garden Archives - Side Hustle Intellectual

the quick & the dead: whispering memory, palpable absence

This summer I’ve been fecklessly plodding along with my French language study. My multi-pronged strategy includes learning a poem now and again, and last week I happened across a disturbing little ditty by Jules Supervielle, “Dans La Forêt Sans Heures.” Jules, bless him, is encouraging the birds to seek their nests in the vertical void where a tree has been cut down, for as long as the memory trembles. Or such like.

Well, that just cut a little close to the bone. (No pun intended. Jeez.) My back garden is still in recovery from the side sewer disaster three years ago. Those vertical spaces that are now empty sky do still evoke for me a sense of this isn’t right. But, then, I’m more aware of the light in late summer, when the garden is drying up and the sun is already low in the sky. Not a huge fan of this particular liminal time, summer-ish and not-quite-fall.

Last summer I was thrilled with the garden recovery and my new-to-me greenhouse. I was also adjusting to the news from my darling hematologist that I would need anticoagulants for the rest of my days. And it turns out that requiring a tiny pill twice a day in order to stay alive gives one a whole new sense of the world. I did not expect to have a more ominous, visceral sympathy for civilians in war zones, for instance. Not that I didn’t have sympathy before, but it’s different now when I hear news about, say, Ukraine. Before the Mortal Peril, I had never taken any medication, so the many ripples of meaning with this reality shift startled me.

Generally, I’m not thrilled to be dependent on Big Pharma, but my doctor was perfect as we talked through all of it. Dr. Chen is about half my height and speaks with such a strong accent I frequently have to replay his words in my mind to glean meaning.

At one point I asked—why now? Why, after fifty glorious years of being absolutely medically boring, did this genetic blood clotting disorder suddenly manifest?

His face lit up and he leaned in to touch my knee. “I can tell you!”

“Oh…?”

“It’s because…” and here he spread his arms wide, “…we are getting older!”

Great!

It happens that this doctor’s office is in the vertical space that was once the stained glass dome of the church where I spent ten formative years of my life—a structure that was subsumed by the hospital complex about fifteen years ago.

Construction of that glorious brick building was completed in 1916, and it was designed to accommodate 1,150. But like the churches of so many mainline Protestant congregations, this one, too, had seen a dramatic drop in attendance in the 1960s and ‘70s. By the time I had arrived in the late 1980s, attendance on any given Sunday wavered between fifty and eighty souls. On a red letter day there might be a hundred. Which means that the services seldom drew a crowd large enough to fill the space to even 1% capacity. Our stalwart crew of elderly in that cavernous building seemed quite a meager gathering indeed.

Those Sunday mornings—that was when I learned that absence often seems a palpable thing, and I was occasionally startled and awed to realize that the missing, the dead, were as present as the living.

“You’re sitting in Homer’s spot,” an agitated gentleman once told me.

I slid over in the empty pew to give the dead Homer some breathing room. As it were.

Memory trembles.

Cherchez, cherchez….

on the particularity of living things

When I was a girl we used to visit my grandmother in Lorain, Ohio, every summer. It was miserably humid and buggy, and, coming from Colorado, a shock. But it was pleasant to sit in the screened porch on the ancient squeaky glider chair, the seat cushions sticky on the backs of my thighs. I was frequently exiled there after dinner to eat my ice cream, which I liked to mush up. This was a jolly punishment for not “politely” eating my food “as it was served.” The nights were lively with insect chorus.

One evening after it began to cool we went for a walk, and my stepmother showed me her elementary school and various childhood landmarks. We passed the former home of a mean old neighbor who didn’t like the children to walk on his grass.

“He would yell at us. So when we walked by on the sidewalk, we’d occasionally, casually, step one foot on his precious lawn.” She demonstrated.

Both these women had been raised in Lorain, and as they reminisced, I noticed that trees loomed large in their memory and imagination—this one excellent for climbing or that one lost to disease.

I’d had a special tree in my own early childhood, when I’d lived in Connecticut, a maple. But I didn’t know the names of any other trees. Evergreens were generically “pines” for me, and I felt ashamed and jealous as each tree on our walk that evening was named and particular.

“I wish we learned tree names in school,” I said.

“We didn’t learn these names in school,” my stepmother said, astonished. “Everyone just knew!”

Everyone just knew.

As a gardener, I have since learned many names of plants and trees, of course, and I love that those names often tell a story. I recently reread Penelope Lively’s Life in the Garden, which reminded me that Anna Pavord’s The Naming of Names has been on my TBR pile for years. I’ve hauled my beautiful hardcover copy off the shelf.

