Rooted in love: lifetime of memories in bloom

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/03/2024 (946 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An understanding of life comes often with a reviewing of the backstory that brought us to the present moment.

For example, I have lived along the same street for 33 years. For 10 of them, I lived in one house; for 23 years, I have lived in the house beside. The move, about six or so feet, feels perfectly natural to me still.

When I first moved into this neighbourhood, the house next door (now mine) showcased a front-yard perennial garden. I watched it grow from my porch. While joyful in terms of its ambition, a touch of green sprouted as envy in my own heart.

My husband, Mendel, felt that our grassed front yard ought not to be disturbed. He believed our two young sons deserved a bit of a playground.

One day, I met him returning from work. Dirt-stained, spade in hand, secure (perhaps defiant), I stood beside the smallish circle of dug-up earth I had created in the middle of our yard. A lovely effect, I thought.

The boys were beside me. They considered my effort odd, but at least one of them liked the feel of the earth between his toes. The other, not so much, though he was at peace, for he did not like to “play” catch outside, was less enamoured of a rough-and-tumble frolic on the grass and had an aversion to falling down as a life principle.

Mendel stopped, perplexed (make that incensed); I stood firm. Time passed. I extended the little circle into a sort of oval and planted a number of things that did not “take,” a few that did.

Mendel rolled his eyes; my next-door neighbour encouraged, sharing her plants, teaching me as much as she could, and then, in a moment of inspiration, letting me dig up her boulevard and plant potatoes.

Someone told me that during the Depression, city officials encouraged Winnipeggers to plant potatoes. I know that Depression (alternately recession) gardens yield nutrition and solace in uncertain times and look back with fondness at the energy engaged in my boulevard dig-up.

My younger son helped. We were on our hands and knees, trowels in hand, inhaling the earth, happy in our side-by-side effort.

He pulled himself up onto his haunches, his trowel aloft, and proclaimed, “We may never do this again, but we are doing this now and we won’t ever forget.” I smile. A moment like this commends the harvest that might grow between mother and child, between humans and earth.

Mendel resigned himself to the uncertainty that distinguished my “vision.” The boys tabled suggestions in light of its fluctuation. Perhaps a raspberry bush on the boulevard, maybe a blueberry one.

The raspberry lasted two seasons. The blueberry never made it through the first. Accepting limits so clearly articulate, I took them to those forests where berries thrive and we picked our way into pies and buckle.

When we moved into the next-door house a few years later, a house with a downstairs bathroom and bedroom that could accommodate my husband’s illness, I learned the ways of “my” new garden — continued the battle with gout weed, encouraged the daisies, though they departed slowly as the canopy of elms and maples extended their reach.

Together, Mendel and I actually planted a cranberry bush and a funny ornamental tree that never found the shape we had hoped for, but whose off-kilter configuration enhanced our garden stories.

The “our” between us flourished. The first-floor bedroom, where Mendel’s dialysis equipment lived, provided a generous picture window overlooking the off-kilter tree, cranberry bush, the budding flowers. Mendel’s admiration grew. All the long-ago “discussions” about my dug-up circle, the “ambitious” early-spring forays into garden stores, sat comfortably, amusedly, beside his embrace of the earth-giving bounty outside his window.

I find myself now tending this garden with increasing devotion. I wonder, is it my aging that intensifies this sense of the miracle of seasons? Drunk in the space, regardless of weather, digging up gout weed, cheering the spread of ribbon grass, smoothing the way for a proliferation of pink-blossoming mallow, I clap my hands — the child in me and the crone in me joining forces.

After Mendel died I wondered if I would spread some of his ashes in the garden. This action has such finality to it — keeping him indoors, in a special container, on an altar of sorts, his picture alongside those of our growing family, well, that seemed as if the ending could be less than the ending it was.

Magical thinking? Perhaps. Emotional intelligence? More likely.

But, this past fall, I approached a section of the garden that hosted an aggressive bundle of giant hyssop I’d been eying for years as it encroached upon phlox and Hosta.

Giant hyssop doesn’t yield easily. Smudged with digging, wearing Mendel’s ancient work shirt, I cleared ground, spread his ashes, spread wildflower seeds, covered them lightly and invoked whatever goddesses of the garden might support my endeavour.

I am waiting. I will look for the wildflowers this spring. They may not come to life, but I will try again — for as long as Nature might allow — on behalf of the our-garden I dream abrim with blossom.

debbieschnitzer@mts.net