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.