Play: Their mother's gardens

"I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty.

Her face, as she prepares the Art that is her gift, is a legacy of respect she leaves to me, for all that illuminates and cherishes life. She had handed down respect for the possibilities - and the will to grasp them."

--from Alice Walker's "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens" 

When I read that essay as a senior in college, I found the subject matter as tedious as the microscopic type and tissue-thin pages of the Norton Anthology in which it appeared.  Sure, I was all for women expressing their creativity, especially oppressed minorities, but gardening, to my mind, fell strictly in the realm of ladies like my grandmother and was thus irrelevant to young, vital, important me. 

When I was young, my grandmother grew lush flower gardens that lined her driveway.  She spent many hours teaching me the names of her plants and hoped that they would someday be useful.  When I was in high school an applying to college she would wistfully suggest that after spending all those early years learning the difference between a pansy and a petunia I might want to become a florist.  I nodded politely, but not encouragingly, at the suggestion which seemed at the time an incredibly frivolous way to spend a life.

Years later, when I was just starting out in teaching at a school where most of my colleagues were on the opposite end of their careers, I used to spend my lunch break listening to the older ladies talking about weeding dahlias and pruning roses. One of them explained to me that though her rose bushes were a lot of work, she thought they were an important tool in demonstrating to her children, high school age at the time, the beauty of nature.  Back then, this struck me as unnecessary.  Everyone knows what a rose looks like, how is seeing one in the front yard going to be any different from seeing one wrapped in cellophane and tossed in a bucket at the supermarket?   

You know where this is going.  With becoming a mother and a homeowner, I have also become a gardener.  My beds are nothing compared to my grandmother's and I've never pruned a rose bush.  I am certainly not a radiant gardener like Walker's mother, but then nor do people come from miles around to admire my work as they did hers.  Really, I'm still not great at planning out a garden, often realizing after a thing takes root that a may not have picked the best spot for it.  Also, dirt grosses me out and worms occasionally make me gag. 

Still, I feel compelled to open up the earth and embellish it with a living thing that I will then nourish and nurture and endeavor to help in fulfilling its promise to be beautiful.  And though I doubt that they'll grow up to be florists or landscape architects, I want my girls to be a part of that. 

I'll likely never be able to teach them what a dahlia is as I have no idea myself, but there are some more important things I hope I might pass on:

You may never own a home with an indoor pool like that classmate whose birthday party Big E attended a while back, but you can always plant a few of those rose bushes that grow on the dunes and imagine yourself beachside.

Though last night's dinner came from a takeout menu, that needn't be your only source.



A little dirt never hurt anybody. . . but you really must wash up before dinner.

And, most important of all, even when you have no confidence in your ability to propagate a lawn, throw out some seed and you just might end up with a lush, verdant patch of loveliness like I did.

Work: Reaping what I've sown

When I was 18, I was very, very wise.  Lucky for my husband, we met back then and I was able to share my wisdom before I grew up and no longer knew quite so much.

I taught him to love rollercoasters and Vietnamese food and tried to teach him how to drive stick.  The bulk of my efforts back then, though, were aimed at pointing out to him the wrongness of nearly every aspect of his happy suburban Long Island upbringing  in contrast to the rightness of my comparatively rural New England upbringing. 

Much to his parents’ chagrin, I preached to him the importance of being true to himself and making a difference in the world, thus ensuring that he would never find use for that suit that his mother bought him.  I also derided the inordinate amount of attention his parents and their neighbors paid to their tiny lawns.  I’d decry the wastefulness of all that sprinkler use and scoff at the laziness apparent in hiring a landscaper to mow a yard smaller than the living room.  Really, I’d sneer self-righteously, it’s just grass.  Why do you all care so much?

My mother-in-law will be happy to know that I am now reaping what I’ve sown.

I stand by the importance of rollercoasters and Vietnamese food (though I gave up on the stick and bought an automatic when Little E was a baby).  His being true to himself and making a difference in the world saves a lot on dry cleaning, so I try not to think about that suit-wearing salary we miss out on.  The lawn thing, though?  I’d like to give wise 18-year-old me a piece of my grown-up 35-year-old mind.

