HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?
25 March 2012
Friday 23rd was a record high – 76 degrees, but then 23rd March is always a record high for me, being my daughter’s birthday. The day she was born it was snowing.
Talking of out of body experiences, we have finally, today, re-inhabited ours after a week of jet lag and culture shock. Perhaps it was our ritual English Sunday breakfast or curling up on the couch with the New York Times that slotted us back into place. Or maybe it’s that the day is more seasonal having dropped some 30 degrees in temperature. Whatever the reason, it’s a relief to be within the borders of oneself again, even though the resulting alignment puts the outside world in sharper focus.
Last week, while still attempting to normalize reality, we strolled in Riverside Park. Suddenly, as we walked across a grassy stretch I was transported to my seaside garden on Cape Cod and felt such a pang of loss I wept in Joel’s arms. As much as I like to say that I never felt it was “my” garden, but rather a piece of the planet I was tending, I have to admit that my attachment to it was deep. Perhaps because I grew it from nothing, the once flat, barren lot of sand becoming, over 12 years, a wonderland of woodland and dune, rose garden and vegetable beds, herb borders and a tamarisk shaded, honeysuckle perfumed hammock arbor.
Standing in Riverside Park, hearing the non-stop whoosh of traffic on The West Side Highway I longed for the scattering of crocii in the lawn, the daffodils that must be waving along the studio wall and the border of the privet hedge. I suddenly felt like a mother who’d abandoned her children before they were fully grown. How could I not be there to see the Linden tree, which when I planted it had a trunk that I could encircle with my fingers and which when we left it last June was a good foot in diameter, it’s branches blotting out the house next door. How can it be that I won’t be there the year its trunk will start wrapping itself around the corner of what was my writing shed?
It is impossible once the longing begins not to run through the list of annual arrivals; after the crocuses and daffs and snowdrops, the scarlet tulips and peonies, the ornamental grasses starting their awesome growth from cut-back, dry stumps to six foot tall bladed fountains. And here comes the crimson rhododendron heralding the burgeoning ferns, ladies mantle and bleeding hearts, the flowering of the pear and beach plum trees…
It would be madness to continue. Instead I envision the new owners going through the garden gate and discovering new joys each week as roses and lavender and hydrangeas show off for them.
We stroll on and surrender to the joy of pink magnolia buds dotting the air with all the carefree happiness of a Sempe painting. There are bits and pieces of our history that we all leave behind. Some of them we walk away from with relief only to be surprised at some point in the future by their almost 3 dimensional return, so deep are some experiences etched into our cellular beings.
Even our children don’t walk away completely, or forever; even though there are definite markers of separation along the way; the first day they go to nursery school, the day you put them on the school bus, the first, terrifying day you watch them drive away, alone behind the wheel.
I remember the day we saw my daughter off to Europe. Having graduated high school in June I took her to Cape Cod for the summer and then, In September, deciding against college, she chose to throw herself out in the world, first stop London. Joel’s daughter left the same day, in the opposite direction, heading for San Francisco. We went first to her terminal to see her off and then to another to watch my daughter bravely turn and walk towards her life, backpacked and solitary, she never looked back. Yet here we all are, all these many years later, living in New York.
And perhaps it is our children who brought us back into focus this week, as they have so many times in their lives. My daughter, on Friday, sharing tea with us while letting us be our old, tired selves. And yesterday, Joel’s daughter, along with her husband and their 3 year-old daughter, taking us in, inviting us to hang, having dinner together.
I can’t ever go back to that garden again – the one I always insisted wasn’t really “mine” really isn’t now. I’ve never been one of those people who love New York and if I focus on all I don’t like about it, it becomes almost unbearable to be here. But I do love if for the best reason of all and that is that our daughters are here. We get to watch them blossom every year and as separate from us as they’ve grown, once in a while we still get to tend them.