I wonder about the Garden of Eden. All Catholics know that the Bible is a rich and mysterious metaphor; we aren’t raised to believe that He wrote it Himself. But what of that metaphor — God as Holy Gardener? I suppose we don’t ever see Him in those pages donning a sun hat and pulling weeds, but it isn’t as if there was anyone else to do it. Angels, I suppose. In any case, I think we are supposed to know that the garden is a sacred place. It’s paradise.
Certainly I don’t feel like God at my garden plot while my neck grows more steadily sunburned. I have often felt confused, and a little hurt, that some people seem to know instinctively, or with the wisdom of generations, just what to do, while I am keenly aware of my separation from the land. My grandfather was a sharecropper’s son who picked almonds to pay for college. He grew big juicy strawberries out on the patio, even after my grandparents stopped having a large garden. Any time I bite into a berry, I look at the insides with my grandpa’s critical eye — they are so often cold and white inside, having traveled unripe in refrigerator trucks all the way from California. But I tried to grow strawberries for years and they were my most unsuccessful plant of all, never growing, the plants just getting steadily drier and browner no matter how much I watered them until they were completely shriveled and unrecognizable. Only this year did my strawberry plants grow back in the spring with healthy green leaves. And then the glossy red fruits were promptly eaten by birds when I went out of town for the weekend.
I have a deep self-consciousness sometimes about not being “from” anywhere. I was born in Hawaii, lived in Illinois and Missouri as a toddler, and split my school-age years between suburban Virginia, southern California, and the D.C. metro area. I went to college in North Carolina, where I fell in love with the American South and the Blue Ridge. And I have family roots all over the Midwest — Michigan, Chicago, Wisconsin, everywhere around Lake Michigan, and Nebraska and Kansas too — and northern and central California. Now I live in Boulder. Sometimes, it is my deepest source of identity — I am “from” America, which is weighty and exciting, living in my heart as a cherished dream. But sometimes it’s hard to be from an idea. I am an interloper everywhere. And nowhere am I actually rooted. Nowhere did my grandparents teach me to garden, season after season, tending the same ground, knowing just what to do and pouring their wisdom into me.
I think a quirk of this is that I understand the specialness of places very quickly. My dad always teased me as a kid for claiming to “want to live here forever!” about two days into each new home. And I don’t think this was about wanting to settle down or stop moving. It’s more that if you let a place be intimate to you, even a little bit, it must become special. The world is naturally, a priori special, and all you have to do is go there to realize it. All those places are precious to me — the Pacific coast and Lake Michigan and Durham and Pisgah and the Never Summer Wilderness all softening, in their familiarity, into holy ground.
In the garden, I am learning to lean into this hard and expansively, giving myself over to foolish hope in the land and my own hands, falling fondly in love with the land and with the process of living more in reciprocity with the land. With every passing season, I learn a little bit more. And the more I learn, the more precious the garden is. I love the plants just barely peeking out of the damp black earth like lime green confetti, so tender and cute. I love the long summer evenings and I love pulling weeds. What if paradise is just the place I visit on my drive home from work before I walk in the door smelling like dust and carrying all the ingredients for eggplant parmesan?
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Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that an antidote to our rootlessness could be living on the land as though we intend to stay. I trust her, as a teacher, and still there is something difficult for me in what she is saying. What is it to belong, anyway? Isn’t there an arrogance in claiming my place here? But I have to consider what she means when she writes staying: gratitude, care, obligation, reciprocity.
I think of the best things the garden has trained in me. Waiting to pick until the fruit is actually ripe, and trusting that there will be more tomorrow, and not being greedy. Sharing the harvest, and asking my neighbors if they have ever tried this or that variety before, and if they would like to. Having long chats with the earnest six-year-old in the plot kitty-corner to mine. Most of all, delighting in the harvest, and saying thank you. Thank you, bees! Thank you, bugs! Thank you, soil microorganisms! Thank you, beautiful zucchini, for being exactly as you are!
