This cheery sunflower greeted me this morning when I wandered into the kitchen. The husband had been out early today doing some garden maintenance.
Our garden is, unequivocally, his garden. He pours over seed catalogues, chooses what to plant. His basement work room is part grow room where he makes things sprout from seed and keeps plants alive. In the spring, he plots about mulch and stakes and growth. He drives great distances to garden centers, and brings home succulents on trips. (The domestic trips only, of course.) He devotes a lot of care, energy, and thought into what we can do with the beds of dirt that surround the house, and how they can be cultivated to make our lives better.
I am not a gardener. It can get quite buggy here, and I am a mosquito magnet. Digging in dirt while being eaten alive in eighty degree weather is exactly zero amount of fun for me. Also, I’ve never understood flowers. Sure they are pretty. But then they die. And I think, “Well the flowers are dead, but there’s still greenery – maybe they’re still good!” And I have to agonize about throwing them out and wonder what else I am symbolically throwing out. It’s complicated. I’m probably overthinking it. It also makes getting flowers on opening night a much more wrought experience than it needs to be.
Sometimes I will pull a weed or two from our garden. But only in the shade of early morning or late afternoon. And I have been known to mow the lawn. Actually I don’t mind mowing the lawn. But the Husband actually seems to like it, so I mostly leave him to it.
I will, however, happily cook what he grows. And I will make suggestions as to what vegetables I think would be interesting to have.
This weekend, these appeared on our counter:
And tonight they became this:
There is something very satisfying about consuming vegetables that months ago were just tiny seeds in the palm of your the Husband’s hand.
One year, we had a huge tomato crop and I learned how to can tomatoes. That winter, having summer tomatoes in the midst of cold and snow was magical. It is a little unclear as to whether we will have a bumper crop of tomatoes this year. There are cherry tomatoes on the vine. The kids will pick them and pop them into their mouths. I hear there is a melon or two coming up. The Husband seemed surprised at that.
We are very fortunate to have a yard, especially this year when stay-at-home orders has made the options for spending time away from home fraught with choices and risk assessment.
I do like the magic of seeing things grow, though. Earlier this summer, I did that grade school experiment of growing a squash seed in a jar with a damp paper towel. It was neat to track the progress and watch it sprout.
I get a lot of pleasure from the small joy of noticing that one of the Husband’s plant looks different today. I know, objectively, that things grow and time marches on, but change seems magical sometimes. Especially gradual change – the kind where you don’t see something is changing until you look again. You glance at something one day, and it’s different, somehow. And you ponder why it looks different, and there is a new bloom, or a new sprig or a plant is three inches taller than the last time you really took time to notice. And you think, “What happened when I wasn’t noticing?”