By Margie
Davis '94M.A.
It had been a year of losses.
Deaths, divorce, disease, you name it. Just when I thought I
had nothing left to lose, came a letter from the city informing
me that it was purchasing my home to make room for a parking lot.
I tried to look at it philosophically. The unexpected windfall
would pay my tuition to nursing school. Still, it meant leaving
my home of 15 years.
The loss was especially devastating since over time I had transformed
a bare backyard into a tangle of gardens: herb, flower, vegetable
and even what I called my orchard, two heirloom apple trees. Those
I expected to be the most sympathetic, my fellow church members,
reacted to my complaints with testy impatience: "You got paid,
right?"
I found a house, a red cottage on two big lots. Plenty of room
for four dogs and three cats and gardening. Plenty of room to
expand the orchard.
While I was delivering boxes to the cottage, someone made off
with my apple trees. Someone dug up the tulip and daffodil beds,
taking every bulb.
Plans for a new garden were buried. I went to school, to the
hospital, and home. I stopped praying. Why bother? Nearly everything
I valued had been dug out of my life.
In the spring I began my psychiatric rotation. Students couldn't
do much for these patients, we were told. Just try to get them
to talk, get them to do the work they were here to do.
The patient assigned to me was a small, sad-eyed woman who frequently
sighed deeply. I didn't feel any more cheerful than she did; we
must have looked quite a pair.
As we spoke, a few facts emerged. Married only two years, she
was the ugly duckling in a family of high-flying swans. Her stepchildren
made fun of her, the mother-in-law criticized her, and her husband
urged her to make something of herself. The family, she said,
complained at the amount of time she spent in her gardens.
Gardens?
She had five.
She'd cleared the plots herself, connecting the gardens with
a series of stone pathways. Some of the stones she'd collected
from the surface of the land, others she'd dug up in the process
of preparing the plots for planting.
The gardening gave her plenty of time to think about her worthlessness.
"I know the problem is in me," she said but feared what she might
find if she looked too deeply. She put her hands over her chest.
"There's something heavy laying here, like a rock. And if you
bring up one, then you have to bring up the next one and the next
one. I don't think that's what my family has in mind. They want
me to find something worthwhile to do."
Out of my own unhappy heart, inspiration struck. I held out
a fist, then relaxed it open. "The earth freezes in winter, then
thaws in spring, bringing rocks up to the surface. We dig them
up and haul them away because we can't plant our gardens until
the rocks are out of the way, right? Every year you think you
must have got them all out, but next spring there's a whole new
cartload. It's part of the natural cycle of life, growth, discovery,
death, even."
I told her about a book I used to read my nephew. A frog plants
a garden, then wears himself out trying to get the seeds to come
up. He yells, he sings, he reads to them. Nothing doing. The seeds
will come up, I'd tell my nephew, in seed time. Not too soon,
not too late, but when it's juuuuuuuust right.
I thought I'd forgotten that story.
My patient warmed to the idea of self-exploration as gardening.
When we parted she hugged me long and hard. By the time I returned
for my next assignment she had been discharged.
That April day I walked outside with the dogs. It was almost
too late to think about a garden, but once the first stones have
been brought to the surface and hauled away, once a plot has been
cleared, how can you not? There was never a time when I hadn't
had something in the ground. Never a time when I hadn't had something
that marked a place as my own. Never a year when I hadn't lived
in seed time.
Maybe a few herbs, I thought grudgingly. Nothing more, I just
wasn't up to it. I thought of my patient and her five gardens.
Well, now.
Maybe I could do a couple of tomatoes, a pepper or two. Sunflowers
would look nice in that corner. Corn. Cukes along the fence, and
here, along the pavement, a row of strawberries. Maybe, in time,
a couple of apple trees.
My dogs ran around me in big, loopy circles, happy to have me
outside at last. Odd I hadn't noticed before how nice bird feeders
would look here in this pine outside my front room. Funny I hadn't
really noticed the pine before.
From the back of the garage I hauled out my wheelbarrow, my
shovel, my garden gloves. Then I got down to the work I was here
to do.
Margie Davis is a writer living in South Bend.
(January 2005)
