern window where she bathes, each morning, in the dawn’s first-light, as rosy-fingered sky reaches up and over the great blue lake just blocks away?

the raggedy one looks down on a garden as magic as any i have ever known, save maybe for “the secret garden,” frances hodgson burnett’s secret one, of course, which by page 42 of that sinful book (i once pretended to have a fever so i could stay home from church to read on and on) was the first i fell head-over-heels in love with, imagined myself inside of, tiptoeing near the climbing roses, curling up on stony bench, listening for the robin who’d led the orphan mary to the garden’s long-lost key and then, at last, to the ivy-covered door that hadn’t been unlocked in years and years.

there is for me something about a garden, a particular sort of mind-of-its-own garden, not one all clipped and shorn and pedicured, but one that rambles, grows this way and that, that sets me to pretending, spinning yarns to match the garden’s swift enchantment.

a little more than a year and a half ago, the storybook garden that belongs to the storybook cottage that just might belong to raggedy ann, gripped me, shot me through and through with what i feared was a most unhappy ending.
before i tell you what unfolded just the other day, i’ve pasted here the passage i once told. read along, then meet me at the story’s end, so i can fill you in on what we’ll call the epilogue.

the story just below, once was published in the chicago tribune. but i wrote it right here at my old pine desk, before i had a kitchen table where i could share my stories.

here’s what now becomes the prologue, printed first in october of 2006:

I am haunted these days by a fairy tale garden that I fear has lost its gardener.

There is, not far from my house, an enchanted little garden and a storybook house to go with it. The first time I eyed it, I nearly drove up the curb. It is all trellis and turret, and delightfully low to the ground, as if curled in a humble embrace with the growing things that spring all around. It is a house that whispers, not shouts.

At the head of a stepping-stone path there’s a front door an elf might wander through, and all around there are great patches of magic, grasses and flowering vines, birdhouses by the dozens, a place lovingly tended by someone completely in tune with the rhythms of wonder and the unfolding of time, season by season.

A Raggedy Ann, toddler size, sits up in the window of one the turrets, peeking out, keeping an eye on all. More than once, I swore she winked at me. The place, I’m telling you, is bewitching.

To drive by, or to wander by, is to slow the staccato of my every day. It is to breathe in and be reminded that lovingly tending the earth reaps wheelbarrows full of heaven.

The other day, though, the staccato picked up as I was stopped at the stop sign across from the storybook house. I saw streams of finely dressed folk pouring down the sidewalk, into the elfin front door, in the middle of a sun-drenched afternoon. This isn’t a holiday, I thought. But then a synapse connected: Those fine clothes were funeral clothes. Oh my goodness, something in the storybook was amiss.

And then, sure as could be, the next morning, flanking both sides of the garden walk, standing sentry for any passerby, were two giant funeral wreaths, one a sumptuous circle of red roses, the other a sheaf of blood-red gladioli.

I am haunted now by the storybook house, and its autumnal garden. Haunted because I am afraid the woman who loved there might be no longer.

Sad thing is, I never met her. Only saw her as a constant stooped figure, bent over her trillium and her scilla in the spring, deadheading her jonquils, cutting back and transplanting through the summer, raking and staking well past the first frost of winter.

I can barely breathe now when I drive by, wondering, worrying. What happens to a garden when a gardener dies? Who will feed the birds that have called her little patch home for decades and decades?

For now, Raggedy Ann keeps an eye on the place. I won’t be able to bear it if she, too, slips away some day when I drive by.

I mourn for the woman who tended the earth with all her heart. I mourn for the trillium and the jonquil and the clematis that will no longer be cajoled and tucked back and talked to, as I often saw her, lips moving as she moved from this to that growing thing. I mourn for all of us who might not have the storybook garden to calm us in the midst of our modern-day madness.

It is a wicked thing when a garden and its gardener do not live happily ever after.

–end of tribune story–

not long after the story ran, i found an email in my tribune mail box. just a few sentences in, my heart caught in my throat. it was an email from the storybook gardener herself.

she’d been stopped, she said, as she turned the sunday pages, drawn in by the drawing of a raggedy ann that ran beside my story, running down two columns. she started to read, and soon knew that this mysterious writer was writing of her very own garden.

she’d not died, she wrote me. but her dear, beloved husband had. suddenly. achingly. without a warning.

and all the bustle i’d come up upon, and the funeral wreaths standing guard by the front door, were indeed for someone loved, now lost.

the garden and the gardener were, oh, yes, deep in mourning. but the words i’d written had not rattled her, so much as soothed her, she wrote. to know that her garden brought so much magic to even one odd passerby.