Five years ago we moved into our house (in a neighborhood not as suburban as his, nor as rural as mine) and suddenly, inexplicably, I morphed into a person who cared what the neighbors thought.  Thanks to my teachings, my husband did not experience such a transformation, and so while he is happy to mow the lawn, that is the extent of his landscaping efforts. He believes that green weeds, as long as they are mowed, are perfectly acceptable groundcover.  Having developed few lawncare skills in my youth, I have subscribed out of necessity to his theory.

 Unfortunately, the massive snow banks and pounds of road salt of this past winter have left large swaths of our front yard barren even to those green weeds I used to count on to fool the neighbors.  Far from being too occupied with whatever profundities 18-year-old me thought my in-laws were neglecting in order to focus on a lush yard, I find myself more than a little horrified by what the neighbors must think. 

As I am the only one in the house (though surely not the only one in the neighborhood) who cares about our lawn failure, it has fallen upon me to do something about it.  Earlier this week, armed with all of my grass-growing knowledge, gleaned mostly from a third grade art project involving a Dixie cup decorated with a drawing of a leprechaun’s face, I set out to reseed the lawn. . .or at least to send a message to the neighbors that though our lawn care is deficient we’re really not the derelict slobs our dusty front yard might suggest.

Given that I bought the cut-rate seed, skipped at least half of the preparation steps recommended on the bag, and have yet to set up (or purchase) a sprinkler, I’m not all that optimistic about what I’ll reap.  My effort, though, is clearly evident in the neatly raked dirt sprinkled with both seed and fertilizer.

I can only hope that the neighbors will give me some credit for having sown at all.

Work: Running away from home

We first set foot in our home a little over five years ago.  We took a perfunctory tour and  surveyed the backyard for a few minutes, where our real estate agent pointed out the possibility of adding a pool, as he had, unprompted, at every showing.  Then we stood in the street conferring with our agent.

We leaned against our car in the blazing July sun and gazed at the house as we told him that we wanted to make an offer.  He, too, stared at the house with its swayback roofline, faded Christmas wreath on the front door, and mouldering pumpkin remains on the front stoop, and asked, "What makes youse guys want this one, of all the places we've looked at?"

Well, we explained, there was the location: five minutes from my new job, across the street from a library and playground, convenient to the highway and in viewing distance of a quaint New England church in which we would never set foot.  But, more importantly, there was the backyard, a large grassy expanse with two huge leafy trees.

He pursed his lips, squinted his eyes, nodded slightly and then threw up his hands and shrugged.  At the time I thought he was conceding our house-buying wisdom, I realize now that he was giving us the international sign for Well, it's your funeral. 

When you are living in a 712 square foot condo with an even smaller shared yard, you never underestimate the value of space.  And when you are sharing that condo not only with your spouse, but your active toddler and hyper-active Boston Terrier as well, you really covet outdoor space.  When you are in this position and yardowners complain to you about the hassle of mowing and the agony of leaf-raking, you feel angry and you absolutely know that you would relish these jobs, that the satisfaction of working your own land would have you happily raking, mowing and trimming every weekend.

Until that is, you actually own a backyard and you realize that you do not revel in its maintenance, but instead find yourself running away from home.  This happened to me last weekend, when at a critical juncture in the landscaping cycle (long grass meets falling leaves), I found myself not mowing or raking, though both are in critical need, but first soccer-cleat shopping with my husband and then crossing state lines to shop a "designer bag replica" flea market so shady that when Big E later developed an itchy scalp I was convinced that she'd picked up an exotic breed of head lice from my new "cashmere" scarf.  All to avoid the yard.

It is, perhaps, because my vision of adulthood is a product of too much television that I imagined that at adulthood I'd be issued a sturdy, symmetrical home with a self-tending lawn. That my reality has turned out so differently, with so many more cracks, leaks, rodents, and, yes, leaves, is hard to accept at times.  It is a lot more work than I had imagined.

I know that I need to come to terms with my burden and deal with the grass and leaves.  But maybe I'll just bulldoze it all and put in that pool.

(Tragic Update:  That itchy head?  It really was lice, and though I cannot comment on their exoticism they sure are proficient at multplying.  This is clearly punishment from the lawn gods for my lack of gratitude.  The irony is that the time I really and truly planned to spend cleaning up the yard this weekend will now be spent combing, laundering, vacuuming, boiling,and bagging. Sweet revenge for condo-dwelling yard coveters everywhere.)