In the Garden

 

I.

My friend Laurie is traveling with three other garden lovers, James and John, and a cousin, to visit England’s best. Perhaps you are as envious as I to hear that they are staying a few days at Sissinghurst. These are her idyllic photographs.

 

I’d urged her not to miss Lamb House while in the vicinity and lent her Joan Aiken’s book, The Haunting of Lamb House.   Given me nearly 30 years ago by a dear friend, who inscribed the inside (as booklovers do with friends), it’s one I sometimes pull to read again, still intrigued by the story of its three sequential inhabitants (one of them Henry James) and their ghostly connections.

 

II.

All three of those lucky travelers are creative gardeners themselves…which got me to thinking about the Chapel Hill Garden tour my neighbor Kim took me on ten days ago.  Each of the places we saw couldn’t have been more different.  Luckily, we began at the one farthest out of town, one belonging to a young couple named King.  If theirs had been the only one on tour, we’d have been happy. 

On what I think may be only half an acre, and in only 13 years, the two (he told us that she designs and he digs) have created pockets of beauty at every turn, from the flowery spring of the front gardens, to the meditative areas of the side, and the surprisingly charming back, where they have made a dry creek bed with stones and  subtly placed lengths of dark wood fallen from trees.

Other gardens on the tour had interesting points to admire, but nothing inspired me like this first one.  I mean inspire…as in breathing in.

To wit:  every single day since that visit, I have been out in the yard trying to revive something of my growing spaces, too.  I don’t have their neatly laid out corner lot (my lot-lines would rival a demonic maze).  And I will never be a gardener like these more dedicated ones.  I love gardens, are inspired by their beauty, but though I try, soils I trod on do not seem to respect my efforts or wishes.  When I find something that will flower, deer, rabbits, and other groundlings make meals of them. 

Nonetheless, post-Garden Tour, out I headed, taking with me the chief thing I learned from the Kings:  one plot at a time. 

Something else was pushing me forward, for which I cannot account.  Along with their inspiration, came an unusual amount of energy.  Really, it was as if someone had infected me with a lot of Vitamin B.

Early each morning, I began (one plot at a time) to search out potential in the mess of an area, and dig into it.  Three or four hours would go by while I pulled weeds and ivy, dug up and carried stones for borders and extended paths…making design, of sorts, the way I make art with whatever comes to me. 

I acquired 5 large slabs to use as stepping stones…at 290 lbs…but realized once I got them home that their weight didn’t allow me to get more than two out of the car.  Steve Winkler, our intrepid, kind, and patient landscape gardener, stopped by and put them in place.  “I couldn’t let you ride around with them in your car forever,” he said.

Here and there, I added pieces of interest (i.e., interest to me)…things from dug-up ground, streets walked, thrift stores, and nice people who indulge my eccentricities…an old wire chair, repainted baskets and pots planted with something brighter (and deer proof). 

Kim arrived one afternoon with a tall purple fixture from her shed, and said, “It needs a bright color.”  We set it to center that little plot, and I painted it sky blue.  Ah. Henry Mitchell would finally nod his approval at something I did in the garden.  (It also, by the way, marks with dignity a little pet burial ground Alexander had begun back there.)

In my memory garden, I found larger stones that wouldn’t disappear in mud and weeds.  Alexander dug out the circles and helped me place the black ones carefully.

Then, ever thinking, he began work on a miniature bike-race track behind one of the benches…a two-day project of his own. I consider that part of a garden, too.

 

 

I gave him the task of painting two birdhouses to post on the back fence, joining the other three made by my neighbor Dail.  When I turned the larger one over, there was Alexander’s 4 year old "signature”…his holiday gift to me in 2017.

 

III.

One day when my knees refused to bend to yet another stone, I attacked the shed, hanging tools on real hooks and finding, once they were off the floor, a few more hiding  (how we accumulated three metal rakes of various ages, I don’t know).  Sport toys, bags of garden nutrients, etc, car-wash tools, out-of-season door wreaths, and camp chairs had their comeuppance. I hope it stays that way for a while.

 

IV.