i should stop by, she wrote. i should visit her in her storybook garden, or inside the magic cottage she now shared with only one limp ragdoll.

for 20 months almost, i’ve kept an eye out. i’ve knocked on that elfin door. i’ve spied evidence of her being there, a just-dropped trowel, a pile of leaves. but not once did i ever see the magic gardener herself.

until just the other dappled afternoon. when the sun played peek-a-boo through her maple leaves, and i saw her slight bent frame, hard at work.

i leapt from my car, i called her name. i tiptoed through her ferny thicket, felt my heart pound hard against my chest. i told her who i was, reminded her that i’d once written of her garden.

she needn’t be reminded. she’d waited, she said, all these months. had wondered why i’d never come.

oh, but i have, i said, a little bashful, a little sad that i’d not maybe tried harder. hadn’t thought to drop a basket or a note, tucked it by the door.

somehow, though, more words–scribbled, folded, left behind–didn’t feel enough, didn’t feel the thing to do. i’d been inclined to meet this soul in person; to know the hands, the eyes, the heart, that made this place call out to me.

here, sit, she said, patting her mud-rubbed palm on just the moss-laced stony bench you’d expect sprouting from her woodland trails.

we talked for the better part of an hour. she offered me anything she grows, to divide and migrate the few blocks south, to my still-getting-off-the-ground patch of earth.

uncannily, time and time again as we talked of achy hips and sudden deaths and how her garden grew, i felt as if i’d known her for a long long while. found myself delighted through and through by just how much our roots, our tales, entwined.

maybe, though, that’s what happens when you’ve imagined yourself in someone’s garden. thought about sipping tea on chilly afternoons, tucked behind her stained-glass kitchen windows.

or maybe, it’s simply magic, long seeded in the hearts of those who share a fondness for a sparrow’s nest tucked under eaves, and ragdolls who nap away the day up in attic windows.

as shadows grew, and i knew my stay might be getting in the way of some dear plant’s undivided attention, i couldn’t help but think how it was that her undying grief had brought us so round-aboutly together, sitting here, side-by-side, in her most enchanted garden.

and how this beauty all around us grew, despite the dappled darkness.

kindred souls discovered where the lilac bloomed, and mayapples nodded in the filtered sunlight.

the story, once imagined, had no happy ending.

but the story, real, i now knew, was like so very much of life: it is shadowed, yes, but only just in spots.

and, here and there and everywhere, new life is pulsing; pushing, bulging, shouldering the clumps of dirt, straining to break through the crusty-shell of earth.

no longer merely make-believe, the storybook gardener and the writer begin that time-worn art of cultivating friendship. drawn together oddly, they carry on as if their story’s meant to be.

which, just maybe, it truly was.

have you made a friend thanks to a garden? or some odd-unfolding circumstance? have you some inkling there’s someone not far from where you live, who just might be your long-lost soulmate, not yet discovered? do tell…

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May 20, 2008

fading…

her teeny-tiny trumpets now have fallen to the ground, a carpet down below of brown-skinned souvenirs of what was.

her perfume, too, is lost. dissipated. lost to world beyond. the world of car exhaust and dryer fumes, lawn mower smoke and bacon burning on the griddle. the world of spring parading on.

lily-of-the-valley’s up next, the beauty queen whose reign is on the rise, demanding our attention as she sticks up and out her tender neck, heavy with those nodding bells that lure you to your knees so you can get a whiff.

she, my sweet viburnum, is just barely hanging on. my fragrant friend, on her final exhalations, and then she’s gone.

i thought it worth returning one more time. to pay heed to the notion that sometimes, oftentimes, we lose what left us dizzy. besotted. utterly and simply with head up in the clouds.

it–the thing that had us swooning, considering a cartwheel–is but an interlude. precious. sacred. it’s here and then it’s merely memory.

and it is the evanescence, the here-then-gone, that yanks our hearts, and stirs us, whispers in our ear: bless this moment, it is fleeting, always. like the tide, it washes in, trickles up the sand, and spills again, returning to the sea, the lake, the deep beyond.

but you knew that already. and so did i.

somehow, though, pausing, bowing as she passes, seems the thing to do. she is beauty fading, waning, drifting to the earth below in perfume-petaled snowflakes.

left behind, up where once she preened, she is little more than one last trumpet and a clutch of stubby little necks, each with head cut off, not unlike a clump of grapes denuded of its succulence. naked, as my mother calls the plucked-off concord stems, can’t abide them, cleans the mess with scissors, reprimands those who dare to leave behind a skeleton of what had been the clump of grapes.

