Wayward Thoughts

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My mind is muddled by the amount of suffering worldwide. To relieve my rage, I’ve been ripping invasive plants up by their roots—barehanded. The Asiatic bittersweet roots can be 12-14 feet long, and I pull until I get to the source. Right behind me, robins gather. Watchful. Waiting. As soon as I move out, the robins move in. Where I’ve unearthed invasive roots, I’ve also disturbed slumbering worms. In my wake is a trail of happy meals—and the robins never pass up a fresh worm. We work in unison, in a way; they wait for me to do the hard work. Then they dart through the remaining undergrowth and snag a newly uncovered worm.

As I wrestle with these roots, my mind wanders...

As a kid, I played tag in cemeteries with my brothers and sister. Midwest cemeteries often claimed the highest and best ground. There were views of the plains, the winding Minnesota River below, and bent cedars battered by the winds. Why did the dead get the best views, we wondered?

I remember seeing side-by-side graves of children from the same family—with the same year of death, 1918. My mother told me the reason. It stopped me in my tracks. “Parents had outlived their children?” I asked. And with every move we made, and at every cemetery, it was the same. One cemetery had five children aged 3-15 who had died in the 1918 flu pandemic. The parents’ gravestone showed that they had lived into old age. What had their remaining 50 years been like, crowded with the memories of their children’s faces coming into the world and then leaving this world so soon?

It hurt to think of it.

My grandmother, who was a nurse, had not shielded me from life’s realities. I knew from the moment we arrived on earth we were all eligible for death.

Tomorrow I’ll pull more roots out by hand and hope my anger and this pestilence leaves the land. I don’t know much; I do know the robins will be well fed.

Men in the Garden?

Answer: Yes, please.

A reader wondered why I don't write about men in the garden. “I’m not qualified,” I wrote back. There’s only one man in my garden at a time, since I embraced serial monogamy.

The man in my garden for the last 26 years is not a gardener. He doesn’t want to be a gardener. He calls himself the “gardener’s helper.” He specializes in heavy lifting. I bring him in for big jobs: loads of mulch, relocating shrubs, felling large trees. You get the idea. He also does the edging, and it’s both neat and original. He does all this without complaint. Though he does require close supervision since he tends to manhandle things.

In all his years of helping me, he hasn’t learned the names of any trees or plants. “What?” you say. “Come on, how can that be?” It’s just his nature. He is not someone who likes to go deep into the weeds or the details. He was the same way when he ran a company with over 100 employees. He shared his vision—and the employees were free to make it come alive in their daily work.

But he sees bigger things: the contours of the land—he sees how a large swath of blue blossoms looks above that gray-green foliage on that plant that attracts all the cats (Nepeta); he sees how short-lived and explosive that yellow bush (forsythia) is in the spring. He sees color keenly and is an inspired color consultant. “Plant that little lime green plant in front of that taller, dark burgundy one,” he says. “You mean Heuchera ‘limelight’ in front of Heuchera ‘plum pudding’?” I ask. “Of course,” he says.

This is where his mind dwells.

A few female gardeners have shared their husbands’ “garden atrocities.” One husband weed-whacked a beautiful, mature perennial bed to the ground. I told my friend it would likely regrow, though she wondered about the future of their relationship. Dear readers, I’m not Ann Landers and this is not a Dear Abby column. But since forgiveness started in the garden, why not forgive? And plenty of gardeners are men. They just don’t happen to live with me.

My Uncle Peter gardens in Minnesota, where he’s just finished his Master Gardener coursework. He told me that for his volunteer hours he wants to educate young school children about the interconnectedness of the earth. He fears that not all children are as lucky as he was to have a mother who taught her children that all living things are connected to the earth.

Amen to that.

I know that when my uncle enters that school and those children see his kind blue eyes and hear his tender voice, they will move in closer to listen to what he has to say. There’s all his knowledge, but most of all there’s still a lot of kid in him—full of wonder for all living things. He has all the right credentials, don’t you think? 

The Task by William Cowper

Who loves a garden loves a green-house too.

Unconscious of less propitious clime,

There blooms exotic beauty, warm and snug,

While the winds whistle and snows descend.

The spiry myrtle with unwith’ring leaf

Shines there, and flourishes. The golden boast

Of Portugal and western India there,

The ruddier orange, and the paler lime,

Peep through their polish’d foliage at the storm,

And seem to smile at what they need not fear.

Th’ amomum there with intermingling flow’rs

And cherries hangs her twigs. Geranium boasts

Her crimson honours, and the spangled beau,

Ficoides, glitters bright the winter long.

All plants, of ev’ry leaf, that can endure

The winter’s frown, if screen’d from his shrewd bite,

Live there, and prosper . . .

Fire and Ice by Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Heat

Photo by Richard Bristol

Planting, mulching or rescuing plants in need of salvation from weeds – none of it should be done in the heat. What makes me an authority? I have been planting, mulching and weeding in the heat.