When one morning I wandered out into the back treed lot I intend to keep ungardened and unhoused, I finally noticed its young maple forest hiding in the tangles of thick thorny Elaeagnus…known in our neighborhood as “ugliagnus” for its aggressive, weather-resistant, critter-resistant, disease-resistant, even clipper-resistant invasions.  Back to the shed I went, trying out one implement after the other until I found one sharp enough to cut down the trunks of those trespassers. 

For two days, I cut, untangled, yanked, pulled and piled, until the spindly maples lifted their grateful arms to the sky. 

 

V.

 

Rain here in our town falls only 10 drops at a time every other week, giving illustration to that precious line of old English poetry, …the small rain down will rain…  I save dishwater to use on the herbs and pots.  But last night I heard the roof tingle, and this morning the top layer of ground, at least, was wet with a whole quarter-inch of it.  Indeed, this afternoon as I write this, it’s been falling steadily, if lightly, keeping me out of the garden (but not stopping me from thinking about it).

And yet, dry as we have been, spring has been the most flowery we’ve seen in a long time.  Thank goodness for other people’s gardens, April-rich with fuchsia azaleas and purple irises, white and pink dogwood.  Another strange gift of the season.

 

VI.

Soon enough, after our rainy respite today, the stone path will be laid, and I’ll figure out my next little plot to renew.

I hope you are in the garden, too, one way or another…even if we are not bedded down in Sissinghurst, enjoying the elegant gardens of an old country.

Privilege

Good morning.   Two weeks ago browsing the library shelves for memoirs I had on my growing list,  I came across Melinda Gates’ The Next Day.  Huh, I thought.  Not usually the kind I’d choose…still, a memoir.

Gates’ book is a slim volume about transitions in life…hers particularly, but often related to others’ as well.  I’d also chosen two books of short stories, my favorite bedtime reading, but night after night, I put those back in the library bag, unhappy with their murky pretensions.  On the third night I picked up Gates.

For a small book, it isn’t a fast read.  Each chapter having its own life lesson for her, it was easy to pick up, put down, pick up later, etc.  I’m a famously fast reader, but this one seemed to defy quickness.  It unfolded the way a journal would, the writer laying down facts and feelings about her life, as if she knew someone would read it eventually. So that’s how I read through it.

It was interesting enough even to mark some points I wanted to pass on to you or to my reading group, and when I finished it the bookmarks remained.  Not new thoughts about life…about trying too hard to organize your life, about accepting that life has its own agenda for you, about grief and caring, about how strength finds you when you need it…but something remindable, relatable.

Which brings me, after all this overly-long preface, back to the title of this post.  From the beginning, Melinda Gates lays down the obvious but necessary base to the way she has gone through the many transitions in her life until she has reached 60.

“I recognize….I’ve benefited from a tremendous amount of privilege, and there’s no question that has insulated me from some of life’s hardships in ways that have limited my perspective.”  No, I don’t think she’s soft-pedaling an excuse.  I’m having a hard time calling up what I mean by that…sorry.  After all, the point of her considerable philanthropy is deliberately directed to women who do not have privilege. 

The next morning, I woke up thinking about what it takes to call oneself privileged.

What is it we consider privilege? The Oxford says it is “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.”  You can be born into it, inherit it, earn it, fall into it.  It isn’t only about wealth, but chance and something else I am having trouble naming…something to do with one’s integral being, I think.  I don’t know that we always use the word correctly…am I “privileged to know you?”  Is it a “privilege to accept this award?”

And is “immunity” a really good point here?

 Without anything like Gates’ resources, her connections, her public and private successes, I nonetheless feel privileged. There have been rough places along the way, yes, searing, heartbreaking, betrayals and missed-steps…stumbling through times I have been horribly blind, self-serving, my own worst fall-woman.  But still coming through thanks to privilege…people to fall back on, eventually, jobs to arise when needed, kindness seen and unseen, pure chance. Even in my poorest days, I had a roof over me, and something to eat.  That and my health have grounded me in privilege.

And no, I’m not bragging (or whatever I am failing to call it), either. I think privilege is something many of us ignore about our circumstances.  Those who know, whatever their circumstances, that life has afforded them sustenance, know privilege.

