Category Archives: My greenish thumb

Gardens don’t hold grudges. That’s one of their nicest qualities. No matter how many weeks (or months) of neglect my backyard has endured, I always feel welcome when I put on the gloves and venture outside.

I was reminded of this one evening, after the dinner dishes were cleared up. Led by a sense of carpe diem, I escaped into the backyard. It had been a while; the ground was rife with weeds.

I’d bought some coleus and impatiens to plant, so I began raking up the molding leaves that covered the flowerbeds. Black beetles scuttled out as I disturbed their homes. The smell of soil filled my nose and the weeds uprooted themselves obligingly from the soft ground. The sun was almost gone, below the horizon.

I’d planned just to prepare the soil and then go inside, but I ended up planting all of the flowers. Even though it was getting hard to see, the peacefulness of the evening drew me in. I pinched the bottom of the crinkly plastic cartons and eased the small plants out carefully, afraid to break them at the stems. The tiny flowers looked vulnerable and insignificant. As I planted them a careful foot apart from each other, they made a very unspectacular display. But I knew that with weeding, water, and Miracle-Gro, it would just be a matter of time before they began elbowing their neighbors, a cheerful coexistence of blooms. As always when I work in the garden, I felt hopeful. At home. Grounded.

I’m hesitant to extrapolate a spiritual message from this experience. Gardening as a metaphor for faith is hardly original; any writer who makes that connection is treading on well-worn ground. But there’s a good reason for that. There’s such a profound, elemental connection between tending a garden and tending one’s spiritual life. After all, gardening is about encouraging the things that sustain and nurture life, and removing the things that don’t. That’s exactly what I try to do with my faith life: assess what brings me closer to God (daily prayer, gratitude, mindfulness) and find ways to do them more often.

The problem with such stock-taking, though, is that it takes effort, and it takes a quiet mind. I’m so busy juggling motherhood, marriage, teaching, writing, housework, and the occasional pursuit of exercise, that days can pass without any conscious spiritual reflection on my part. Every now and then, though, the craving for spiritual renewal hits me like a thunderbolt. Only then do I realize, with what feels like surprise, that I need some quiet time to help keep me blooming.

That’s why I stayed out in the yard that night, working even after the sun had gone down. Kneeling on the overgrown lawn, pressing soil around the tiny new plants, it felt like a benediction. I was praying without words, satisfying a hunger I hadn’t realized I’d had. And I was relearning a lesson I’ve learned thousands of times: every now and then, we all need to hit pause, breathe deeply, and return to what grounds us.

 This article first appeared in Catholic San Francisco.

Every year, I plant impatiens in one little area of my yard.  It’s a corner under a lovely Japanese maple, right near a kitschy figurine of a happy frog.  It’s an area with a lot of shade, so when the flowers bloom – red, lavender, fuschia, white – the vivid color is absolutely striking.

I planted them about six weeks ago, and settled in happily to wait for them to flourish.

I got one good bloom, and then something – I suspect those neighborhood ruffians, the snails – vandalized them.  Leaves were chomped off, petals were shredded, and a full half of them ended up as mere shadows of their former selves.

I was tempted to replace the damaged plants.  At about $1.99 for a six-pack, it would not have been a huge investment.  But then I decided I’d just apply Miracle-Gro, cut back the damaged part, and wait to see what happens.

And guess what?  They’re blooming again.

The whole story seems like a metaphor for so many things in my life.  In my haste to make things happen now, it’s so easy to get impatient and to pull up the tender little thing that just needs a little time and space and TLC to flourish.  I do this with my writing, sometimes; if an article doesn’t seem to be going with quite  the speed I’d wanted, I’ll sometimes move on entirely instead of giving it a little more time to hit its stride.  I’ve also had times of prayer when it starts off feeling  dry and rote and so I bag it all and go watch that DVR’d episode of Frasier instead of embracing the process.    That’s not to say that every stunted thing is eventually going to burst into glorious bloom, but I do have to recognize that my tendency is often to pull things up by the roots just a little bit prematurely.  Sometimes, it’s good to sit on my hands and wait.

One of the great things about motherhood, in fact, is that it trains you to give things time.  When my kids are annoying, I can’t just drop them off at the neighbor’s house and board the next plane to Anywhere But Here (even though, believe me, that sounds pretty tempting at times).  I wait it out, whatever “it” is – the tantrum, the stomach flu, the potty-training that seems to move in geological time.   And I have never been sorry that I did.   Just like those little flowers under the maple tree, there’s a beautiful reward if you can just hang in there.

How fitting that impatiens made me reflect upon patience.

So things are not totally rosy at the moment.  I strained my lower back the other night and it’s remarkably painful, the kind of pain that makes you wait till all the students are out of the classroom, lock the door, then lie down and do a grim round of back exercises.  Last night I treated the pain with an adhesive heating pad and a relaxing glass of cabernet, which was somewhat helpful, though Vicodin would have been better.   (Who is the patron saint of back pain?  Must investigate.)