so it is with viburnum on the distal end.

it is time then to genuflect, to drop our heads and thank the hardy bush, the one that asks for no attention, makes no demands all year. except for that single week or two when she is joy ascending, bursting, beckoning all who wander by within an acre of her puff-puff-puffing tailpipes, spewing ’round-the-clock, top-secret nose-bewitching formula.

she reminds, as she fades from foreground to unnoticed backdrop, that we all, all of us, have our shining moments, and then for 50 other weeks of every year we simply breathe and reach for sunshine, and swallow rain, because without it we’d be parched.

and she signals, too, this passing thought: even when we appear as ordinary as a bush with plain old leaves, we have, somewhere deep inside, what it takes to be a momentary, holy, neck-craning, oh-my-goodness-did-you-see-that-smell-that-sense-that source of radiance.

most of the time, day in and day out, we are not so much something to write home about. we are ordinary. waking. chewing. making beds. chasing after dreams. hauling out the trash.

but in any given moment–depending on what’s asked of us, how deeply we dig down into the luminescence that dwells inside–we, like sweet viburnum early in the month of may, can become holy transcendence.

we can exude a sweetness, and all that’s truly wholly fine. step out from our ordinariness and remind the world: even a plain old bush, when given half a chance, can assume a stance of unabating beauty.

and when she fades, she is radiant still. it’s only that she cloaks it beneath her humble plumage.

come her turn again, she’ll show the world of what she’s made.

and that, it seems, is why she’s more than earned her post just beyond my kitchen window. she never fails to wow me, even in her faded, lasting wisdom.

once again, the gospel of the garden.

fading. coming and going. rise and fall. these are the universal themes of life, and surely of the seasons. ecclesiastes, i believe, spells it out. and year after year, the lesson is repeated and repeated. what lessons does the springtime bring to you? who are your teachers in the world abloom around you?

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May 9, 2008

no reason ’cept she’s beautiful…

i guess maybe you’ll think you need to call the doctor. dial up some prescription for that poor lady who cannot haul herself in from out beneath the smelly bush.

oh, my, the neighbors soon will whisper. why, i saw her there, just the other night, they’ll say. all curled up and sleeping. didn’t seem to mind the rain. she lay there, drip, drip, drip. till morning. when she stirred, and stretched and, dang, she took another picture, that lady did. seems she’s up and lost her mind over that there vi-bur-num.

fear not, friends. it’s just that, well, i couldn’t very well tuck that lovely rain-laced beauty queen away in some old box with mothballs to keep it from crumbling. i had to lay it out, so you could see. sort of like when folks invite you in for coffee, then make sure to leave all the baby books right there on the cushions of the couch, and you can’t help but flip the pages and coo the mandatory ooohs, and ahhhs.

the other thing is simply this: it’s the very end of a long, long week, and looking at that picture (although here it looks a little fuzzy, which it did not before it landed here. oh, well…) is sort of like putting on your old holey jammies, the ones you would not wear out the house. the ones you would race to change, even before the fire fighters got there, if you’d had to call and beg their services.

it’s just a friday night, is all, and rather than curling up with ice cream and a trashy novel, i thought, oh, heck, why not wander over to the table. put out some new fresh flowers. pretty things up for the weekend.

this is, of course, that day we mamas wait for, yessirree. that day when we do the shopping, make the quiche, invite the friends, and call it mother’s day brunch. oh, wait. it’s not like that at your house? hmm. well, it is at mine.

mostly, i’m unwinding from a week that stretched my heart from here to there, and back again. my computer went kerpluey. which was not so very fun. no, not at all.

and, then, i stumbled upon a story so sweet and so delicious, i am still trying to get the drippy stains off of my chest. actually, they might be dried-up tears, because i’m not like those hard-boiled, tough-skinned news chicks on tv. oh no. i don’t pretend that it’s just a story, and i am there to scribble notes.

nope.

i fall hard sometimes. really really hard.

thing is, i realized this week that, for me, writing stories is the most fervent prayer i pray. it is wholly sacred, i tell you, to sit and listen as some fine someone unfurls her story. and i, collecting words like rosary beads, just snatch and string each one. bead after bead, story after story. until the tale is told.

when i’m in the gather mode, scooping up so many beads, i do ask a million questions. once, someone laughed and called me a human vacuum cleaner. hmm.

well, i do tend to ask for a few thousand teeny-tiny details. and, then, because i can’t help myself, i whip up my newsgirl lasso and swing it first in little circles once or twice, then i cast it out, wide and sweeping. often, this is where the things that someones say humble me to tears. if you listen long enough, you can’t help but hear some mighty wisdom.