I’ll stop here now, still thinking this through.  But it occurred to me to send a version of my first draft to my PORCH neighborhoods in my monthly call for food donations, and it sparked quite a lot of generosity…clearly they, too, understood what privilege meant and are trying to share it.

Perhaps you will respond with your own thoughts or comments on mine…I’d welcome them. 

Meanwhile, the weather suddenly turning to early summer and the ground blossoming with spring, I’m off to find something to do in the yard.   Another kind of privilege?

Ice

 

 

“How comfortable are you walking on ice?” the vestigial questionnaire asks.  1 – 10.  

I mark 0.

On the way home from the wellness center, I begin to think about a lot of people who are not comfortable on ice, or with ice, skating thinly on it or around it, for one reason or another.  This month and last, ice has been our chief weather, fast turned metaphor, fast turning allegory.

This year, I’ve decided to read memoirs…looking, as I put it yesterday to my uncle’s niece in Scotland, for clues to the way people persevere, for what gives us the resilience (dare I say hope?) of brain and body to weather what comes.  Beginning with a published list, then asking my reading friends for suggestions, then perusing the library shelves, I came up with some I hadn’t known, as well as some already read…even a long time before..and wanted to befriend again.

I’ve found a few important clues so far, two of which…maybe three…I’m bringing to our book group Wednesday night to begin a discussion about it (we were founded to have such discussions).

 

The first, found in re-reading one of the bravest books I know, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior: a girlhood among ghosts, from the ‘70s, opens wide the field for me:

“I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes,” she writes in an early chapter, “White Tigers”.

Yes, I thought…it’s a good ground rule for considering this and a lot of life-searing searches, isn’t it?

Sure enough, it occurred as the resolution of a novel I picked up on a whim between reading lives. Carys Davies’ Clear, set in the Scottish clearances of the mid-1800’s on a far north island inhabited by only one man, is a story of three lives intimately wrapped in estranged languages. (In fairness, I won’t tell more, but urge you toward it in the spirit of mind-enlarging.)

In between those books, I paged through Dinners with Ruth, Nina Totenberg’s memoir on the power of friendships.  While Kingston’s and Totenberg’s books (not to mention Davies’) are planets apart in all the ways I can think of, Totenberg’s friendships, both highly public and meaningfully, privately supportive, reminded me mostly of the way in which most of our women’s lives work, whatever we are or do. 

It’s at the end that she discovers what is behind resilience.  Talking about the remarkable  people (women and men) with whom she has “had the fortune to have…as friends,” and are gone now, she wonders what they might think of the current world they have left behind, the one each has worked so hard to set right, to make better and more open to justice and sense:

“I am struck by the fact that no matter their origins or paths in life, all of them shared a common trait: optimism.  Today’s events, at home and abroad, would surely test that optimism, but while I think each of them would be realistic about the challenges we face, they would all be determined to persevere.  As Ruth [Bader Ginsburg] often said, “My story is hopeful.”

***********************************

I like my new vestigial therapist.  My first homework, she tells me, is to stand between, but not touch, the walls of a corner, feet together, while I close my eyes and keep my balance for 30 seconds at a time.  (Not as easy as you think when you have only one ear working.) Then, in the same corner, I am to open my eyes, look up, look down, look to one side, then the other. And come back to center. Repeat.

Talk about a good metaphor for what perseverance, resilience, and a widened view of life’s possibilities (and paradoxes) can give us.  Even if I can’t ever walk over ice, I am coming to know the way to keep myself from traversing whatever landscape I do come to, whatever dissonance or dark surrounds me.  Hoping to get it right.

 

           

 

 

 

On Time

 

"Luminaries such as [Husserl and Heidegger], who spent much of their prolific careers on trying to fathom the subjective experience of time, concluded that it is one of the most difficult of all phenomenological problems to understand..." (1)

 

It’s four days to the New Year, and, perhaps not surprisingly, I’m thinking about time.  Not so much years…I can’t seem to look backwards with any accuracy.  And not in age…there again, how I calculate my own age (years or intrinsic feeling?) is a conundrum, and how I calculate the age of others by looking at them is futile.