But I’m rolling with it, and thinking about how things could be worse, and remembering the nice little things that have happened lately (mindfulness being one of my strategies for maintaining sanity while I attempt to Do It All).  And here are a few lovely little moments/experiences/images of the last several days.

1. Making homemade cranberry sauce. It’s very easy to be mindful when you are looking at these lovely little jewels on the stove, and hearing their fascinating little muffled pops as they burst their skins.  It’s pretty mesmerizing, and the result tastes SO good (especially served warm with pumpkin pancakes from the mix at Trader Joe’s).

2.  A warm wonderful weekend.  Last Saturday, we took the boys to a pumpkin patch in San Francisco (yes, they do have them; there was even a hayride!) and the day was unutterably gorgeous.  There’s nothing like a warm day in the city, when the pastel candybox colors of the houses look so beautiful against the blue sky and happy people flood the parks and the Panhandle.  It was a day to remember, and proof that if you want to see San Francisco at its best, come in the fall, not the summer.

3.  This view of the sacristy at church.  With the sun projecting the stained glass colors on the walls and floor, it was like being inside a kaleidoscope.

4. Halloween evening, in which I escorted a very cuddly shark and a very cute policeman around the neighborhood for treats.  There were epic levels of excitement at our house.  I think I had as much fun as they did, watching them both participate wholeheartedly in one of the best of childhood’s rituals.  My parents joined us, which made it all even nicer.

5.  A very nice email from a friend, about my latest article.  It really touched her, and that reaction touched me.

6.  My pink rosebush, which has been exploding in blooms lately — the last gasp of summer. “They’re florist quality!” raved my mom, whom I sent home on Monday with some not-yet-opened blooms.  I’ve got multiple vases of them in the house,  loving my final rose fix of the year.

So that’s me!  What made you happy this week?

As I watered the pots and flowerbeds the other day, I thought about how much our backyard has changed  in the seven years that we’ve lived in our house.

When we first moved in, there was an unspeakably vile red lean-to structure that stretched from one end of the house all the way to the side fence.  It meant that when you entered the backyard you could see nothing of the trees and lawn just behind; the only thing greeting you was a red wooden wall (featuring, inexplicably, a Dutch door).    Shortly after we moved in,  Scott got to work with a crowbar, and spent many happy weekends demolishing it (he rarely gets to destroy things; it was very cathartic, he reported).  Its demise meant that our small NoCal backyard instantly shot up on the beauty-o-meter. The yard suddenly looked — and felt — a whole lot more spacious.

The yard has also gotten much more floral.  The home’s previous owner  was more into shrubs than flowers, and I’ve rectified that by having Scott hack away at some tough old  junipers and oleander (more happy destruction!) in order to clear the way for flowerbeds.    Since moving in, we’ve planted roses, and bulbs and annuals, a hydrangea or two (alas, the native soil seems not to like hydrangeas), and lots and lots of blooming pots.   So now it is far more colorful, especially on these warm autumn afternoons when the light is rich and buttery yellow, and the red geraniums and purple sage pop into your line of vision like the colors of stained glass.

It sounds odd to say this, but the yard has also gotten a lot more Catholic over the years.   There’s a small St. Francis shrine on the fence that I see outside the kitchen window, and a white stone Mary stands in gracious state where the corner of the house meets the garage, with low flowering pots at her feet.   I don’t really stop and pray at these shrines, but their presence makes me happy nonetheless, because they are a visual reminder of the faith that my parents chose for me when I was a kid, and that I choose again for myself, over and over, every day of my life.

And the yard also tells part of the story of our family.  When I miscarried before Matthew was born, we planted a white camellia along the side fence, to honor that little life that we never got to know.  Its blooms are ruffled and small, much more delicate than those of the tough pink camellia ten feet away.  It’s  a reminder, a quiet, unassuming reminder, of one of the two children that I never got to meet and hold, and of the fragile faith that carried me along through some dark days.  I am very glad that it’s there.

And the yard bears pretty obvious testimony to the fact that, God be praised, two little boys did eventually enter our lives.  There’s the cracked wading pool, the faded rubber ball off in the corner, the Little Tykes basketball hoop on the patio.  There is the flowerbed that I’ve decided to keep empty, in case they one day want to have a dirt spot to play with their plastic construction vehicles.

And there are lots of memories echoing off of the cracked asphalt: the sound of basketballs and laughter, of frisbees scuttling along the ground, of my voice telling a little helper how to pat soil around tiny marigolds, of the sudden splash of small boys jumping into a shallow wading pool on a warm evening, their hair plastered to their foreheads, their bare tummies adorned with wet leaves and bits of dirt and grass.

On the face of it, it’s just a modest suburban backyard.  But to me, it’s holy ground.