gardening – Mama the Reader

I’ve had a few days alone as the kids are on spring break and on a trip with their dad. Truthfully, I’ve got neither the cash nor the time for a trip right now, and I am always a little anxious with them away, but I’m so happy they get the chance to go. I am in full swing at work with only about 4 weeks left of class this semester. Student meetings and a visiting poet today and papers pouring in and reports to complete for administrative purposes. I’m almost drowning, but I don’t mind since I’ve come to associate this frantic April pace with a long rest that is coming soon enough. Summer is around the corner.

Yesterday my friend indulged me in a belated birthday treat that we’ve had on the calendar for weeks. I went to a traditional Korean sauna, and it was outside of my comfort zone in ways (gender segregated nude areas), but it always feels so good to push myself to do something new. I don’t do it enough. I ended up getting a “body shampoo” which actually means someone scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed every dead skin particle off my body and left me feeling like a baby. It was a perfect ritual to mark spring and newness. I need to shed so many things, I think. And so often our bodies are the tools through which we can get to something else. I see that idea reflected more and more as I age.

After that, I spent five hours lounging in their various saunas – lined with anything from amethyst to charcoal to clay. As we walked out into the Atlanta spring sun, it felt like nothing was left in my skin that was there when I walked in. Newness is good.

Life has evened out in a way that, to be totally honest, makes me feel really strange. I spent the last two years shedding layer upon layer, and now what? I am just here and moving along at a usual pace and there are no scary surprises or catastrophes or major adjustments. I think yesterday’s experience felt so good because it has been too long since I jumped out of my comfort zone (after two solid years of living every single second outside of it). It’s easy to fall back into that human desire for complacency and consistency, isn’t it? Sometimes we need experiences – little or big – to shake us up again.

Two summers ago, I read Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea at the recommendation of a friend. It resonated with me in a major way, and I like to revisit it every now and then. Lindbergh says, “It isn’t for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for that long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.”

I think I am on the long uphill climb now. The part where I am out of the woods, but now I figure out what I want and how to get it and do the hard work of plowing ahead to get there. I want so many things — stability and comfort and solid ground but also persistent renewal and new challenges. I’m grateful for the wide open road in front of me, and the different sort of stability that I feel having spent two years on my own feet in some rocky waters. I don’t want those same kind of rocks again, but I do want some new terrain on this uphill climb. I want to see new places and have the faith to pursue what I know is coming for me. More.

Our back patio is overflowing with so much green – thanks to my grandad’s generosity and my inherited love for homegrown food. The kids help pick greens every night now – lettuces and chard and kale that make their way to the dinner table. We’ve created this place somehow with neighbors and friends and our own little village of sorts. I was making dinner one night last week to glance up and catch a glimpse out the back patio door of my two playing with a crowd of neighborhood kids with bare feet and short sleeves and late daylight. It was the simplest of moments but the one I scribbled on paper for my gratitude jar that night. Here we are in a home we love with predictable routines and a solid foundation.

I’ve heard that saying “what you take for granted someone else is praying for,” but now I see it in my own life in a different way. What I have now, this little life with all of its routine beauty, is what I so desperately prayed for years ago when I really couldn’t see my out to the other side yet. And here I am. But now I want more, and I can feel it just out of reach. That’s the secret perhaps – to always be reaching for more and pausing in between to listen to that voice that tells you what you really want.

Last weekend, we went early on Saturday morning to a local blueberry farm, and I planned to arrive at 9am to avoid the hot Georgia sun. We arrived at 9:15, and it was already hot, but that’s the way it goes this time of year. And after a lifetime in Georgia, I’ve learned to embrace it.

The bushes were tall and tangled, and every now and then you could find some shade. The kids wandered in and out of them trying to find the darkest berries.

They both took the task pretty seriously, only choosing the best ones and getting excited when they found a surprise blackberry or two hidden among the blueberries.

When we pick apples or strawberries, it only takes us a few minutes to get more than we can easily consume just the three of us. But tiny blueberries are a hard-won prize. We can pick and pick and still only have little to show for it. Especially when Norah crouches low to hide and eat them rather than take them home to share.

She then found the irrigation sprinkler and decided to go for a run to cool off, and who could blame her? July in Georgia is no joke.

I love this time of year for so many reasons, but July and August at a roadside produce stand is enough of a reward to pay for any amount of heat or discomfort. Our plates are colorful and vibrant, and I always think about how much I’ll miss these tastes and smells — sun-ripened tomatoes, sweet corn, mellow peaches — when winter hits and soup loses its luster.

We’ve been playing around with a little backyard gardening as well. I’ve frozen so much pesto from my over-producing basil and will do another round this week. And we’re trying our hand at beans for the first time this year. A tiny effort for a tiny patio for a tiny family, but it feels good to let both kids have a hand in what makes it to the table and understand the idea of seasons and growth and where food comes from.

And, of course, I can’t neglect to mention my grandparents’ amazing garden only a half-hour away which they share with the rest of us. I’ve got big plans to freeze gallons of this squash soup tomorrow for us to enjoy this fall and winter.

The kids are mostly with their dad this week, but I had them for a few hours today, and I was disappointed to find dozens of worms on my bean leaves. (The perils of organic gardening, I guess!) But Jude and Norah were fascinated, of course – placing them in a vented mason jar with leaves to keep them fed and happy.

There was a time when I would have focused on the inconvenience of a garden pest and the potential it holds to ruin the beans I’m spending effort tending to. A time when I would have been too distracted by the sweltering heat to enjoy picking berries. Disheartened by “the small irritations like salt on melon” as Linda Pastan says in that poem I love so dearly.

But the upheaval of my previous year, among many other things, put these annoyances in clearer perspective for me. It’s never perfect. None of it is seamless. But these things come so seldom, and I’ll miss it if I’m not paying attention because I’m distracted by discomfort or reminders of what could have been. This is now – tomatoes, berries, sweet corn, cold cucumbers, fresh beans, bright basil. It only lasts a moment before time moves us to another season.

Tag: gardening

long uphill climb

summer harvest