other times i tiptoe on the ledge, inching close as i can inch to just short of that place where the teller of the story, would say, oh no. that i cannot, will not, tell.

when it’s over, when the last story is spilled, and folks are starting to yawn, i gather all my beads, sweep them up and stuff them in my satchel.

then, back home, i sit down before the magic keys and close my eyes, and pray to God to be that holy pencil, i so often refer to.

what i pray for, is that the pulsing beauty of the everyday psalm–as the brilliant chicago photographer, john white, once referred to the capturing of the uncommonly common street story–oozes through the words that just come spilling out, and fill the page.

then i send it off and wait. i have this little picture in my head. i imagine some sort of gold dust, from the spirit of the story’s essence, rubbing off, onto the fingers and the heart of every someone who takes the time to sit and pick up that day’s news, and, then, just happens to bumble on the one i stitched my heart in, and reads along, to the very end.

i imagine, this mother’s day especially, a whole city glowing gold, as, one-by-one, a story’s read and passed along. i imagine a whole city shining.

or at least that’s what i pray. and why i think the work i do each day is really nothing more than the finest prayer i ever learned to pray.

and that’s what i’m thinking about this lovely evening. lying here, beneath that raindrop-christened bush, where all is beautiful these smelly days and nights.

oh, and besides, the nice computer man told me to fool around here and see if he’d chased out all the critters that were gunking up the gears. so let me just push this one little button here, and see….

promise, soon as i can i will share with you the story that has me at once so giddy, and so very tired, this late late friday night.

it’s sunday now. the computer went kerpluey again. but i think we’ve now done the proper voodoo. at least i hope so. tomorrow morn, when all is quiet, and i am fully breathing once again, i will post the lucy story, and share with you the lovely bits that had to fall to the cutting room floor. ol’ dear mr. hemingway once said, a story is only as good as what’s left on the cutting room floor. and that fine maxim has been the novacaine to get me through plenty a painful cutting session. ouch. it always hurts. but this here blog, i now realize is a fine remedy, a way to still get to tell some of the pieces of the story that i think you’ll love. lucy trevino and her mama, rosa, are my heroes of this day. a more amazing love story i’ve not heard in a long long while….check out the tribune’s website today, or come back tomorrow, and i’ll have the story here….

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April 16, 2008

blue patches worth the wait

i am drawn to them the way i stumble to the bathroom sink in deep of night. when my throat is parched, and i am not awake so much, except to feel like i am choking on the dryness. and then the waters come, cool ones, wet ones. and the choking goes away. and back i stumble, into sleep. my throat no longer aching to be soothed.

it’s what it feels like, especially at the close of this long winter, when the patches start to sprout. first, like measles made of blue, the spots come here and there. scattered. hardly connected. a little bit of cobalt. another little bit.

but then, suddenly, it’s spreading. whole pools and puddles, patches. old yards, right now, show their age. in the best way i can imagine. they spread out in blue. as if whole blankets from the attic have been taken down the winding stairs, shaken out of all their accumulated winter’s dust and left to air, where thirsty ones like me can drink them in.

it is the single thing of spring, the scilla, or Siberian squill, that sends me soonest to the moon, has me down and on my belly, taking in the endless waves of nodding heads of blue.

they come, the scilla does, where earth is undisturbed. it is, like gray locks on a wise old lady’s head, a crown of age.

oh, you might tuck a bulb or two into the ground. and, should the squirrels not binge, you might find just one or two breaking through the crust, come spring.

but if it’s a swath of blue you’re after–a river, really, blue on blue on blue, paying no mind to where one yard ends and another starts, barely yielding to the street, popping up again just beyond the curb–then you will have to wait. ten, twenty, fifty years, when, squill by squill, they multiply, take up every inch of old and tired real estate.

i’ve nearly crashed the car in this accidental season. can’t keep my eyes on this here road. i’m always scanning for the scilla pools.

and when i come upon them, it’s not enough to merely notice, and keep along my way. why, no, i’ve been known to pull a U-ey, screech the brakes, drop to hands and knees. it’s why, i think, God gave me a belly, the perfect launching pad for taking in the earth at eyeball level.

you might have seen me, sprawled. you might have thought, oh, that lady’s had a stroke. or perhaps she’s lost a ring, and is making like a snake, turning over leaves in hopes of finding gold.

gold, shmold. i am seeking blue. inhaling it. licking it. basically, consuming it through every pore. getting my annual allotment, and then some. i fill my belly now, or else, i wait.