Time during the day is easy…clocks ring, timers buzz, the sun appears and then disappears, often in a purple-scarlet blaze out the back windows that has nothing to do with the clock.

The week, however, is the strangest of all counts:  I know how many days have passed not so much by the calendar, but when the laundry needs to be done.  Otherwise, a Tuesday is the same as Thursday or even Saturday.  What day is it? is a frequent question I wake up to.  (Is this the day I put the trash out?)

Time is, and ever has been, my nemesis.  Nobody’s time (except my sister’s at 4pm when it’s time for crossword puzzles) seems to suit mine, or I it.  I’m speaking of daytime, hourtime, mealtime, even yeartime. People ask if I am free next month at 2pm on Tuesday, and even if I put it on the calendar, it doesn’t seem real.  Next month is a blank, calendar notation or no.

In that regard, I’m always amazed at people who can plan trips a year…even six months…in advance.  Who knows what will happen before then to challenge time?

I don’t bother any more trying to figure out why…it just is the way it is and I am. 

But I can’t help adding one scientist’s words:  “Our sense of time is often linked to our ability to recall past experiences, and disruptions in memory can affect our temporal perception.”  Hmmm.

 

It turns out that I am not the only one with a different sense of time.  A few days ago, I’d pulled Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat off a high bookshelf, thinking to explore further an issue with balance, this time in a narrative rather than the tiresome clinical way (I am nothing if not narrative in persuasion).  Therein, I found that the weirdness of time inhabits others, too.

 Mine, it doesn’t seem, is not what the med men would call pathologic, but there it is:  somewhere in the brain is a mechanism that regulates time by a pulse that doesn’t have anything to do with the clock. Or calendar (so often mishandled over the centuries, anyway, we might as well ignore it). Mine, like others, has a mind of its own.

If I had to guess, I’d say that I am much more tuned to the call of seasons for time, not only the four we also manage to misidentify (spring begins March 21? Not in the south or north, either), but also the subplots of each.  What seems springlike when the snowdrops pop up is only chapter one. When swimming temperature in the ocean arrives, and when it leaves, when the azaleas choose to bloom…all subplots. 

What day do sweaters go back into the storage box?  What day does wool become the friend against chill?  Or linen the breathability in sweltering summer…which usually ends here in October, by the way.  Those are the regulators of my time…the weather having its say as well as the mean temperature.

Even a single day regulates itself by sun or cloud, wind or rain, chill or mist or aridity.  The hours within begin or end later or sooner depending.  Mood, inspired by weather, can dictate my perception of time...even space.

 

But back to laundry-time, which changes with the seasons as well.  Less chronologically challenged housekeepers might be “Monday is wash day” types, but I’m not, and neither is my pile of soiled clothing, towels, sheets, etc., which seems to be as eccentric as I am with time.

Now that it’s winter, there are fewer of certain things to wash…shirts, slacks…and more of others…socks (I can’t seem to keep them in the drawer for long) and undershirts.  When spring ascends into summer, those items made in cotton and linen (thus ironing begins) also ascend in height in the laundry basket; though admittedly lighter and smaller, they take up a third more washing time than in winter.  The day doesn’t matter…some weeks it’s Friday and next Thursday, some weeks it’s Wednesday, Saturday and next Friday again.

None of this dismays me.  It’s part of the homeliness of life that something like when I do the wash tells me about the days passing.  There are so many other and better things to take up time than time itself.

Like art.  How long does it take you to make one of your cards, asked a friend recently as holiday-card season began.  I don’t know, I told him…sometimes five minutes; sometimes two days.  It depends.  I've had pieces of larger art take more than five years, but unless I happen to know the date of origin, I'm not counting.

  

Ah.  Perhaps I have found the ticking mechanism I travel with: it depends.  A nice subjective way of passing time.

Meanwhile, I wish to all a new year of good, whenever it begins for you.

 

(1)            Frontier Psychiatry. 2021 May 7;12:668633. Distortions: A Systematic Review of Cases Characteristic of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, Blom, Nanuashvili, Waters