Certainly planting seeds is a promise to stay in the garden for a few more months, if only to see what might happen. Planting raspberry bushes is a promise to stay awhile longer, pruning and tending until next season, and the next. Almost every long summer day in the garden, while I’m picking beans and cantaloupe and tomatoes, I find something that’s just begging me to take a bite before it makes it into the basket. And I taste again just how cool and crisp and sweet belonging can be.
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My work has felt hard and draining lately. All the time spent in the homes of suffering people. All the time in my own home typing up notes on them into our ancient electronic record-keeping system. I am sitting at my desk at home, and I look over to a shelf full of growing things. Tomatoes, parsley, and zinnias springing up from their trays under grow lights. Year after year, I get better at coaxing these little seeds to life. In a few weeks, I’ll plant the hardiest cultivars into the chill spring soil. The lettuce, radicchio, and spinach. The peas and the kale. The first few weekends of the growing season always make my back sore while I try to remember to squat properly when I’m planting.
It’s easy to get depressed this time of year. Spring is around the corner, sure, but it’s still cold, and wet, and it’s dark outside when my morning alarm goes off, and after months of frost and snow the gray briskness doesn’t feel novel anymore, just dreary. It’s nice to have a real-life metaphor in my living room. I trust the garden to bring me back. I trust that the seasons are real, and meaningful, and that all of us organisms here on earth are well-suited to experiencing them. I trust that with care, things can grow, and usually only with care. There’s nothing like the life cycle of a tomato to help me live my own life at the speed of actual time.
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Mary Oliver taught me to see the exorbitance of the natural world. She writes about the owl, screaming in the middle of its hunt, the wild roses with their drunken sweetness. Excessive, cruel violence. Excessive gentleness.
In the garden, there is some of this exorbitance, to be sure. Gleaming eggplants hanging heavy between their leaves, powdery white aphids teeming in the cabbages. Dandelions and bindweed running riot amidst unpruned tomato plants dripping with jewel-golden fruits. Mostly, there is right-sizedness. Frustration, sunburn, the unpretentious thrill of the beanstalk running up the corn. The gentle, sated delight of the first feathery carrot seedlings poking through the dark topsoil in early spring. The work of my own hands turned into peas and beets and bright salads laying the table two nights before our wedding while Joey turns the chicken on the grill and we feed our families and everyone says, it’s so good to see you, and everyone says, this is delicious.
There is so much I don’t understand. But I think that being in the garden is being in the world. And being in the world is the big miracle, the one that really begs our attention. Look! Things are growing out here, and things are dying. And did you smell that smell, and did you see that?, I mean, wow.
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A couple months back, Isabelle sent me photos of postcards her dad had written from Italy twenty-eight years ago. The Tuscany scape almost makes a believer of this heathen, he wrote. At least I am convinced if “she” were to exist she would be a gardener. There it was, a little peek through the veil. My own thoughts plucked out of the brain of someone I love and written down before I was even alive.
I opened up this document on my computer: garden.docx. I wrote most of it a year or two ago. I read it back with tenderness and couldn’t help but make more confident edits, trimming back a little of the insecurity. Of course ruining any semblance of proper time and tense, but oh well. We’re always here, and there, at the same time, anyway. In the garden, at my kitchen table. This year, last year, next year spilling into each other. My garden neighbor’s sunflower seeds blew into my plot a couple seasons ago and the flowers sprang up so tall and so easy in the spring I couldn’t believe it.
Glimpses of belonging. And of lineage. Some way to begin to grasp what it is to just be here in the living world, not as a visitor, and not as a newcomer, but as the daughter I have always been, marveling at it all, hoping I might get to live here forever. I’m not the only one living these uncertainties, of course I’m not. I’m not the only heathen almost-believer walking in this garden, asking unreasonable questions of the plants, and receiving in return more delight, more love, more heady meaning and humble glory than I had even dared seek.
