Friday, May 9, 2008

Getting Back To The Garden


A few nights ago, my husband and I did one of our very favorite things which is to make a sunset drink and wander around the yard and garden, checking out everything from how the cucumbers were coming along to the status of the giant oak in the backyard that I was so worried about last year during that drought.
I'm still worried about it.
Anyway, we picked snow peas and squash and dug a few potatoes and onions for our supper and then we strolled around the rest of the yard noting and commenting on how things were growing. Since this house is 150 years old, there are plants and trees that predate our arrival by at least a century and there are things we've planted, too, and I've done my best to nurture both the old and the new and to make the yard something to be proud of in my non-professional, old southern woman way.
My husband has been working very hard on the garden this year and it shows- it's a beautiful garden and although we're already getting food out of it, that almost seems beside the point. As with growing anything, it's the joy of seeing the tiny things flourish under our care.
So we were enjoying the fruits of our labors, so to speak, and the light was that sort of magical light that only comes at sundown and as we walked around this beautiful old house where we are so blessed to live, I had an epiphany of sorts.
When we first moved here, I could barely function for thinking of all the the history that has played out within the walls of this house. It was like being allowed to live in a museum, the velvet ropes that keep people from entering the rooms cast aside and me (me!) given permission to move in my furniture, my rugs, my pots and pans. Although I've not seen much "ghostly" activity, every square inch of the house seemed to me to ring with the sound of others' voices, others' footsteps. I thought of the babies born here, the people who have died here, danced here, courted here, gone through sorrow and confusion and sadness and joy here. The weddings, the funerals, the dinners, the parties, and all the many, many days of regular life- meals prepared and eaten, clothes washed, floors swept and mopped, gardens tended, water hauled, wood chopped, children raised.
Add to all of that the fact that a fairly famous author lived here before we did and it was all almost too much for me. I hardly felt worthy.
But as time has passed, this feeling has faded. I am just as much in love with the house as I ever was, but it's a more pragmatic, less sentimental type of love. After four years of daily life of my family's own, after a wedding, a wake, too many birthdays to count, four Thanksgivings, four Christmases, the Mother's Days, the Father's Days, the music played, the floors swept, it has become a place nothing like a museum at all. It has become our home, the place where we live.
And this was the realization I had as we walked around the house.
After we finished our walk-about, we came inside and I cooked the squash and the onions, the potatoes and snow peas and we sat and ate, just as so many other people have done before us.
But before we ate, my husband pulled me into his lap and held me for a few minutes and my heart was so filled with love for him a that the love spilled out and I cried a little.
It occurs to me that my love for him is much like the love I have for this house in that it started out one way and has grown into something so much more. My love for him is a love based on a reality, not a fantasy, and it is better than anything I ever could have imagined. It has grown through all the changes in our lives, the children, the businesses, the changes we see in ourselves and each other as we age.
When I met my husband and fell in love with him, the idea of a life with him was a dream.
A sweet dream, but a dream, nonetheless.
And when I moved into this house, that, too, was like a dream.
And dreams, like tiny sprouting plants in the garden, are beautiful things but it's what actually grows from the sprouts, from the dreams, that make a garden, a life.
We may have been kicked out of the garden, according to Genesis, but if we are willing to work, if we aren't afraid to dream big, we can, somehow, find our way back in to find that the fruit of the trees is sweeter for our labor, the lap of our love is more comfortable for all the years we've nestled there.
And we can continue to dream as long as we live, sweet dreams that build, one upon another, until life is a sort of heaven, at least sometimes, maybe on a weekday night when you least expect it.

8 comments:

  1. Wow, Mama. If bedtime stories were made for the morning, and instead of putting us to sleep to dream sweet dreams they were made to wake us up gently and remind us of what is good and important, to give us fodder for sweet daydreams and to feed the warm soft places of our hearts making us better people throughout the day, that is exactly what those stories should be. Thank you for such a lovely waking up story.

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  2. That was a great waking up story. I had a place off of Sixth Avenue in Tallahassee that was built in the 30's and I had the same thoughts sometimes.
    By the way, who was the fairly famous author?

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  3. I admire the idea of going out to the garden to get fresh food for dinner. Those were very lovely descriptions of your home. :)

    At one point, I lived in a tiny, 500 sq. foot place, built in the 30's, down from FSU's school of music and Bill's bookstore, on Park Ave. I wondered about the former residents and their stories. :) That was my favorite residence in Tallahassee. Not only did it have so much charm because of the wood floors, the aged plaster walls and the radiator in the corner, but it had the smell of an old place, which I found wonderful. It also had a Palmetto tree outside the window, and that was special too. :)

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  4. When I first moved into the Fives, my little 30s cottage, I sometimes felt like I was crammed into that tiny kitchen with every bachelor who ever made corned beef hash and listened to the radio on a week night. All of us in our boxer shorts and under shirts, stirring something in one pot on the little stove, maybe drinking a cold beer before setting down to dinner. Sometimes I remember feeling like that, and I wonder if the next person who lives there will think of me - not specifically, but in that chain of renters. If they'll hang something on a nail I pounded into the wall or cuss me for not unsticking the painted-shut windows.

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  5. Thank-you, May. Thank-you.
    And isn't it true that the places we remember the best, the ones we really love are the old places? I know a lot of people dream about building their dream house so that it is perfectly new and perfectly the way they want it.
    Me? I like the old, the lived in, the proven. I like fitting my own self around what the space gives me, instead of the other way around.

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  6. Oh, me, too!! I love to improvise with what the space offers me. The other way seems like too much of a need for control, to have things "perfect" -- and yet what could be closer to "perfect" than your yesterday in your house and garden? :) ¿Que mas?

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  7. You're so fortunate to be in love.

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  8. MOB- don't I know it. Believe me, this is not something I take for granted.
    Lo-Yep. Perfection is hardly something I can create. It finds me once in a while, though, and it's a small and wonderful miracle.

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