Need a lesson in how to handle the heat? Look no further than one of my parents’ cats, Spoolie. Nothing flat to lounge on? Become a multi-level lounger. Notice his head is lower than his body, and maybe cooler? Heat does rise. The high midday sun has lowered his eyes to slits, a quarter of their full size – a glaze over his gaze. Did he just burn through one of his nine lives?

Last summer, our cat, Van Gogh, was so languid in the heat that a chipmunk ran by and he only opened one eye. This predator had taken the afternoon off.

I could learn how to handle the heat by watching my cat.

You never see a cat hunting in the midday sun. Van Gogh disappears under the large, leathery hosta leaves. My miniature goat weed plant becomes a pillow. He’s flattened a fair number of plants this past summer with his 17 pounds. The garden is pocked with the imprint of his body. He naps anywhere and everywhere there’s shade. It’s as if he is narcoleptic; he just drops to the ground and naps.

If only I could relax and nap like that.

I did pass out in the heat several times. But that’s not narcolepsy, that’s stupidity. When you find yourself disoriented with your nose in the dirt, that’s not relaxing. I managed to crawl into the air-conditioned house and lay motionless while the room spun. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what happens to those who have no place to cool off. Where do people in India go? Despite its icy, pristine start in the Himalayas, the River Ganges is no place to cool off anymore.

I too burned through one of my lives during the hottest summer on record. No more working in the heat. Next summer I’ll follow my cat deep into a shady hollow. Stretch out. And forget everything.

Humans would be better off if we stopped trying to train cats; they could train us.

Two with the Earth

If you are lucky enough to have your mother live a long time, and you share a love of the earth, you might get the chance to garden alongside your mother as I did on the Great Plains.

Visiting while weeding can’t be beat.

While my dad installs a new solenoid on his John Deere mower, we clean the perennial beds. We uncover last year’s plantings under the leaves, eggshells and coffee grounds. There are too many perennial beds for me to get to them all; that would take a much longer visit.

We’re never alone. Her four cats supervise the work: They check out the flower beds, and then they check my dad’s progress.

My mom heads to the potting shed that my dad built a few summers ago. She’s cleaning and organizing it. Something she does in short order. No one cleans and organizes like my mom. Spring arrived with extreme weather: a 90-degree day followed by the threat of an overnight freeze. She lines up her pots, so she’s ready to take them into the potting shed overnight.

She says the orioles are back, and I spot a nest on the highest branch of the weeping willow. Gardening in the great migratory flyway is to garden accompanied by a symphony of birdsong. The shelter belt that’s full of trees, and protects three sides of their acreage, is streaming live with birds. And I’m not just talking about sandhill cranes. There are ducks, owls, hawks and songbirds. Nebraska is on the great bird migration route and thousands of species pass through each spring. On our weekly calls, as my mom carries the phone around her gardens, I can hear the birds.

We take a break and eat a tuna fish sandwich, and then we get back to the watering. Despite the record flooding, the 60-mph winds suck the moisture out of her newly planted forsythia. I have no idea how she and my dad have managed to keep everything watered on their acreage. I carry a bucket to the far corner of their land and realize how my mother got the biceps of Arnold Schwarzenegger. And then there are the tons of large rocks that ring all the beds that she and my dad haul from Kansas during their weekly rock-hunting treks.

Proust said it best: “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

Bubbles and Bliss

I plunge my hands into the warm sudsy water and gaze out the window at my tulips, and that’s when it happens.

I relax into the slow, methodical act of washing dishes by hand. I feel a connection to all the women who ever washed dishes or a baby in the kitchen sink. 

No, my dishwasher isn’t broken. I decided to turn off my cell phone, and then I wondered if other modern conveniences have robbed me of some of the simple everyday past pleasures in life? There’s a gap between what my mind and body need, and I need to get creative to fight the fragmentation of the real world. Maybe that gap grows with all these time-saving devices? So I decided to wash the dishes in the sink. Something I’ve not done in years.

My first bath was in the kitchen sink. You can fit a baby or two in a large sink. You can’t beat fun like that. Add a red hat, like my mother did when she bathed my niece, and you’re really having some fun.

I think of all the women who spent so much time at their kitchen sinks. I see my grandmother there with the window open on a hot Minnesota summer day. She could see her apple tree and hear the birds from her kitchen window. I’ll bet she did her best creative thinking at that sink, and she designed and made all her children’s clothes. They had the most original outfits in town. One man complained to his wife, “Why can’t our kids have cute outfits like those Falk kids?”

As her children slept, her Singer® sewing machine hummed through the night. Maybe she was designing that pleated skirt and matching vest for my mother over the kitchen sink? Alone with her own thoughts for the first time all day, her hands washed the breakfast dishes, but her mind worked on new patterns for outfits. Or maybe she was thinking about all the latest trials her children confided in her.

Now and then I need to have my hands in some warm water and soothing suds, open the window over the sink, and hum. Not the hum of the automatic dishwasher.

I never know what the bubbles might bring forth from the recesses of my childhood. I just know that now and then I need a good hum among the suds.

