In The Weeds
more words on the garden.
I thought I didn’t know what to write when I sat down, but once I got started I knew exactly what I wanted to say. It felt like magic, getting the words out.
The line I keep writing over and over and over again in my journal, and in whatever word processor I’m writing in is “There’s so much to tell you.”
On the one hand, there is, and on the other hand… isn’t there always?
Life lately has been a lot of mixed feelings. Beautiful and crushing. Happy and sad. Big joy and big grief. Life and death. It is always both.
There is so much to observe in the banal of the everyday. Life, whether we like it or not, is always moving forward. The sun shines every day for a week and then it storms. The cucumber vines swell with beautiful green fruit until you forget to pluck one, and then it swells yellow and the whole plant dies. The tomatoes have been mostly dead for a month, but they’re still producing. The herbs have all flowered early because of the rain and the heat. I have beets I’m afraid to eat because they’ve poked out of the ground and I read somewhere that maybe that doesn’t sit well with your stomach. Also, I don’t like beets.
New bugs show up on my zinnias and I spend 30 minutes googling them, trying to figure out if they’re friend or foe.
I still don’t know.
Speaking of the garden, it may have been a failure this year. I spent too much time having fun, and not enough time in the sweltering heat plucking weeds from the soil again and again and it shows. The lines are all blurred with weeds, the paths have wild cucumbers zigging and zagging over the overgrowth. There are cherry tomatoes that have fallen off the mostly dead plants this morning, on the ground waiting for slugs or whatever other pests are around to come to eat them.
It is not my finest work, this garden, but it is indicative of the wildness that settled in after my labor and the labor of our friends. It is not perfect, and some parts of it aren’t even good, but it just is. It exists, just as it is, and when a new friend has a truly shitty week, it has just the perfect amount of zinnias and herb flowers to give her a big bouquet. When friends come over to watch a movie on the projector, there is plenty to share. Everyone takes home handfuls of whatever it is that’s there for them. Garlic bulbs that aren’t the size I wish they were, herbs aplenty, almost yellow cucumbers. Scallions and chives and dark opal basil and Genovese basil and Thai basil and lemon basil and oregano for days.
We gawk at the scraggly watermelons and pray that they make it safely to our bellies.
In the winter last year I clung so deeply to the idea of this garden as the source of the coming joy, as something that would make me truly happy when the warmth hit.
Now that it’s here, it has at times made me feel crushed because I didn’t do a better job. I should have weeded, I should have fertilized. I should squash the new bugs with reckless abandon when I see them munching on my oregano. I should care more in some ways and less in others.
But I am not perfect, and Mary Oliver tells me I do not have to even be good.
I just am.
I am me, and this garden took a back seat because I was busy screaming at my friends that I love them on a crowded dance floor. I was busy attending every birthday party. I was busy kissing my friends while they ate spicy pickles in front of a glowing refrigerator at 2:30am. I was making mango oatmeal from fruit that someone cared enough to bring me all the way from Florida by car. I was crying in the shower because I felt so loved by my friends and so scared to lose them. I was attending my first Bonnaroo and dancing to Odesza in the dust. I was trying to keep up with the laundry and the dishes and cook some meals, too. I was getting into swimming again, and sewing, and I was learning to throw coffee mugs on a wheel. I was obsessing over glaze colors. I was getting into professional cycling and watching the Tour de France. I was bleaching my husband's hair after both of us had terrible weeks. I was telling new friends I love them and telling old friends I love them. I was watching the people closest to me fall in love.
And I neglected the garden, yes, but I was busy.
And still, the garden gives me flowers. Even sweeter, it gives me a reminder that it doesn’t need perfect conditions to thrive in its own way. It has something to give, and it continues to give it. What it has is enough. What it gives is enough. It is content to just be.
Maybe one day I will have time to do both. I will figure out a way to have a beautiful garden with no weeds, trellises installed at the right time, and upright tomato plants. I will produce enough vegetables that when friends come over they can take enough produce to feed them for a week (oh my God, the dream) and it will not detract from my activities. I’ll have the time and the space to have it all.
But for now, I have my own both.
What I have is enough.
What I give is enough.
I am content to just be
P.S. I wrote this in about an hour and I decided I wanted to go snap some photos of the garden as it was as I was writing. I went out and took the images you see here, and picked some lavender to take a photo of, in my hand with the mess behind it. When I snapped the shutter something flew into frame so I snapped again.
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