I meant to start at dawn and so I did. These soft May mornings are not to be lost and besides I had 48 plants grown by my Farmers’ Market friend Lee to get in the ground.
These plants are not the ones you’d expect to be grown in a greenhouse over winter. The flats Lee unloaded yesterday contain zinnias and cosmos. As I write that sentence, I see my mom, my grandmothers, and their mothers too (though those faces are fuzzy, known only to me from photos) staring at me in shock, their mouths open, brows drawn together. “What in the world are you thinking?” they seem to say. “Anybody knows that you buy annuals in a packet from a trusted source and plant them by seed. It costs almost nothing. Whoever heard of starting zinnias?” The generations of women wander off, shaking their heads, disillusioned.
Oh, I heard them loud and clear. In essence, they said in no uncertain terms, “What is this world coming to? And, just how helpless are you anyway, Helen?” Gulp.
In this case, I have my defenses ready: there are reasons for what looks like a major falling off on my part. We are moving, moving north, and so this is the last summer to commune with this piece of ground. Last fall when I ordered the dozens of high summer seeds to be raised in Lee’s greenhouse, my decision was at least partly economically calculated. I was being savvy, making an investment. Having read that houses show better, even 20% ($) better, with attractive landscaping, this seemed like a good move. See, ancestors, I did know what I was doing.
But in the end, the last laugh is on me as we’ve already sold our house and property to a young educator and his family. Now this, of course, leaves people to wonder even more, some encouragingly saying, “Now you don’t have to think about the gardens and the rest of it this year.”
So, OK. Point taken, but that point rolls right off my rural-bred back. You do gardens and flower beds because you just do (now my grandmothers are smiling), because there is no privilege more freely given anywhere. My money spent for the starts? Those dollars are buying me the joy of planting hearty plants in May and the ongoing delight of watching them grow for a few weeks.
It was so quiet out there on Mothers’ Day morning — no cars, only the faint tapping of a pileated woodpecker already at work in the woods to the west. I drew on my gloves, grabbed my favorite trowel, dropped onto my knees, and started digging holes. Beside me in the grass, those alluring flats of zinnias and cosmos. First, all that simple math to do: I’ve got 24 zinnias and 24 cosmos. Let’s see. Is the curving row I’ve prepared long enough? Too long? Can I eyeball how far the holes should be apart? Maybe … I rely on the tried and true “length of the trowel” method, and am soon lost in the heady smell of humus and the routine hollowing out of evenly-spaced holes. Then comes the watering and setting the little plants carefully in and mounding soil around each. The cardinals woke up first and then the robins arrived, beeping their soft chirps as they hunted. Soon many more birds stir. That chorus is not like it used to be, but it’s still there and sounds resilient. A friend has a swell story from about 35 years ago: her then toddler daughter asked her if she would please turn down the birds as they were too loud for her ears.
This rare opportunity to be outside alone and at work, to “braid sweetgrass,” as it were, is full of grace and peace. How do we miss this so often? To be out in the natural world alone when day is new? To be doing something to restore our ties with dirt and plants and air, to be aware of a different economy, a different kind of news, a different way of being? Robin Wall Kimmerer in her remarkable book Braiding Sweetgrass reminds us, drawing on her Native American roots, just how essential this is for our own health and for the planet’s. One can turn philosophical, working with small, even spindly, plants called “cosmos.” Everything wheels around me.
My loving husband brings me his good coffee in my favorite mug. It’s Mother’s Day, after all. Never, though, in my long life have I ever drunk coffee while on my knees planting. (Now that mug is sitting on the drainboard by the sink with morning mud on its handle. Most satisfying.) As for me, I’m lost in a dream of what this bed will have on show in high summer as I create color combos, setting yellow behind red; pairing ivory zinnias and apricot cosmos and yellow cosmos and pink zinnias …. Awile back, one of my students in the class I coordinate and mentor on Sunday afternoons said, “A seed is a contract with the future — it says, ‘I know something better will happen tomorrow.’” I think of that.
But the day and the world calls. I’m still knee deep in academic obligations, annual meetings of important organizations, packing, downsizing, and I must get with it. Even sooner, I must scrub these muddy fingernails and get ready for church.
Our time and space in this place has been a treasure to us as have all of you. We’d never meant to leave this beloved place, but the magnet of family and new life in the form of an infant grandson, a daughter having her very first Mother’s Day today, calls. Our ages encourage us to get a move on. I know you’ll be well if you live the Real Food Life. So fare thee well and maybe I’ll write an occasional missive from up north. Meanwhile I’ll see you at our Farmers’ Market, 8 a.m. to noon on Saturdays.
Dr. Helen Hudson contributes her Real Food column to the Journal Review.