My Brother's Legs

He was a master at converting tense moments into comedy. Our family had plenty of both. He delivered perfect mimicry in voice, gesture and walk. His inventive mind directed his whole body, and he used everything he had to keep us laughing.

He’d perfect the walk of the person he was imitating with his long legs. My brother’s legs were gorgeous. Longer than anyone’s in the family, with nice calves and narrow ankles.

It’s hard to admit that your brother has better legs than you do. But it happens.

After he died, it was hard when his belongings were detached from the one they belonged to. The pants, the shoes, the beautiful shirts, the eyeglasses. The dead have no use for them. And while the living struggle to let go, we cannot carry such heavy cargo.

Twelve years after his death, I still think about my brother’s personal items. The minister in Omaha that wears all his meticulous shirts. My brother would have loved that his things are being used by others.

Most of all, I think of the man who got his femur. He had a lovely femur, taken from those long lovely legs. You don’t recognize your brother’s femur when it belongs to someone else, but you feel good knowing someone else has it. But you wonder how all of it comes to be. The need for a femur? How do you match a femur?

Several years after his death, I was waiting for a long car repair to come to an end. When the service manager appeared in the waiting room and told me my car was done, I noticed he had a bad limp. He told me he had been in a motorcycle accident and his femur was crushed, “But I got a new one,” he said. “From a cadaver. The guy was just 40, I’m 53, so my femur is younger than the rest of me.”

Hmm, my brother was 40 when he died, I thought. So that’s how it happens. How someone gets a femur from someone else.

“That’s wonderful,” I said, “But that cadaver belonged to someone and that someone may have been someone’s brother.” Then I realized that he meant no offense, and I really was happy for him. But I still cried all the way home.

And you know how people tell you, “grief gets better with time.” It’s not true.

I miss him more. Lovely legs and all.

Wandering in the Dark

When my mother can’t sleep, she grabs her flashlight and takes a walk on her acreage out on the great plains of Nebraska. There’s a lot to see and hear: for starters, this is the best place for stargazing. A dark dome overhead, with no light to compete, showcases shooting stars and constellations.

And the night is full of sounds you won’t hear anywhere else.

Their acreage is in the migratory bird flyway. Not far from them, half a million sandhill cranes converge on the Platte River – she hears their bugle calls. There are bald eagles, snow geese honking overhead, American white pelicans, ospreys and grebes. She hears owls and tundra swans – birds and waterfowl that I’ve only seen in the pages of my Roger Tory Peterson field guide. The nearby cottonwoods and grassland are a rest stop for bobwhites, Bell’s vireo, orchard and Baltimore orioles – masses of them. Last fall hundreds of monarch butterflies stopped on their way to Mexico.

Tomorrow her sister from Minnesota will stop on her migratory route to Arizona.

Then there are all the four-legged critters. She hears coyotes, but rarely sees these elusive animals. A few weeks ago, she came face-to-face with a large opossum and discovered that “they hiss and bare their razor-sharp teeth when cornered.”

Last night she saw another “possum.” It headed for a hole in the foundation of their house and disappeared. She sprang into action and closed that hole with some fencing and anchored that with a large rock.

Back in bed she heard the possum rearranging things beneath her and straining to get out. Perhaps he had some stargazing to do too?

The next morning, she removed the fencing, but by then the possum had found another way out. So she set about closing that opening in case he tried to get back in.

A few days later she heard a plaintive cry coming from the same location the possum had vacated, only to find her cat, Agatha, trapped under the foundation. She and my father quickly removed some of the fencing and freed little Agatha.

Who says you have to leave home to find adventure?

I told my mother that it’s fashionable in Connecticut to give your acreage a name. We have a property nearby that sits at the bend of the Farmington River named Riverbend.

“What would you name our property? she asked.

“Possum Hollow.”

Beclouded

Photos by Richard Bristol

They come in thick bands, narrow strips, wisps, pale pinks and menacing gray, but all summer they come. Some days I feel closed in by clouds, as if I could reach up and rearrange them. But the sun cannot break through them.

Some clouds bring lashing winds. As I collect downed branches, the clouds scuttle by.

Thick, heavy clouds muddle my mind. A little sunshine might add some clarity. Back-to-back days of clouds cause me to hunker down and turn inward. And what I find is “the brain within its groove,” just as Emily Dickinson described in her poem.

And what I need now is a new groove.

Several summers ago, my husband bemoaned too many days of cloudless blue skies – it meant no rain. A drought followed. Clouds that produce no rain unsettle the parched soul. This summer, we have had weeks of clouds and plenty of rain.

So, while we celebrated that the nearby Farmington River was high, and the reservoirs were full, we were hankering for some sunshine. We got our wish. And with the sunshine came record heat in five record-breaking waves.

In the Midwest, where I grew up, farmers knew clouds. They knew a cirrus from a cumulus; they knew which clouds promised rain, and which didn’t. The dark stratus is where they would put their money. They were good students of clouds, forever scanning the skies. Their crops and livelihoods depended on it.

