Weeding to Eden: a life

A gathering in comes toward the end of many people’s lives, not of friends and family though that can happen too, but of what has been and who we thought we were. Not that we know when we will die, but we know when we are, at best, in the last decade or two.

We revisit our lives as a storyline, connecting dots, finding patterns, rediscovering visions, accepting failures. With luck we are able to love where we once did not. Ourselves and others.

Then we edit. What is to be weeded out? What to be given gently as gift? What to be treasured? What to be forgiven? What to be wrapped up and set aside to free ourselves for one more great discovery or great work?

. . .

I have a garden, a city garden. It’s relatively quiet, with robins, cardinals, mourning doves, wrens, and a woodpecker – and wisteria arbor, cherry trees and Japanese weeping maples, flowering bushes, ferns, iris, peonies, walls of ivy, and a pool. Over years of tweaking, tending, planting, and weeding it has become my eden. In warm weather I eat breakfast there and in the late afternoons I swim.

Homesteading in Tennessee 40 years ago, I had a raised-bed vegetable garden alongside a slate-bottomed spring-fed creek. It included several varieties of tomatoes, lettuce, squash, and potatoes, plus broccoli, cauliflower, eggplant, okra, peas, green beans, cucumbers, and prize asparagus. It was surrounded by purple iris transplanted from the woods where a house had burnt to its foundation decades before.

That garden saved my life by saving my spirit when my then-husband descended into violence. 

. . . 

The vegetable gardens of my youth could hardly be called gardens. They contained tomato and cucumber plants entwined with weeds. Lettuce and cabbage were also planted but, courtesy of worms, became green lace before we could eat them.

Even so, the tomatoes and cucumbers bore fruit. My brother would snap off a tomato or cuke to eat whole and unwashed.

The garden shamed me somehow. It was theoretically a 4-H project of my brother’s, but so far as I knew no one tended it. Truth is, my memories are vague, tied up with do wives and girls do farm work or not? There was a sharp divide between the families where women worked the farm along with the men and those where women did not. Those who did were in the majority, but I’m sure my mother made clear from the get go she was not going to be among them, which is probably why I did not do outdoor chores either except for a pre-teen period when I was to give a bucket of crushed oyster shells daily to the hens and “pick” the eggs from the filthy nests. That only lasted a few months. I believe I vomited in the henhouse.

The sweet corn was in my father’s domain, weeded by machine and tended as diligently as the field corn. Sweet corn was next to God.

. . . 

My mother did have a flower garden, a sort of flower moat that provided protection for the lawn and house from the farm buildings. Roses covered the crumbling facade of the porch, lilac bushes blocked out the unkempt woods, and a single Oriental poppy stood, tall, red, and flashy among humble bleeding hearts, daisies, and tiger lilies. 

The poppy still occupies space in my dreams as I weed the flower garden, tending my mother’s and my weedy relationship.

. . . 

So I gather in and round out as I sit in an eden neither my mother nor father – nor I – could have imagined. I weed so the field is clear for one more great discovery or great work. 

 

11 thoughts on “Weeding to Eden: a life

  1. Delightful! Thoughtful reflections of gardens worth remembering, and why we still care… Once a bite of the apple’s been taken, most cannot remember they were even there… J…

  2. Thankyou, dearest Patricia….
    I love your tender and powerful way of expressing all that surrounds you and that is in you…. I love your writing…. I can always feel it…. and sometimes taste it…. isn’t that what it’s all about?❤️🆎

  3. Lovely, Patricia!

    Like you, I have seen that my relationships with the departed can go on evolving after they pass. It was a surprise to me, but it jibes with something I’m learning in NVC, that what we think about other people is mostly about us, & vice versa.

  4. I feel your core in this–unadorned, unabashed, raw, yet with the glow of a pearl. Precious, as natural as your life itself.

  5. Thank you as always Patricia for this soulful, gentle heartfelt writing.
    I follow you with a loving heart, embracing your openness, vulnerability, and always wishing to respect your boundaries. Oddly, as different as we are and our lives have been, I sense that we are threads cut from similar cloths. This is not a connection I often make. It has been and is with you…Sisters? No. Relatives? I think so. I am touched by your eased passion as you delve to come to terms with life in general and your life in particular. I appreciate and value you. Your sharing helps me be a better, more accepting me.

  6. I am also going through that garden tending, too. It started in earnest a few months ago. Gwen and I were making plans for a 50th wedding anniversary trip to Hawaii when her robust health suddenly started to decline. It turned out that she had an undetected UTI, which coupled with her diabetes manifest itself as delirium, loss of balance and other significant problems. I’m not sure where it will go, but what I do know is that the landscape has changed and, as you say, the field is being “weeded.” I have read your postings for the past couple of years and often been tempted to reply, but always hesitated. Now it seems appropriate as we do begin to acknowledge our mortality that it is way past time for me to say, “Thank You.” And also to confess that I have been remiss for many decades in neglecting to say, in the context of your thoughts, that amidst the weeds there were beautiful flowers that I didn’t or wouldn’t recognize. But the memory of them has never been lost. And as I “tend my garden” I am careful to not plow them under as being of no purpose or place in the larger picture. Thank you for making a difference in the person I became…because of you.

    • Thank you for your posting. I’m glad you did. Sorry for your news. At one month shy of 77 I am weeding, fertilizing and replanting. Amazing experience. Have no idea what lies around the corner.—Noen of us do.

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