through may and june, when there are, praise be, distractions to occupy my eyes and nose. through july and august, when all i do is sweat. through the whole of fall, when i make do with swirling leaves and pumpkins, too. to december when the tree lights twinkle, and somehow seem to mesmerize me. back to january. february. on to march, the slow road to mental decline if there ever was one. by early april, without a bit of blue, i am nearly sunk. so blue inside i might as well give up. call 9-1-1, come get me.

but then, as if my inner blue is on the loose, the spots appear before my eyes. at first, i think i’m seeing things. could this be a blue mirage? is someone playing cobalt tricks?

and that, my friends, is why you find me, at the height of april, flattened. on the ground, stretched out. rolling in the scilla. seeing if, perhaps, i can stain my skin the blue i thirst for. so the wait won’t be so anguished.

it is a silly thing, how sometimes these meanders go where i’d not one bit intended. i had set out in one direction, but my fingers on the keys took me elsewhere. oh, well, that’s how it is in spring, this season that we wait and wait for. i’ll be back, i guess, to lolligag my way along some other route some coming day. because it seems the squill took over here. do you have something in the spring that makes you go a little gaga? do you have squill where you live? or what is it that lures you over the fine edge?

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April 10, 2007

requiem for the spring that will not be

i cannot let this heartbreak pass without taking time to sing a song of sorrow.

the petaled promise of spring, everywhere, it seems, is bent, is broken, downed by something silent that came under cloak of night, but also in the klieg light glare of high morning, when the sun, at full slant, could not make its way through molecules of cold.

i have walked for miles, i have taken toll. i know now the litany of the dead, the blooms that will not be. star magnolia, petals browned like egg whites under too much butter, too much flame. only this is brown from freezing. daffodils, whole hosts, bowed in cold defeat, heads down, limp in dirt that might as well be burial mounds. bergenia, a woodland beauty sometimes known as pigsqueak, has lost its squeal. exhibit a, up above; the barnyard must be weeping.

i know i am.

barely a week ago, when winds were filling lungs, getting ready to let loose, when the air was balmy 70, we heard the rather mild-mannered news, the short-burst alarm: temperatures might dip. take precaution.

precaution, we presumed, was tossing blankets helter skelter overnight. and lifting in the morning. the danger past, the sun back up, all caution scattered with the noonday wind.

but then, the cold, it stayed. the daffodils, days later, still haven’t raised their heads from deepest dying bow. the magnolia never had a chance. one day, its velvet fingers, gloved in alabaster. but then, the next, all froze, and kept on freezing. there will be no bloom this year. there will only be brown buds falling to the ground, botanic bullets shot through with frozen death.

promise lost before it even had a chance.

which sounds, to the children’s cancer nurse in me, too much like life sometimes. this narrative we know, not only from the garden.

all around, i walk through springtime frozen on the stem; i ask myself just what it means. what lesson is this teaching?

i called a man who knows many things about the garden. he said it’s death on case-by-case basis. depends, he said, on micro-climate. vigor of the plant before the cold winds came. says he’s never seen anything like it, not this much cold, this long, preceded by solar-heated days that coaxed the blooms, coaxed spring, right from the earth, from winter.

way he sees it, he says, it’s just a blip for planet earth. a mere blink of the eye for the globe that’s spun for zillions of millions of revolutions.

buck up, he pretty much says. these growing things grow here because, through the millennia, they’ve done the darwin thing. they’ve got little tricks up their long green sleeves. but there will be no blooms. toast, he boomed, time after time, no matter what i mentioned, full of hope, some growing thing, perhaps, merely suspended in freeze-frame animation.

toast, he cried. toast, toast. i could hear him shake his head; pity the poor lady with skull so thick she’s dense.

at best, the wise man offered, the growing things dig deep inside their little souls, extract a blast of carbohydrate, give it everything they’ve got to unfurl their leaves, take a chance at air and light and a good stiff drink of rain.

it’ll be an iffy proposition from here on out, this season. too little rain, too many pests–oh no, here comes his favorite word–“toast!” he crowed again.

scooching out to the edge of this most precarious limb, i asked the hard-baked gardener if he saw any metaphysics in all this burned botanic bread. “this is nature,” he said, shooing me away to take another call.

well, half the reason i come to class is i’m convinced there is much to learn in the not-so-tidy rows of my struggling garden.

as i tiptoed through the swath where my daffodils once tossed their pretty heads, scissors at the ready, at last surrendered to the notion that there would be no resurrection, i mused long and hard on all this would-not-be.

walking miles, shuffling past the dead and fallen, i rumbled thoughts through head. why death? why so much frozen death?