And is there anything more thrilling than a summer thunderstorm? The house of my childhood had a large porch, clad in a metal roof, and to hear the rain amplified on the metal roof was a thrill. My mother would gather her five children and we would sit on the porch and listen to the rain.

The mood of the day changes with clouds.

There’s that heavy, still feeling that hangs in the air right before a thunderstorm. Clouds roiling overhead. Then hot air collides with cold air and the ground trembles with deafening thunder and lightning. After a cloudburst and a hard rain, the air is lighter, scrubbed clean.

For drama, go to my parent’s acreage in rural Nebraska in Cather country, about thirty miles west of Red Cloud. Just drop in, they won’t mind. Talk about the eye of the storm; they have some of the wildest weather I’ve ever seen.

You won’t be bored. Promise. Just look up.

So much to say about clouds. You could study them for a lifetime. See the faces of loved ones in them, revel in the promise of moisture that makes all life possible. There’s just not enough time.

Higher Ground

I have so many lovely places in my garden to sit and get a new perspective. My favorite is a patio my husband built on the highest ground, with a view of the valley. I’m level with the treetops so I feel like I’m tucked in a treehouse.

But I’m too busy to enjoy any of these perches.

Why? Because I can’t walk by a weed without pulling it, a drooping plant without watering it, a disappointing perennial bed without re-designing it, or a wilting plant without inspecting it for aphids. There’s always something to do.

So out of the mouth of the non-gardener, my husband, the oracle of higher ground, comes this: “Stop re-designing, plucking and righting, and start enjoying.”

Come again?

You can tell he’s not a gardener because he can walk right by a weed without even pulling it. Shocking, isn’t it?

And yet, I know he’s right. I need to fill up my tank with joy so I have vast reserves for the journey ahead. Because some days you need to draw on those reserves, and you don’t want to find the tank empty.

Given all the things that happen in my garden, why have I not stopped to enjoy them?

My grandmother knew how to do this. My mother does this daily. They know how to sit and listen and learn and just watch ants at work. We were taught to take in all the joy around us. The world right outside our back door. Full of mystery, intrigue and even live bait for a late-in-the-day fishing trip.

I had better scrap the “to do” list and get serious about joy.

Joy is on an installment plan, and I need an installment every day. This may be the hardest thing I have to learn.

May I extend to myself the tenderness I feel towards all the teeming life in the garden. And may you, too.

We’re going to need joy for the journey.

Grandma's Kitchen - Part Two

My grandmother could dress any animal or fowl; racoon, chicken, pheasant, you name it.

Grandpa’s customers supplied her kitchen, too. His lifelong occupation was a 50-yard walk from Grandma’s kitchen to his gas station on busy Minnesota Highway 60. Throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, folks pulled up to Grandpa’s pumps in need of gas, but with no money. “Well, what have you got?” he’d ask. One day the reply to that question was “a possum.” Grandpa filled the man’s gas tank, took the possum, walked to the kitchen door and handed Grandma the possum. She told me later that a possum is tough to skin. This wasn’t a complaint, just a point of comparison. With every animal she dressed she’d marvel at “the way it was put together,” how it differed from another animal.

I couldn’t enjoy any animal once I had seen how it was put together; she enjoyed it even more.

Maybe it was her training as a nurse in Rochester, Minnesota, at what became the Mayo Clinic. She graduated September 29, 1929, during the depression. Two of her teachers, William and Charlie Mayo, signed her graduation certificate. She had completed a four-year course that half of her classmates found too difficult to finish. On her first day of nurses training an instructor told her that at 90 pounds she would have to “put some weight on.”

She told me she ate crackers with butter and honey all that fall. By Christmas she had added twenty pounds. But most of her life she was 105 pounds of quiet, intellectual curiosity. Her drive was to understand what could be understood. What was futile to understand, like why people behaved the way they did or whom her six children chose to marry, she didn’t waste a moment on.

I once met her younger sister Rachel, and she told me about a quality my grandmother revealed in their childhood near Sentinel Butte, North Dakota. A pack of coyote blocked their route to school one morning. Grandma held Rachel with one hand; with the other she aimed her shiny metal lunch pail directly at the sun. She aimed the reflected light back into the pack, and it spooked and dispersed them. Seventy years later, Rachel was still awestruck by my grandmother’s calm ingenuity.

In her early eighties, Grandma moved her heavy cast iron skillets to the highest shelf. I cautioned her about the move; “I need the strength training,” she said. She also began making wine. She brought out a bottle of her raspberry, black currant, rhubarb or dandelion wine on special occasions. See my blessay “Free Weights.”

At the end of every day, she took all the rugs out of the kitchen, shook them and hung them on the clothesline. She swept the floor and washed it with what remained of her morning water. (See my blessay “Ode to a Broom”)

There was beauty in her kitchen – gingham curtains on the windows. She made time to find beauty everywhere or to create it. In the summer she made bouquets from her garden, often Coral Bells and Shasta Daisies. Grandma lived the Chinese proverb: “If you have two loaves of bread, sell one to buy a hyacinth.” She sought to please herself in her choice of flowers and fabrics. Every few years there were new kitchen curtains and a matching blouse made on her Husgvarna sewing machine that hummed late into the night.

