Cultivating My Soil

"We have the power to craft our growth 

the way a landscaper crafts a majestic garden,

or we can leave it to chance, 

allowing it to unfold wild as the weeds 

that spread across a vacant lot."

-- Scott Edmund Miller

Garden soil before and after 4-7-14

"In nature we never see anything isolated,
but everything in connection with something else
which is before it, beside it, under it and over it."

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"We must cultivate our own garden."

-- Voltaire

I have a ragged little patch of ground that I call a garden, which I tend to in the Spring and Summertime. And in spite of my horticultural shortcomings, the soil still manages somehow to squeeze up some pretty delicious vegetables all season long.

I got the process started yesterday by raking up the scruffy debris and getting down to the soft, fragrant dirt underneath. It was a sunny, brisk, Sunday afternoon. The Cleveland Indians were on the radio. The air smelled fresh and clean and the work limbered up my Winter-stiffened back and shoulders.

The atmosphere made me more than a little nostalgic for my Dad. He and I spent countless Sundays just like this, working together in the yard, listening to the Detroit Tigers. It made me miss him. But I could also feel him in the chill breeze against my face.

It was sweet and lovely.

Garden 4-7-14

By the time I finished, my hands (and jacket) were good and dirty. My jeans had slid progressively further and further off my hips until they sagged halfway down my ass, just like my Dad's always did. My boots were caked with damp soil and so were my fingernails.

It's not a huge garden -- just big enough for me to handle without being overwhelmed. It doesn't look like much. It's pretty ordinary -- a rectangular box of landscape timbers filled with topsoil surrounded by a warped wire fence.

It was originally my son, Sam's. He wanted a garden and plants for his birthday one year, and so we all made it together and he took care of it for several growing seasons until the demands of school and work and  the busy life of being a young man pulled him away. He bequeathed it to me and I promised to tend it with care.

Maybe that's what makes it so special. Maybe by taking care of Sam's garden I still feel a little bit like I am taking care of Sam -- a seriously independent, self-sufficient, highly capable 19-year-old who doesn't seem to need me much for anything anymore.

I can do this for him. He needs me to do this for him. Without me, Sam's garden would disappear into an unwieldy tangle of overgrowth, get swallowed up by briers and brambles and leaves and weeds gone wild.

I admit, I'm not the best gardener in the world.

My thumb is not so much green as it is a multi-colored, random-patterned tie-dyed swirl. But as long as I feed and water stuff, it seems to grow. Healthy stuff. Good stuff.

So I guess I'm gardener enough.

Lord knows I am not the best mother in the world, either.

My parenting skills are pretty colorful and random, too. But in spite of my parental shortcomings, as long as I feed and water them, my boys seem to grow. Healthy boys. Good boys.

So I guess I'm mother enough.

In a few months my garden will be choked with an over-abundance of zucchini and tomatoes, broccoli and cauliflower, all fighting each other in the confines of the overcrowded space for room to spread out. Everything will grow until it's too big to stay and I'll have to harvest it for it's final destiny -- sauce, or soup, or salad.

Dads and boys do the same. They stay until they're called away to something beyond the confines of where they came from, until they chafe against the boundaries and it's time to move on. It's the daughter's and the mother's role to not only let them go, but to help them go, before they spoil on the vine.