the singular thing that struck me was how this scourge rolled in without a sound, without a whimper even. this was not destruction with a drum roll, no whipping winds and thunder claps, nor streaks of light that tore the sky in jagged halves.

this was, like so much of life’s unwanted news, completely unannounced.

one minute you’re talking to your papa on the phone; the next you’ve got an operator on the line, interrupting some other silly call, telling you to clear the line, someone must get through, someone needs to tell you it’s very, very bad, you need to get there fast.

one minute you think your firstborn son is out riding his bike on a golden autumn day filled with light and promise; the next, the doctor is leaning against the hard cold wall, telling you it’s a fractured vertebrae in his neck and the spinal cord itself looks to be in trouble.

you think of all the friends you’ve loved, whose news came in fractured syllables: a dark spot on a lung, a blob they couldn’t see through, ’bout the size of a cotton ball, on an unsuspecting breast.

they never knew it was coming. you never knew it was coming. it was suddenly just here. it was the sub-freezing dawn in the middle of your spring.

you too, drooped your head into the dirt. you too forgot to breathe. case-by-case basis, the plant man said. some will make it. others won’t.

you, not willing to go with door no. 2, you dig down deep inside your carbohydrate stores. you give it everything you’ve got.

some will make it.

you swallow deep your sorrow, and plow on into spring. you pray to God warm winds are on their way.

just there, beyond the window, in the hoary morning’s frost, you set your gaze on daffodils, a humbled host, stilled, not breathing at half mast.

you, though, you take a breath. you brace against the chill. you carry on, intrepid, into spring. no one says it doesn’t sting. no one…

anyone care to offer up a line, or stanza, in this song of frozen springtime sorrow? or some sign of resurrection in the field?

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April 4, 2007

batten the hatches, blanket the garden

no, no, this is not about how to dry your laundry on the line, sans the line. this is not about casting your underthings and old rags upon the garden for the sake of saving turning on the dryer.

no, darn it, this is about fickle spring.

there you are merrily thinking the thaw is underway. all around the place, little things are pushing up, pushing through the crust. not so tentatively, but maybe a little shy, they peek their soft green tips. tenacious tips. they gaze around, they check to see if they’ve got goosebumps, or whether it’s safe to keep on coming.

they come. a tulip sprout here. virginia bluebells there. the poppies, even, send up their fountainhead of leaves that look as if they’ve been cut by giant pinking shears, all ziggy-zaggy around the edge.

and my april prize, my heirloom hyacinths. the antiques of my garden with roots dating back to 1870, the one they call, “the queen of the blues.” she is a soft, soft silvery blue, according to my friends at old house gardens, the ones who rescued her in the first place, and then, for a small price, bequeathed her to me. she’s been in my care and custody for years now. if heaven sold perfume, this might be the no. 2 seller (after the aphrodisiac, korean spice viburnum, which sends me to the moon, and which, if sold at neiman marcus would elbow ol’ dowdy chanel V right off the counter.)

but back to the laundry scattered in the beds.

it seems that just as all the pretty things were hours or maybe days from showing their true colors, someone somewhere decided to pull the switch, hit reverse, and suddenly out there it feels like winter.

the mercury on my truth-telling thermometer is silently sliding south, right now at 32, which, unless i’m losing marbles, i am certain i learned in first-grade science is the point at which fluid water turns to solid ice, a substance nowhere in the primer, “how to grow a flower.”

the weatherperson who lives in my computer tells me it’s getting colder still; and, as is, all living things outside feel as if it’s deep down in the early 20s.

that means, my growing things need coats.

sleeves for tulips can be a little difficult to construct. so i go for the loose look, the draped look. old sheets flung. terry towels as fabric domes to hold in what little heat there is.

did i mention that the winds were whipping through the night? great howling winds. winds that made you think you must have holes right through your floorboards and the winds were whistling west to east, taking shortcuts through the room where you were sleeping. or trying to sleep, at least.

yes, yes, it was a night, it remains a day, for ragtag april garden. i’ve had to do this right up through may: the annual tucking of the beds under bedclothes.

in the city, i lived next door to an equally towel-tossed gardener. our side-to-side gardens on these frosty mornings looked like christo, the fabric artist who has shrouded museums and mountains and even central park, had slipped through the ’hood and done his wrapper thing. on our tulip heads under towels.

these days i dwell in the land where one does not fling mismatched rags on the lawn. once again, i stand in danger of at least a phone call from the appearance review police.

excuse me, madame chair, they would begin, we do not support your nasty habit of littering the leafy shore with those babushkas in your beds. please remove them, or we will revoke your passport and send you shuffling back to the nitty-gritty city.