There wasn’t much in the material world that interested her, but she did buy two oil paintings from a local artist. One was a view of Split Rock Lighthouse on the shores of Lake Superior, and the other was a still life of asters.

I miss her. I miss the smell of her kitchen. A smell that cannot be replicated. Oh, I guess the ingredients are all available – the yeasty smell of bread rising, the briny smell of a cucumber on its way to picklehood, fresh flowers, coffee boiling – but the original combination that created it all, that’s gone.

I still marvel at the sheer output from her kitchen – over all those years – output that fed and clothed six children, and a husband. Output that I would never have believed one person capable of, had I not seen it myself. 

But mostly I miss her quiet, calm self-reliance. The purposeful rhythm of her life. The rhythm of another world, the world she created. 

A world I knew I was privileged to witness in Grandma’s kitchen.

Grandma's Kitchen - Part One

An anthropologist studying Eskimos concluded: “A flea couldn’t survive on what an Eskimo wastes.” That anthropologist would have come to the same conclusion if she’d visited my grandmother’s kitchen. Everything that entered her kitchen and garden were put to use, converted to a new use, or returned to its original state.

The butcher’s coarse brown string righted a flagging tomato; small coffee cans became bread pans; and large coffee cans ringed newly planted tomatoes, serving as a barrier to hungry cutworms.

Every scrap that wasn’t a meal, from cucumbers and potato and carrot peels to coffee grounds and eggshells, all ended up in a large covered bucket outside the kitchen door. On her next trip to the garden, the entire contents were soon buried and back at work fertilizing the place they had just vacated.

From garden to kitchen to garden – this was the rhythm of her day.

But not everything returned to the garden. Watermelon rinds became watermelon pickles. Cucumbers became bread and butter pickles, while others surrendered life on the vine to make a comeback as crunchy dill pickles. Apples, raspberries, blackberries, apricots, chokecherries and mulberries starred in butters, jams or pies.

What was ripe and needed to be picked and canned dictated her days. She harvested and packed peas, carrots, corn, tomatoes, zucchini, okra, green beans and beets into sterilized Ball jars. She’d lower them into a boiling water bath to vacuum-seal them for the long Minnesota winter. When she heard the seal of success, the PING of the Ball lid sealed in place, everything went down to the cool, dark root cellar. Once jars were all lined up, I would sit and eye the canned contents, the promise of thousands of happy meals to come. (See my Blessay “Appetite.”)

Water was a precious commodity in her kitchen.

One faucet at the kitchen sink brought water from the cistern. I had no idea what a cistern was until Grandma took me to the root cellar and held me up to see this dark room full of rainwater.

I never saw anyone get so much use out of so little water. In the morning she would fill two large stainless steel bowls that fit her double sink. She used the first bowl to wash the breakfast dishes; the other held the clean rinse water. After lunch she’d reheat the rinse water and wash the lunch dishes. That water lasted all day. Its final use? The garden.

During hot Minnesota summers and droughts, she wasn’t learning to conserve water like her neighbors, she was simply doing what she had always done.

Saturday night was bath night. Sequential bathing worked best: the cleanest went first, and the dirtiest went last. Grandma drew one tub of bath water; you saved the water for the next bather. Who got the first bath? A quick inspection behind the ears helped determine the order.

Since You Asked

Since you remarked on seeing me in the same outfit at the last garden lecture, may I explain? I buy beautiful clothes and never wear them. They hang in my closet. Occasionally, I run my fingers over the fabrics and remember how good I looked in them when I tried them on. I’m not going to wear them. Ever.

Why do I do this?

When I was 10 my father’s construction business was doing so well we were able to move from a poorly constructed four-room home on Minnesota’s prairie to a large, solidly built home in Kasota, Minnesota. On the drive to our new home, I saw limestone bluffs rise above the Minnesota River Valley, a jaw-dropping site compared to the miles of flat prairie we’d just left. I saw that limestone everywhere: abutments that supported railroads, the post office in Mankato, banks and schools, including my new school. All were made of limestone – all Kasota stone.

Never heard of Kasota stone? Ever heard of the Philadelphia Museum of Art? Or the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian? That beautiful buff limestone, the color of Cedar Waxwing breasts, which encases those buildings? That’s Kasota Stone.

I’m telling you this because the three-story house we moved to rose from a foundation of Kasota stone. It was built by one of the early partners in the Kasota Quarry, Tyrrell Wilcox. It was a grand home. Long before Kasota stone became popular with architects, I swam in the spring-fed Kasota quarries. I pressed my cheek next to cool slabs of Kasota stone on a hot Minnesota day and pronounced that stone the most beautiful of things. Being Lutheran, I was given to pronouncements, but mainly about Catholics.

That house made me love beautiful things. Things of quality.

