Gratitude for experimentation, mothers and marigolds

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/12/2024 (687 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When I was five, I decided I needed to plant marigolds. We lived in a distressed neighborhood in a side-by-side across from the police station and a decrepit YMCA whose pool was infested, whose dilapidated rooms were rented by many on the down-and-out.

We had a patch of grass that masqueraded as a backyard, a wire fence that separated the side-by-side and a heavily creased aluminum garage, listing to one side.

My mother was beset by four children under five, a meagre budget and a husband frustrated by thwarted ambitions.

I don’t know why I wanted to plant marigolds. There were no gardens in my neighbourhood that I can recall. We did read about Zeke the gardener in our Dick and Jane reader and probably had mimeographed sheets we coloured in kindergarten that had flowers and bunny rabbits at Easter. I don’t remember a flower shop.

My grandfather raised apple trees and pickled cucumbers — there might have been a lilac in his back yard as well but I can’t be sure. He had a green thumb and generous heart and it was that heart that helped my parents get by during the first years of their marriage when times were tough and money tight.

He would pull up in his sedan, the back seat laden with groceries and his pockets full of butterscotch candies and quarters. I named my first son after him. A grandfather like that is not to be forgotten.

My mother was not interested in marigolds. Her hands were more than full, but I persisted when persistence in a girl child was not highly recommended and the very accessibility of marigold plants in doubt. It just seemed to me, however, that the spring could not proceed unless I were given this chance.

I found myself beside the backyard fence, on my hands and knees with a soup spoon and marigolds. I do not know where they came from. My mother was not about to show me how these things were to be planted. My grandfather seemed not to be in any way part of the proceedings. Perhaps he didn’t even know, because I like to think that if he had he would have been by my side, coaching.

But I was on my own. I knew my mother was not going to come out to help me. The earth was hard. I had no idea it could be as unyielding. I used my spoon as best I could, envisioning a skilfully tilled herbaceous border.

Of course I did not know words such as herbaceous and tilled, but I know I thought I would have a straight row of upturned earth, soft and pretty, and then I would place the marigolds as an expert might. Again, I did not know the word expert, but I had these feelings for growing things deep in my own growing bones.

The earth did not yield, however, and nothing was soft and pretty.

I don’t know if my mother was looking out from the kitchen window at the sight of her only daughter struggling. It is strange to think of her remove, for as parent and grandparent myself, I am an enthusiast if and when my children did and my grandchildren do show any interest in experimentation. My grandson is in fact devoted to seeds, to planting.

But my mother was put upon in a way I was not. She was isolated, exhausted and denied any political, social, economic, even spiritual movement that could support the difficulties she faced as a stay-at-home woman denied her own creative expression and equality in a culture that had little understanding or respect for women’s value, identity, status and work.

I remember the plants as withered, drooping in shallow holes, mismanaged within a straggled, dispirited and short, bumpy row. I never planted again. I may have sought encouragement that never came; lost interest as any small child can; saw the mess I had made along the fence as something other than a garden and decided I was not a “natural.”

Whatever the caveats, I do remember that the marigolds did not prosper. I felt bad. I also felt betrayed, for I had bargained that if I passionately pursued the planting of marigolds they were bound to requite my desire.

Of course, such a bargain has little merit, a life lesson I learn repeatedly. But that yearning for marigolds, sedated for a time, reawakened in my middle and late ages. When on my hands and knees in the midst of my current perennial garden, I think with gratitude of my mother who, while unwilling and overwhelmed, nonetheless allowed a little girl to try her hand as best they both could manage.

fparts@freepress.mb.ca