The Garden is Perspective Part 2 | (#19)
“Why do not more folks have gardens? It’s clear to me. It is almost a full-time job. Add in the cost of the seeds/plants, the soil amendments, fertilizers, tillers, etc. along with the work of planting and harvesting, and Stouffer’s prepared meals become a clear choice for most households.”
My Good Gardening Friend, an expert vegetable grower, sent me a letter. That bit about frozen dinners is a snippet from one of his letters. He was responding to my questions about growing a garden on this sand dune at this home we are renting on this island in Eastern North Carolina.
Below are some of my replies to his letters.
My Good Gardening Friend!
As I hinted at in my last letter, the gardens we have started at my parent’s home are not so much for my dad.1 On any given day, it’s a toss-up whether he would prefer to grow vegetables or burn off his eyebrows.
A garden - the soil, the green, the change, the growing, the life, the flowers, the butterflies, the songs, the tradition, the food - is for my mom.
She is not passionate about it. She is not inclined to work too hard on it these days. She would not study up on how to grow a better garden unless the lessons came packaged in a BBC murder mystery series. (That’s an overstatement. If the majority of characters have a British accent and someone is murdered, that’ll work too). She even seems hesitant to eat from her garden these days. Not sure why.
But the garden is comforting. It piques her curiosity. Most every day she takes her self out to be with the garden. She strolls around. “Putters” is a word. She does a bit here and there. She is looking down, at the flowers, at the soil, at the insects, at the fruit. She is listening, smelling, sensing. When she opens her eyes and looks up, she yells at my dad.
He is usually running past her with a sharp tool. In rhythm with his stride, he is chanting to himself “Cutting, cutting, cutting”. If my mom dares to ask what he is doing, and he deigns to respond, he says, “pruning.”
Sometimes she risks her life, grabs his arm as he passes, and says, pointing at a plant or flower or vegetable, “Look at this! Have you ever seen that before? What is that? Is it poisonous? Is it ready to eat?”
Interrupted from his daily mission to cut anything that has grown below the reach of a giraffe’s neck, he kind of skids to a stop, huffing and puffing. He leans over and looks at whatever mom is pointing to. He sighs, furrows his brow. Presses a straight index finger to his lips. He tries to show her that he is applying serious brain power to the question she has asked.
He sighs again. He sighs loudly to, in his view, subtly intimate that there are more important things that are not getting done while he is doing nothing just standing here looking at things. He says, through another exasperated sigh, thinking “no good deed…”, getting more impatient with his saintly effort to be polite and his above-and-beyond show of goodwill…through all of this he says,
“I don’t have a clue. Ask Matt.”
And then he runs. He runs to cut.2
In Gratitude,
Matt
Today’s Traveller: What important thing are you not taking time for today because of what you have been used to doing yesterdays?
Here is a video from a few years ago about starting a garden at my parents home, where my mom is doing the work while I talk about it. Caught!
My father is amazing. You can see some of this in the video where we are talking about the garden and what it contributes to our well-being. He is in his 70s. They have been married over 50 years. He wants to learn. He wants to be ever more correct. He wants to see the errors in his reasoning and adjust and adapt. He does not like it but he is doing it. I am learning from his effort. ]