which is why i do my dirty work, my mission work, really, in the back, where, save for this blaring announcement, no one should notice that i am deep into doing what it takes to get my garden through the cold snap.

if it means secreting out the back door, in dark of night, bundle of slightly tattered sheets in arms, then i will risk my residence here on this north shore. i will, as i unfurl my cotton armaments on my shivering spring shoots, not be stopped.

do not, i tell you, get between a madwoman and the precious beds she must protect, come lawn police or subzero temps that would do in a lesser warrior.

anyone else lie awake fearing for their tender sprouts, as wicked winds whistle taunts all through the night? anyone else cast a quilt of tattered cloths upon the april beds, in hope that may the month will bring a riotous show of life triumphant over freezing cold? anyone else have any other warming tricks up their shivering gardener’s sleeves?

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March 8, 2007

in memoriam

be still, your pounding hearts. we gather today to—wait, to consider the death that abounds in vases all over my house. the bouquet that’s gone bust. the flowers duly expired. the blooms well past their best-if-used-by prime.

fitting we should consider the limp, the faded, the still–to my eye—beautiful here in the desperate days of end-stage winter. where if things don’t lighten up, warm up, spring forth, or d.) any of the above, we shall make like the flowers and go limp, fade, flop over, or d.) skip the above bit about beauty beheld.

as we limp, no we stagger, toward spring, where week-ahead forecasts for 50s and 60s (remember, chair headquarters is here in chicago, along the shivering shores of lake michigan) tempt us to roll up the scarves, shove away mittens, we are exhaling the last final puffs of spent, dry, stale air from the pits of our lungs. we are clinging to walls, waiting for updrafts from parts of the world where, by now, it is blooming, it’s warm.

we have, if you’re like me, tossed away sum after sum in the grocery store line, week after week plucking those plastic-sheathed posies, thinking a rose in a see-through sleeve is a beautiful thing, is the only thing really that might keep your spring hopes alive.

i’ve done tulips by the near truckload. opted for a few precious clumps of wordsworth’s golden host, the daff-o-dill. clutched white roses at christmas. antique porcelain, with a mere wisp of mauve, up above. the hydrangea beside it spoke to me, too; i couldn’t leave the grocery without it.

fool, me.

between my cat who decapitates tulips like my little one sneaks handfuls of gumdrops, and the rather short-lived life of a stem out of soil, i watch clump after clump go the way of all flesh: peaked to shriveled to brown-tipped to dried. dehydrated right there on the stem, in the vase, on my counter, long past the point you might consider polite. (if flowers have pride mine might be ashamed.)

quite aware of the fact that i’ve shot my winter’s allowance for flowers, i am now milking my petals for all that they’re worth. thus, the tea rose up above, the hydrangea beside it, they’ve been in serious need of resuscitation—or recycling bin—for the better part of a week.

but i’m not budging. i have, not yet anyway, no intention of tossing. long partial to the weak and infirm, i have every intention of milking every last drop of my fading bouquets.

besides, i rather like the more challenging task of searching for beauty where others see none. in a world that rewards in-your-face, pop-up aesthetics, anna nicole’s bosom versus katie hepburn’s upsweep, i’ll take the upsweep. any day.

and, yes, looking in the mirror is a daily reminder that to fade, honestly, naturally, without shame, is an ennobling possibility.

so i will keep my bouquets parched as they are, gasping for that last breath of life. i will watch the sunset of their petals, as they fade into the horizon. i will honor them, keep them, well after death us do part.

in the share-a-quirky-secret society, anyone else hold onto floral abundance ’til it’s turned into floral decay? beyond the dead buds, anyone else see the beauty in things old and faded and dry? wabi sabi does….

7 Comments

February 22, 2007

herbs in winter, er, spring

okay, so five minutes ago it was winter. and most likely, another three and it’ll be winter again. last week at this time, out my window, it was the arctic tundra. only thing missing was the mush dogs.

now, it’s a vast ocean of blkkh. isthmuses of scant white surrounded by sog (the ground when it’s turning to sponge). small continents of sooty dirt gray melting inch by inch into more sog.

but the slant of the sun, and the scant touch of warm in its rays, sends message to brain cells: stay alert. there might be an end to the winter.

now i might be an avowed winter baby, love nothing so much as a warm woolen sweater, my nose pressed to the glass, watching the cotton puffs fall from the sky. but even the winteriest among us need a small pharmacopoeia of sorts to get through.

my elixir of choice, the one i take daily, multiple times a day if i can, is the herb. not dried in a bottle. not crumbly inside of a jar. but real and alive, bright green on my sill.

