I have been saying for fifteen years that I wanted a garden.
Not the theoretical garden, not the intention of a garden, not the seed catalogues I looked at in February with the particular February longing of a person who is snow-bound and dreaming of something that requires patience and actual dirt and the willingness to be wrong about things and try again in the spring. The actual garden. The one that requires time I did not have, attention I could not afford to give, the kind of daily and seasonal presence that a garden demands from you and that I was giving to other things, always other things, always the more urgent and visible things.
This spring I made the beds.
I made them badly. I will admit that plainly. I did not prepare the soil correctly and I planted some things too close and I lost three tomato seedlings to a late frost because I was overconfident about the last-frost date, which is a beginner’s error I should not have made if I had been paying attention to the garden books I have owned since 2008. I made mistakes and the garden did not mind. The garden is democratic about beginners. The garden offers you another try next year without requiring you to justify why it took you until now to show up.
I go out there every morning now.
Before the coffee sometimes, which is unusual for me, who normally requires coffee before anything can be said to begin. But the garden is different. The garden asks for you before the day has organized itself, in the early light when the temperature is still cool and the slugs are finishing their night shift and the birds are in full argument about territorial matters I do not fully understand. I go out and I walk the beds and I look at what happened overnight, what opened, what is struggling, what has surprised me by surviving something I was sure it would not survive.
I have become a person who is surprised by plants.
This seems like a small thing. It is not a small thing. It is the discovery of a category of attention I had not given myself permission to have, an attention that is slow and patient and proceeds at the pace of growing things rather than the pace of institutions. An attention that asks nothing back. That does not need to be useful. That is just the morning and the garden and a woman learning to love something that will never go on a resume and does not need to.
