Did I say, "the sun came out and we headed for the garden"? Some modernday mother wagoning off into the sunset with cute kids? Did I give you the impression that the garden is a peaceful place where tension melts with the spring rains?
Well, maybe for a pansy.
The anxiety is wound only in me, and the earth is one of the few places that pulls that tiger by the tail in a way that sends me spinning. Yesterday afternoon, I dug into my bed of greens with thoughts of transforming it into carrots.
The topside mess of cleavers, mache, sprouting broccolli, kale, and other green unidentifiables went to the bunnies. I discovered a couple of heads of lettuce buried in there, too, which I took out for us. Then I started digging.
What roots! Where was the dirt? Spade after spade turned up a tightly laced matrix of fine hairy root mass (oh, tightly wound, like me!) and the turning created... lumps. I cast a glance at the carrot starts my friend, Nick, had passed to me and remembered my solemn vow to have them in this week. Planted into... lumps?
Now, this is a little embarrassing. I've been gardening for years, and still I'm stymied by these little adjustments to my vision. I could have straightened my glasses. But no. Instead I looked around my yard. Twenty trees and bushes in a holding spot in the earth waiting to have their beds dug. A patch of grass slated to be obliterated while daily it steals into every other bed around it. A tree to come down. And then, again, the grasssssses, insssidiousss grassses creeeping into everythingandall.
Sigh.
Some days you just want to throw down your shovel. What would a Good Gardener do? He** if I know. But I'll tell you what I did.
I kept digging. It got a little less lumpy.
And I'm thinking: maybe I can get my orange food from something other than a root crop. I eat too dang many carrots, anyway.
Calendar and Current Events
12 years ago
1 comment:
Such fire in your performance last night at the poetry reading at the Axe and Fiddle in Cottage Grove. Under the warm glow of the spotlights, you were an electrifying contrast to the grizzled, grey- and long-haired poet denizens of the woods thereabouts! And you were sober, too! (smile) There comes a point, I sense, where the relative smallness of the community surrounding a poetry reading, the watershed container which catches it, lends such events a uniquely precious and intimate edge - readings growing from and blending with the landscape. I left, last night, with a strong sense of local poetry as an invocation of sorts, an ode to the marriage of people and place, the location and affirmation of community, and the moral consequences of history as it coheres in specific places. Surely re-storing ourselves and our landscapes is one and the same as re-storying our world, too. And our worlds and these stories will be definingly local - birthed, voiced, shared. Hooray for local poetry readings!
Your poem about birth speaks so much to me about the New Jerusalem rising now in our midst. Will you place the poems you read upon the web, Kristin? I do hope so.
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