But back to that silk jacket hanging in my closet. When I say this house was grand, I mean this: two large verandas roofed in copper, carved oak columns in the entryway, oak paneling in many rooms, a 6-foot marble fireplace in the library, four large bedrooms on the second floor, three small bedrooms on the third floor to house the domestic staff. The bedroom I shared with my sister had two steps up to an outdoor balcony. The top step lifted and was a laundry shoot. Dirty clothes were chucked down to a waiting maid in the laundry room.

That kind of grand. 

One night, my dad didn’t show up for dinner. That was not unusual, but after several nights we worried. After several weeks we cried, and after several months the IRS put a lien on our grand house. You can’t blame the IRS man for wanting to recoup some of the back taxes my dad left behind. The IRS knows the value of a grand thing too.

The IRS had already satisfied some of my father’s debt by taking the other house we owned, next door to ours. My father was doing so well in business that he bought it shortly after we moved to Kasota. The two families, their kids and the rent that enriched our lives were now gone. It was a slightly less grand house, built for Mr. Babcock, another partner in the Kasota Quarry.

My mother, whose resourcefulness is second only to Scarlett O’Hara, ripped down the drapes and fashioned herself a gown, metaphorically. She found and worked two jobs. Five children, little income and no end in sight. I don’t know how she did it, but she hung on to our grand house.

But everything fell apart.

A leaky pipe caused the plaster to fall from the library ceiling. The massive oak front door, its beveled glass kicked in during one of my father’s drunken rages, rotted.

And it broke my heart. All of it. 

I got a job. I gave my mother my paycheck. I babysat my brothers and sister while my mom worked nights. I did what I could. 

Now, I like to open my closet every so often and see those beautiful things, and see that they’re still there. Untouched. Unworn. Preserved in that perfect state of beauty.

So, “no,” I won’t be wearing any of those beautiful clothes that hang in my closet. I’ll be wearing the same thing you see me in today, since you asked. But I’m making some headway. Last week I unwrapped a silk scarf I’ve kept sealed in tissue paper for 28 years. And I wore it.

Bluebirds: In the Manner of Charles Bukowski

“There’s a bluebird in my heart, that wants to get out.”

But I only let him out in winter. I keep him chained by nourishing old resentments and calling these endless “to-do lists” a life.

Our “secret pact.”

“It’s enough to make me weep.”

And I do weep: for what is lost, and for what we don’t even know we’ve lost.

And for that bluebird chained to my heart, that bluebird that longs to flit among the purple berries in the blinding winter sunshine.

Yesterday there was a flock of bluebirds on my beautyberry bushes.

Maybe, just maybe, those bushes will draw that bluebird out of my hungry heart.

I linger at the sight: sun on snow, blue feathers, purple berries hurled here and there.

I weep, too, for the beauty of it all.

An Uncrowded Corner

Every life reaches that time when the house – from the basement to the attic – is crammed with stuff. It seems to coincide with the mind being cluttered with memories and regrets; a romance that fizzled for reasons we never understood. Everything, it seems, conspires to multiply. Even sentences are jammed with multisyllable words, and paragraphs grow complex and longer.

We’re swallowed by stuff. Eventually.

As if to add perfect symmetry to my expanding universe, my waistline expands, too.

The garden is no different.

After years of acquiring, this fall I’ve been pulling, digging, ripping, relocating, and watching the ground open, inch by lovely inch. I’m tackling a corner at a time, lest I become overwhelmed.

And I’ve unearthed some beautiful plants that simply needed breathing room.

Twenty years ago, I started with nothing. No, really, nothing. I saw possibility, and then I got carried away. Hell-bent on reducing lawn, I justified the purchase of plant after plant. Now I’m returning to the bare bones beauty that gives each plant a chance to show its loveliness.

I’m paring things down to the essentials. It’s liberating.

The plants are moving on to other gardens. Saying goodbye isn’t always easy, but seeing the look of wonder on the faces of new gardeners has helped. I feel like a new mother leaving her child for the first time as I explain what this plant needs to be happy. I’ve also relocated a few onto our local green for Sunday walkers to enjoy. “Thank you,” say a group of women visiting from Poughkeepsie. “What beautiful little town you have here,” they add as they head off to our local trail.

Maybe this discipline will inform my writing, too? Perhaps that offending sentence that I struggle to rework, could just get cut? I remind myself that I cannot fall in love with my words. Or that rare plant.

I’m returning to open ground, as I declutter and resurrect one crowded corner at a time.

Subtraction trumps addition.

Then a thought stops me dead in my tracks: Why stop at the garden? Inside there’s a library full of books just looking for a home.

The Absence of Presence

Long after my youngest brother died, I used to imagine that he was living somewhere else. He’d left his old life behind and started over. He left the stress of his work: the hiring, the firing and the grinding hours seven days a week … the whole thing. It was the stress that hastened his death at his desk at age forty.

A few months after he died, I saw a man in the supermarket who looked like him. He walked the way my brother did. I followed him around and watched him walk.

I told this to a friend recently, and she said; "So had you lost your mind?"

