I don’t like what I just heard some guy say on MSNBC…that the Republicans have the lead in early voting…so I turned off the TV and am sitting here with a cup of Lady Grey tea and a slice of pumpkin crumb cake. Otherwise, I’m for the moment holding off on stress eating. If things go bad in this election, there could be a whole lot of stress ahead. It will be impossible to eat it away.
For the moment, I’m turning to two things happening in my patio garden. When I moved here four years ago, for the next Mother’s Day my daughters took me plant shopping and set up a lovely garden on my fenced-in patio…flower boxes, hanging pots, all kinds of displays. Fortunately, nature did most of the work in keeping them alive.
I got my first plants when I was 24 and had just moved into a house with three other people. This was an emergency move when my boyfriend, with whom I was supposed to be getting our first apartment, decided on moving day that he wanted the place to himself. I’d vacated my existing apartment, so I had no place to go. I was lucky to find this new room. The woman leaving it left me her houseplants. Within a month they were dead. The woman came to visit my roommates and announced it was my karma that had killed the plants. In retrospect, that sounds like a lot of karma to put on a 24-year-old. But under the circumstances, maybe she was right. I’d lost 15 pounds that month from grief over being dumped.
Subsequent gardening efforts were rare and only slightly more successful. We planted a garden when I was pregnant with my first child and thought fresh vegetables were the way to go. My not-yet-husband rented a Rototiller and plowed a good-sized area of the lawn on the six-feet-tall-chain-link-surrounded plot that also contained poet Joyce Kilmer’s New Brunswick, NJ, birthplace and a small parking lot. We planted beans, peas, tomatoes, lettuce, mustard greens, etc. I couldn’t tell the difference between a weed and a desired plant, so the garden became overgrown. I never did figure out which were the greens. But the garden did produce cricket-bat-sized zucchini. Those were hard to miss.
Several years later we moved to a house in quasi-rural Mass and tried a garden again. Same plowing process, more vegetables. But I was clueless. Very little grew: tiny eggplants, one or two tomatoes.
My younger daughter is great with plants and has been giving me succulents for years, perhaps with the thought that I can’t kill them. Surprise! A couple are still left, along with an air plant that may or may not be dead. Houseplants become part of the furniture and unfortunately tend to get watered about as often as I dust.
In Portland we’ve gone from brightly sunny, warm summer to damp and chill. Soon it will rain most days. Most of the plants in my patio garden and outside my fence have started to disintegrate. But these two…
My remaining two stalwart pansies are holding on. The first summer I had plants here, several pots of pansies were grouped on an area of dirt outside my fence. As individual blooms died, I’d pinch them off and toss them on the ground. Eventually all the potted ones died, and I was shocked and delighted to see little plants growing from the dirt where I’d tossed the dried-out blooms. At their heyday, I counted 64 blooms. They lasted into the winter. I’ve tried to recreate that phenomenon, to no avail.
However, this fall a brave and adventurous snap dragon plant bloomed from inside the dryer-vent well that’s 30 feet from its mother plant sitting on a little table outside my fence (next to the last pansy pot). It’s under my bedroom window and behind a hedge, so you have to walk right up on it to see it. I discovered it by surprise when I was spraying the outside of my window for ants.
I named the snap dragon Resilience because I admire its ability to establish itself where it landed and its ability to thrive alone in an ugly setting. I named the pansy Hope because we need that and it’s holding on for as long as it can.
I need these things today and for the foreseeable future as we wait to see whether we will have our ordinary problematic country or one with a fascist thrust.
