Befores and Afters

A friend recently told me that from afar my life looked idyllic. I had to think about that. Idyllic;  Adj.: Extremely happy, peaceful or picturesque. 

Hmmm. I guess it could look that way.  I’ve always tried to be honest in my social media posts. I never use a filter or photoshop on people, especially not myself, and only filter other photos to bring the color up to the vibrancy of real life.  But one thing I recognize is that I am a master cropper. A castoff shoe, a cluttered countertop, a basket of laundry, all end up on the virtual cutting room floor. 

I crop stories, too, to protect my family’s privacy. I way over-share my own stuff, as you well know, but their stories are not mine, even though the pain they can cause often is.  It’s not at all that we don’t have trials.  We have scrapes and snags like everyone; marital fussing, belligerent offspring, embarrassingly deferred maintenance, and shocking sinks towering with three days of cereal bowls and soup pots. 

 I guess I don’t need to justify anything. We are a pretty typical family in most ways. I will admit that the Littles have an unusually close relationship. I thank God everyday for sending Nano for Jonah.  But we argue and fuss and get our feelings hurt and feel lost and alone and overwhelmed, just like everyone else. 

By cropping out some stories I guess my life can sometimes look like a glazed donut, but trust me when I say there have been heartbreaks and tragedies. Doughnuts have holes.  I’m not trying to depict our lives as one big “After” picture. Sometimes I just forget you haven’t seen the “Before”. 

*****

Before: our garden area, long neglected.  Last year at this time I was still nearly bedridden after three months of severe shingles and the the sledgehammer of Hashimoto’s. Neglected weeds send down deep roots. 

 This is AFTER two days of weeding!  

5 days in:

The never ending burn pile...

My goal had been to get all the prep work done during the week so we could plant that Saturday. We lost a day to rain, and the near equivalent to lollygagging, whining and faux weeding (which is when children look like they are weeding, but upon close inspection are counting the stripes on rolly polly bugs). 

That Friday, Guy and I had a date night, toodling around Lowe’s gathering cinder blocks and fence poles, but our plans for lush garden plantings were thwarted by endless racks of tomatoes and not much else. We got some takeout and watched the tail end of the sunset from the Petco parking lot.  Dating in the era of covid.  

In vegetable desperation, on Saturday we hopped over to the little garden center here in town. I seldom stop there, guilty of opting for low price over local.  It was so amazingly beautiful!  One might say... idyllic.



The nursery’s weathered, hand-built shelves were loaded with heirloom-this and hybrid-that, and held aloft over dozens of volunteers; Blue Columbine popping up at the bench corners, Hostas and stripped creepers blanketing the shady ground under benches, and sprays of Alyssum tumbling like giggling babies from old clay pots stacked in rusty wheelbarrows.





It looks like gardening perfection there. Of course, one doesn’t see the late nights spent over hundreds of weeks since this place came into being, or the bin out back of brown stems and dry, crunchy leaves on plants that didn’t make it long enough to find their forever home. 

(What the heck are my kids doing in the background? I didn’t see that happening when I took the picture!)

We bought veggies, mostly just the food we will eat, and a few that will become bug food for sure (I know, I know, cayenne and soap. I remind myself to get around to it every time I see a chewed up leaf).  And each child chose a pack of flowers, for our spirits. 

Then it was back to work...
 

When kids start fighting I should tell them to go get in a garden box. 

A transplanted lavender that is not happy. 

A volunteer!  Miner’s lettuce. To some, a weed, but not to me. It’s cute, the deer don’t like it, so I’m leaving it!

My sweetie, my smiling garden gnome. I’m really grateful to him. Outdoor work is not his favorite. Bugs. Specifically, mosquitoes.  He’s delicious to them, you see.  But he has been very willing. We are setting new fence posts to enclose the entire garden (I have been UNimpressed with the individual wire cages on the boxes, as my arms are not nine feet long). We weeded the beds on the landing and are moving ferns from the creek, which is cheap and exhausting. But he’s been a trouper. 

Blessedly, there are plantings around the property that we inherited. Thank heaven. It’s nice to have someone else’s Afters to give us some courage for our Befores. 

Welcome to the Jungle

There is nothing

so delightfully

sweetly

tenderly

surprising

as turning on my camera 

and finding a photo

of an angel.

I swear I can almost see her wings.

And all of a sudden I don't care so much

that the side of my house

is a dreadful jungle

of overgrown grass and ivy.

If it hadn't been,

maybe this little sprite 

wouldn't have decided 

to visit with her magic

and make it a Secret Garden

of Childhood Delights.

(Photos by Ellie)

In Hidden Places

The Library hosted a free class this afternoon.  It was about Edible Gardening.  I learned so much, but the lesson that most distilled in me was that I DON'T KNOW CRAP ABOUT GARDENING.

I want to garden.  I come from a childhood spent making fish-emulsion tea to thrill the lucky roots of asparagus ferns.  I aerated compost with a bellows before I was knee high to a rototiller.  I was raised to respect earthworms, to transport ladybugs by hand to waiting rose buds, and to honor honeybees.  It is so deep within my genes to garden that if you looked in a microscope at a cross section of my DNA, you'd see a well tilled and furrowed double helix.

But I stink at gardening.  

I do.  I was not blessed with my father's green thumbs.  

I grow stupendously healthy weed beds, and have had a thriving compost pile inhabited by both bumble-bees and baby mice, at the same time.  In this house, I am weighed down by the sins of a past generation who believed that 8 cubic tons of small river rock would be a fabulous idea.  If I had a time machine I would travel back to 1972 and smack those bozos upside the head with my garden-gloved hand.  Pop.  