But forty years after that evening stroll in Lorain, even the quickest perusal of any Facebook gardening group will confirm that very few people just know. I don’t think it’s difficult to suss out how this general illiteracy came about. But it does seem to me to be a symptom of something ugly and unwieldy, a peculiar and tone deaf relationship with the outdoors, with the scraps of land in our care.

Two years ago on July 4, as I was coming home from a socially distanced barbecue, my first outing in months, every intersection in my neighborhood was bright with explosives. The blocks, the squares, became bizarre cubes of light, the grid eerily visible, three dimensional. I worried about fire, about our urban wildlife.

On this Independence Day I’m anticipating more of the same commotion. And I’m remembering a late June backpacking trip on Mt. Tahoma, pictured here. And I’m thinking about constitutional and environmental crisis. I’m also appreciating my stepmother as a child, leading the charge with tiny rebellious steps on that old codger’s lawn—and I love that she and my grandmother had tools to see and appreciate the variety and particularity of living things.

life wants to happen

“Fecund” is the first word I voluntarily looked up in a dictionary; I’d read it in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I don’t recall much about the book, except fecund. The word itself. I was fourteen, and my world was constricted, barren. I was hesitant to trust that fecundity was even a thing.

And so for the last quarter century, I’ve been haplessly dithering at making a garden, trying, at the very least, to make room for beauty and life.

We planted apple trees after I learned my second babe would be a boy, and I panicked at prospect of having to feed two human male teenagers. How could we possibly afford it! I decided to landscape with food.

I ordered bare root trees and together we planted them one dark January evening, that tiny baby in the front pack under my coat, before his name felt like his so we referred to him by various terms, usually The Stink. (“Just enough edge with that to give him something to talk about in therapy later,” my therapist friend said, “but not actually damaging or cruel.”)

Twenty years later, and just before the Mortal Peril, I had been ready to take out the apples. The boys were grown and the trees had served their purpose. The upkeep was hard.

But then I didn’t get around to it, what with the Mortal Peril and all. And because I was going to remove them, I didn’t have my pal Steve the Tree Killer come over to prune.

Evidently the trees did not get the memo that they were no longer required, and they’re producing like gangbusters. Two years of unchecked growth. Looks like I will be able to process enough applesauce and apple butter this fall to survive the apocalypse.

And in the back garden, the cover crop is growing to beat the band. Because of the side-sewer disruption, I didn’t get the vegetables in until late, but, this week, finally, I found a tomato.

View this post on Instagram

First wee tomato.

A post shared by Nicole Mulhausen (@nicolemulhausen) on Aug 6, 2019 at 10:34am PDT

The apples, the cover crop, the tomato. All good signs, but hard, hard work. I’ve been out every morning for an hour or so the last week, and everything hurts—lower back, hips, shoulders. (At the Red Hot the other day, I had to ask my pal to finish his beer and dog so we could head out. “This wooden chair is killing me.”) I have been under the evidently false impression that infirmity and decrepitude wouldn’t impact the gardening for another ten years or so. But mostly it’s a good soreness, reminding me I’m still alive, dammit.

Sometimes I wish I had known how to ask for help in the garden after the Mortal Peril. Although, it was already beginning to get out of control when I ended up in the hospital.

Usually I only find dismembered toy dolls in the gardens. Or auto parts. But today I found a volunteer oak tree, thigh high. That’s right. OAK. TREE.

So. If I had asked for help, that forgotten stash left by some industrious squirrel might not have taken root.

And on Friday both my boys will be home with their particular friends for feasting and end-of-summer reveling.

Fecundity for the win.

last straw situation

I like to think that I have handled the litany of woe over the last sixteen or so months with grace and equanimity and humor.

Potentially deadly blood clotting disorder no one seems to know anything about? Okay!

Mis- and lack-of- information from ostensible medical professionals about the recovery? Okey-doke!

Subsequent medical debt? Well, then!

Interminable recovery? Alrighty!

Near debilitating memory loss? Wearying, but FINE!

Six week migraine? Thank the gods for good drugs!

Father’s death and sibling insanity? Yee-haw!

Plumbing problems to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars I don’t have *hysterical giggling*

Utter annihilation of the garden?

…

No.

LAST STRAW SITUATION.

So yesterday on a whim I hied myself to Portland, met up with dear old friends, and bought myself two vintage children’s books, French readers, and a new book, on sale, about the Russian Revolution. I totally feel better.

And then this morning I wrote such a kind and subtle Dear John note to a suitor that even Penelope at her loom would be proud.

So. Now that I’ve freed up some bandwidth, I can worry about fascism again.

Productive weekend.