Lost Garden

Each morning, I trudge out to my garden, garbage can in tow. I usually am mumbling something under my breath and am disgusted. But by the time I hit the edge of the pond, the late summer sun is warming my shoulder and I look up and I am soothed.

The truth is, I've been a very poor gardener of late. My enthusiasm for gardening was quenched late last year after months of drought-like conditions that left my garden parched and stale. "I'll fix in in the fall" I told myself -- and anyone else that asked me about it, but I was being a fickle lover. I knew that my love affair with my garden was waning, I just didn't know what to do about it.

But with spring, love returned and I began to have visions of my garden again. Yes, there was lots of reclamation to do, yes the paths were twisted and ugly, yes the perennials needed thinning. A few days of rain became weeks and then over a month of what we in the midwest call a "gully washer". For days, I'd watch my garden safely from my inside and I'd wonder, "how had we come to this?" Where was the love that had propelled me from my work and into the garden immediately upon coming home? Where was the love that had captured my vision during the day so that I could hardly wait to return home.

Like all loves, it withered and died with neglect. And so I stood inside my house, watching the rain pour, feeling the grief of a love lost.

If you're lucky, real love gives way from the loosey goosey feelings and what emerges in its place is a kind of hard committment, the kind that says, "I've worked too damn hard for this thing, I'm not letting it go.." And so each morning I trudge out with my garden shoes and garbage bags and I begin to reclaim my garden.

It is a type of prayer, really, to crouch and see one's mistakes. To see how the places where I planted sunny perennials should have been reserved for shade loving hostas. It is a form of meditation to reach out and pull the parched shrub and lay it in the trash, knowing that it was once beautiful and perfect. And that what can go in its place can be beautitful, too, if only in the right time.

I give myself permission to cry at times for the plans I had...the plans that were good but not great. I see that now, how the garden's curves can be so much more and that it took my first, sophomoric attempts to get to the place where a sturdier beauty can become real. I only wish I could say my enthusiasm was better. It is not. I dread those early morning walks to the edge of my sad little garden and I sigh as take my place, crouching among the dead stalks, determined to make this lovely once again.