She’s never known grief, or engulfing sorrow. The kind of loss that passes all understanding of the known world.

She’s never known what the mind is capable of conjuring up just to mete out the sorrow, slowly, so you can get used to the idea of never seeing the one person you want to see most. How you struggle to understand that the thing you long for, that ride down a country road with that person for just another second, what your heart desires, you will never have again.

She’s never known the sadness of realizing that the person – with his unabashed humor, his uninhibited laugh, his love of small things – will never come again.

No, that friend knows nothing of this. And I cannot tell her about it.

“No, I had not lost my mind,” I said. “I was just learning how to live without him.”

I am still learning how to live without him a decade later.

But it’s getting better.

And like the bulbs I am planting right now, love slumbers on.

Hymn to a Quieter Mind

My husband just said, “You were in the garden all day, and you didn’t talk.”

“So what’s your point?” I ask. “You want me to garden more?”

“It’s just that you try and get me to talk all the time,” he adds. “You talk to friends in the evening; you talk to yourself in the bath. Eight hours in the garden, and you have no need to talk.”

His observation makes me realize how profoundly different I am in the garden. How can I explain to a non-gardener what happens in the garden? How can I describe how different it is than any other activity; and how purpose and time and rhythm and the senses are one? How can I convey the experience of the garden? How can I write this essay with the clarity and succinctness that is mine in the garden, but eludes me at the keyboard?

I’m not the landscape painter in the family, but I think gardening has something in common with painting and nearly every other creative endeavor. It involves a vision; the vision evolves over time — the palette, texture and shape of the plants supply the aesthetic complexity. Then there’s the needs of the plant: the amount of sun, water, drainage and type of soil. So you see just how many things there are to consider. This makes the act of creating a garden challenging.

There’s vision and purpose in the garden.

As I transform the earth to match the vision I hold in my mind, I must also confront what’s right in front of me: There’s a plant that’s outgrown its current location, and a shrub that needs to be moved out of a wet location. My vision and reality come together here. I stand back and take in the pleasing results — results I rarely see outside the garden when working with people.

 I’m challenged and relaxed at the same time.

What I strive for outside the garden comes naturally in the garden: in the singular act of planting or weeding, I live in the moment. There are no electronic interruptions. Mind and body are meant for this. The rhythm is not dictated by manufactured interruptions and deadlines, but simply the needs before me: I see a plant that needs to be sheared; the bird bath needs topping off; and a skunk has dug up a new planting. My mind gets to work on how to skunk proof that area.

This is a form of creative expression that has infinite variety. No two gardens are alike. And like plein air painting, all the senses are employed: the sun on your arms, the smell of the turned earth and life, the call of the catbird, the gulps of fresh air, the taste of mint, the hummingbird hovering over the bee balm.

There is no need for speech.

My mind is focused yet suspended. I’m thinking of everything and nothing. As I feed the soil, this solitary act feeds my subconscious. My mind is a medley of half-formed ideas that become whole. I allow my mind to wander, and my subconscious offers up answers to problems that have vexed me all week: I rewrite some copy that has stumped me; I come to a new understanding of a family member; and I unearth these long forgotten lines from the New England writer Malcolm Cowley:

“I pray simply for this: to walk as humbly on the earth as my mother and father did; to greatly love a few; to love the earth, to be sparing of what it yields, and not leave it poorer for my presence.”

After a day in the garden, I come inside, and my husband has dinner on the table.

Glorious.

Travelling Trees Or the 1,000-mile Garden

 I've lost track of how many properties in Nebraska my mother has planted and tended. When I say planted, I mean this: In the beginning, they were without form. And mom said, “Let there be a garden.” And when she’s done, though she’s never really done, there are windbreaks that go on for miles, hundreds of shrubs, flowers, rock walls, fences, cover for wildlife, nesting and food for birds and pollen for pollinators.

To the flocks of migrating birds that do a flyover, it’s hard not to make a stopover.

And she gardens against great odds: high, endless winds; drought; floods; tornadoes; hail. It's guerilla gardening, and you had better gird your loins before taking on this rugged prairie.

A few years ago, in a rash of April tornadoes, my parent’s acreage was flooded. Nine inches of rain moved all the corn husks from a nearby, upper feedlot and deposited them on their property. Every square inch of ground was covered in corn husks. She and my dad set about cleaning everything up right after the last corn husk settled. They have the perseverance of pioneers – living not too far from Red Cloud, Nebraska, in Willa Cather country.

Her gardens start with the other love of her life: Earl May (the garden nursery, not the man), although she's had many a fling at Wilke’s Nursery, too. It’s one of the last family-owned nurseries in the state. There’s always a nursery along the way to one of her properties, but she’s been known to drive out of her way for a plant sale. By the way, out of the way in Nebraska is a couple of hundred miles.