So, quite like a little ant, I shuffle the rocks.  I move piles of depleted soil from one area to another.  I weed.  I plant.  I water and hope.  I try.  I get an occasional tomato out of the deal, but in some years I have even failed at growing zucchini.  Who does that?!  

Today after my class, I set out to the back yard with fresh resolve to look over the terrain and begin anew.  I moved more rocks, dug and raked and weeded.  I tried.  Again.  And I will try, and keep trying, because I want to be a gardener one day.

I went to the gardening bench in the play room where baskets of seeds wait well beyond their seasons for planting.  They wait until 'someday', hopefully before they are unusable, when I will get them into the ground.  And this afternoon, amid the seeds I found a gift, and a new lesson.  

Under my bench was a flowerpot that I had placed there at least a year ago, maybe two.  It had been covered with old gloves and forgotten.  As I lifted off the gloves I was so surprised to see that the pot was full of little brown bulbs, and in their dark, cool hiding place, they had started to grow.  Green stems reached hopefully upward.  They must have thought (because all bulbs think, you know) that they were under the ground, just pushing up to find the sun.  It was lucky I found them so that I could hurry and get them into the ground before they dried out.  But I can't pretend I have done them any favor in finding them.  

I saw in them a drive to grow and develop that was so strong, that it didn't matter they were not in the ideal place to do so.  Somehow, there in the dark, that little spark of life decided that this was it's time.  Time to grow.

***

I truly believe that when we desire to grow, we do, if only in unseen ways.  Maybe not in the places we even thought we would or could.  In our hidden places, we find green, new growth.  Tender shoots, that indeed are vulnerable and fragile, break through, even if we don't know it's happening.

I planted them, the bulbs.

  They deserved it after toiling in the dark and dry.  Let's hope they didn't notice that my thumbs aren't all that green.  

Thoughts from the hammock

A conversation with my sweetie:

"Why are you into

working on the yard all of a sudden?"

 

"What do you mean?"

 

"I thought you didn't like yard work."

 

"I don't, but you can't do it now, and I know it matters to you."

 

*****

 

I wandered out to the back yard to watch Guy plant some of the lovely flowers he bought.  A few weeks ago a crew of church folks came and cleaned winter's death from the ground, and left it welcoming and hopeful for Spring.  I followed Guy's hands as he worked and felt the itch in my arms to join him; the imaginary soil under my nails.  The whispers of "need to" and "should" in my heart began their little battle with the logic-and-practicality lobes of my brain.  Gardening makes me want to work, plan, improve, perfect.

After Guy felt done planting (though there were plants still waiting their turn from their black plastic pots), he sat down in the hammock.  He has the gift of being able to be "done" and not have to work himself into the ground.  The hammock scene called to me, so I made my way across the uneven lawn and settled in under his arm.

At first, I only noticed his arm under my head and the feel of the hammock on my back.  My mind was an airport terminal of weary travelers waiting their turn to be processed.  Soon the tree above us groaned, barely beckoning me away from my crowd of frustrated thoughts, the carousel of un-handled baggage going round and round and round in my mind.  A bold squirrel with huge black eyes, who clearly owns the yard, emerged from the mulberry  and demanded, "What is the meaning of this?" with his arched tail.  Bird's voices, that had been there all along, began to ease over the rickety fence and to stretch down from hidden places in the trees.  Somewhere, dozens of somewheres, a chorus of wind chimes sang together as though they were sharing the same secret. 

A sudden raucous gust of wind lifted the gently bobbing spring branches over our heads with a whip and a thrilling wave, and raised up music from the new leaves like a rushing green river.  I fell up, into the branches, and was engulfed by the intensity that mocked how un-noteworthy a moment this was.  My vision held only the branches overhead as they settled into whispers of sea foam that meets wet sand, only to leap again like a crowd in a grandstand in united celebration with the next gust of wind.  A hummingbird buzzed through the shuffling green-clad crowd and somehow found easy footing on a slender, swimming branch.

I floated up beside it and held on.  Suddenly nothing mattered in my head anymore, just the rush and thunder and calm of the wind in the trees that, despite my inattention, had always been there.

*****

 

In the past few days I have been hearing so many "should's";
- in my own harsh mind,
- on the lips of friends as they question their parenting abilities,
- and in articles and posts from people I have never met that scream at me
 in yellow highlighter
 where my shortcomings lie.
 
When I focus all of my attention on them, they seem so important. 

*
Then I listen...

 

My friend Ellen hears me critique myself and gently points out how I gravitate towards self-shaming.

 

Kind Chantal reminds me over and over that we are all on our own journey, all of us trying, and that our Creator would never judge us as harshly as we often judge ourselves.

My gentle husband reminds me that my own heart is where
 I have always found my greatest answers.

Wise Amanda points me to all that I am doing right.

And Kathy, her heart as open as the sky, takes my concerns, wraps them lovingly,
and hands them back to me with all of their sharp edges carefully tucked away.

*****
For the past two years, there have been no irises.
This winter was so cold it killed my 13 year old rose geranium,
but because of the harshness of winter, the irises have produced a bounty
 to be envied by a seasoned gardener... which I am not.

*****
I have given away cuttings from my old geranium to many people over the years.
I know I can get a cutting from one of them, and start over again.

*****
The loveliest spots in my garden this year have surprised me.  They are the places
 I have been cultivating for years in my awkward way. 
It took the efforts of others to bring the polish to my flowering beds,
but what was there
was already going to be beautiful.