i’m telling you the thing that gets me through winter, the thing that keeps red blood in my veins, is the three pots of herbs that grow just to the west of my faucet.

they keep me, well, green. i snip and i sprinkle all winter. i am plowing deep into faux summer, even if only through the gardeny taste that swirls on my tongue. fresh and just picked, right here in the months of the snows.

i bite into the clean of cilantro. i melt for the tender tendrils of thyme. i spice things up with my ruffly basil.

i make believe it’s my garden. i clip and i water. i turn to the rays of the sun, so my herbs they can be coaxed to trigger the chlorophyll. (or however that works.)

but still, i am sorry to say, with regular regularity, my herb pots they shrivel and die. i might get a few weeks out of the basils. the lavender rarely lasts a few days. and the thyme it takes time before it turns crumbly and brown. not unlike those herbs in the bottles. but eventually it indeed turns to crumbly.

and i, sisyphean in style and psyche, i trod a path right back to the produce patch at my grocery. pluck myself one more pot of basil at $2.29. not a high price for midwinter sanity. if in fact it’s keeping me sane. (those around me might tell you it’s not.)

i do know it’s keeping me pink–pink in the cheek, pink in the heart. i eat them for breakfast and dinner. snip them on cheese on my toast. toss with abandon into the stew. adorn like a madwoman each plate, basil poking from the mashed potatoes, thyme branches strewn like the wreath of a hero atop the breast of the chicken.

and if i manage time for some lunch, i eat them then too. i reach in the drawer for my kitchen shears, pretend that i’m clipping an orchard of espaliered apple when only it’s a 4-inch expanse of basil, or the lone stem of lemony balm.

if you’ve been poking around here awhile you might have noticed a trend: i am a girl who leans heavy on growing things. i am a girl who needs gardens. even in the dark days of winter.

so i strongly advise (and i’m not one for advising) that if you can, if you don’t mind the suggestion, you dash to the store, any old supermarket, and you buy the start of your garden.

these herbs, they have history. it’s not like they’ve just been invented. they’ve been around for a very long time, and they seem to have a solid reputation for making for all sorts of miracles.

a quick run through the herbalist, in alphabetical order:

basil, they gave as house gifts in renaissance england because, well, it kept the house flies away.

bay they once planted to protect from lightning strikes. the caesars were certain it kept conspiracies, hmm, at bay. in the 1700s, in england, it was thought to do in the devil. the priestesses of apollo chewed a wad of the stuff before spewing a prophesy. not long after, wise folk prescribed placing it under your pillow to bring on dreams, prescient in nature.

chervil, a sure cure for hiccups. sipped in a tea, that is. (sipped in a broth on holy thursday, it reminded the sippers of the resurrection of christ. says so right here in a book.)

coriander is one of which to be careful. ol’ pliny, the first-century agrarian, cautioned against too much of the seed, which he found had narcotic tendencies.

dill, diluted in water, is the thing to soothe colicky babies.

lemon balm is a tad schizophrenic. on the one hand, it was recommended to scholars to sharpen their memory; on the other hand, it was doled out to insomniacs who found slumber in its sleep-inducing powers.

marjoram, thought to have been touched by venus, is big in the love potion department. italians bunched it in nosegays and gave it away to banish sadness. how lovely.

mint will whiten your teeth.

oregano is boldly medicinal, prescribed over the ages for everything from toothaches to opium addiction.

parsley was first eaten by romans; the greeks long before them made wreaths for weddings and sports games, but only fed it to horses.

rosemary, get this, was put under the nuptial mattress to a.) increase faithfulness, and b.) keep away insects and mildew. who knew?

tarragon, thought to fight off fatigue, was slipped into shoes in the middle ages just before trodding off on a pilgrimage. a pre-cursor to dr. scholl, i suppose.

lastly comes thyme, an all-purpose herb if ever there was one. athenians made liquors of it, bathed in it, burned it in temples. egyptians embalmed with it. i thought it was good on my cottage cheese.

and so, there you go, an alphabet of herbs for your daily consumption. grow them. sniff them. stuff them under your mattress. not a bad sport for the winter.

now, i was going to share a little herb recipe here. i had oh so many choices. but i swear i’ve run out of room. so i promise, the lazy susan this weekend, will proudly display one of these choices. you get to vote. 1. sage apple cake. 2. baked snapper with onion and balm. 3. simple tomato sauce. all courtesy of “herbs in the kitchen: a celebration of flavor,” by carolyn dille (i’m not making that up) and susan belsinger. vote and vote often. this is chicago, you know…..

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Category: garden