And then there’s the rock hunting expeditions to Kansas. She likes to travel back to the seas that once covered Kansas. There’s sandstone, but mostly she and my dad bring home limestone (a mere 70-80 million years old), formed in the deepest portions of that old sea bed. And every rock is full of fossils and shells. The same rock that gave earlier pioneers great building materials, and the post rocks that still mark the property lines. Talk about sturdy posts with character.

While my mom may be the brains, my dad brings brawn to the operation. I’ve never seen anyone dig a fence post hole so quickly or expertly. He unloads pickups full of rock. This hard work accounts for the good shape he’s in. He’s rock pressed tons of stone. He helps with the watering. And in drought years, you have to carry a lot of buckets of water to new plantings at the outer reaches of four acres. Oh, and did I mention he’s also in charge of the tree trimming and mowing?

Mom has been crisscrossing Nebraska for years, tending their properties and planting gardens. And for a decade, she managed three properties in Nebraska and commuted to their home in Iowa. She planted a garden in Iowa, too.

If you lived on one of the routes to their many properties, you’d see a lot of trees and shrubbery cruising by.

Imagine sitting on your front porch and seeing a 10-foot tree and a few viburnums tethered to the back of her truck. Every week, whether in a truck or car, plants are always in tow. When she travelled between Nebraska and Iowa, I guess that qualified her as an interstate and intrastate gardener. Her garden stretched for 1,000 miles.

I called her on Arbor Day, and you’ll never guess what she was doing. Yup, she was planting trees… about 50 of them. “Happy Arbor Day,” she said. Fitting words and work right where Arbor Day started. Out there you need windbreaks. The wind rarely stops. Remember in My Ántonia, the young narrator, Jim, described some of the new immigrants nearly losing their minds from the relentless winds. Trust me; I’ve never had a good hair day out there. But boy, clothes on my mom’s clotheslines dry fast. One day her sheets were blowing straight out from the clotheslines.

And on the seventh day, instead of resting, she hit the road, tree in tow, to plant another garden.

And behold, it was good.

Bathe in It or Use as a Laxative? In Search of Simplicity

I opened my medicine cabinet and saw the problem.

Eye wash, anti-fungal cream, antacids, acid reflux pills, muscle pain cream, cold sore cream, eczema cream, poison ivy block and scrub, anti-itch cream and three deodorants, including invisible gel deodorant. (Do I even have this one on?)

My bathroom was chock-full of expensive astringents and exfoliators. We even have two kinds of mouthwash — for people with and without braces. My laundry is full of detergents that boost, brighten and lift, and that’s just for the wash, never mind the dryer.

How come with all these products I never seem to have what I need?

My grandmother’s cupboards only had a few products, yet she always had a remedy for our latest catastrophe. Maybe because most of the products in her cupboards did double, triple and even quadruple duty? I went in search of simplicity.

First the laundry.

Every washday my grandmother used to bring out her big yellow bar of Fels Naptha soap. She’d take a knife and shave some of it over grandpa’s oil-stained overalls soaking in the washer. I found it at the supermarket right next to the newer sexier soaps.

And when Grandma met up with poison ivy, Fels Naptha removed the toxic oil from her skin and kept it from spreading. Since the oil could last a year, she washed her garden tools in Fels Naptha soap too.

And Fels Naptha beat “ring around the collar” by about 100 years. Just wet the bar, rub it inside a shirt collar and no more “ring around the collar.” I keep a cheese grater next to my washing machine and shave a bit of Fels Naptha into the grimiest load.

Another of Grandma’s staples on washday was 20 Mule Team® Borax. This naturally occurring mineral, boron, puts newer laundry detergents “all natural” claims to shame. Plus it cleans tile and grout, sinks, pots and pans, refrigerators, ovens, microwaves and stainless steel. It even removes mattress odors. When I say its uses are endless, I’m exaggerating slightly, but not by much.

This single product replaced five products: oven cleaner, grout cleaner, stainless steel polish, deodorizer and that pricey product I used to dry flowers.

Feel free to use it for its original purpose: to boost laundry detergent’s cleansing action.

On to the bathroom.

My grandmother quelled bug bites with witch hazel. This plant-based astringent is so effective as an anti-inflammatory that it shrinks anything swollen, from top to bottom. I’m not going into a lot of detail. Just trust me.

And then there’s Epsom salt.

Soak in it, or use it as a natural laxative? I kid you not. You really can do either. And according to the Epsom Salt Council (yes, there really is an Epsom Salt Council), the natural components of Epsom salt, magnesium and sulfate, claim to “ease stress, improve sleep and concentration, regulate the activity of 325+ enzymes and … ” to name just a few. Wow, the Epsom Salt Council is a thorough bunch. I use Epsom salt as a garden fertilizer. Then I add it to a bath and soak; it’s great for sore muscles.

With fewer products in my cupboards, I still have whatever I need —  whether I get stung by a bee, sprain an ankle or need to remove olive oil from my shirt.

And unlike some newer products, I never have to wonder if these products will work as promised. After 100 years, I know their claims have truly been tested. They all passed my grandmother’s test.

Just one question: What am I going to do with all that extra room in my cupboards?

Answer: Nothing.