A glorious day in Portland, Maine, and we deserve it, if I do say so, on behalf of all of my fellow Mainers who have survived a cold and very white winter and cold and very gray spring. When this past winter snuck up on me -- my first winter back in Maine after five away -- I had, somehow, forgotten how nasty a winter up here can be. Winters in Massachusetts can be unpleasant but just two hours north brings a few more degrees of cold and a few more inches of snow in a typical year, and that is enough to huddle inside in front of the fireplace and step up your planning for that Florida condo. Worse, spring comes later, colder, and even a bit less bright -- it seems a complete indignity to me that one still needs a pair of gloves on a morning run on many May days up here in the north.
Ahh, but I started my story on a positive note so I must return. It's sunny and warm enough today to go without a jacket and the birds are chirping and the flowers are showing their colors. Whoops, I'm starting to frown again. You see, all of a sudden I have a garden, a real garden, with mulch and wood chips and plants I don't know the names for and an irrigation system. To many of you, I suspect this would seem great good fortune, not impending terror, and on the days when I am just looking out the window and feeling grateful for my cool old house and its patch of yard and the haven of plants, trees, and flowers that form its border with the city streets, I too see the garden as a blessing. However, on a day like today, a Saturday, when the sun is shining and the clock is not calling me to work and my neighbors are out in their yards, sweeping out the last dead leaves and planting bushes and cutting their grass, sadly, my heart is not light -- it is filled with dread at my total incompetence amongst a gaggle of greenery.
Not that I haven't tried, but over the years, we -- my gardens and I -- have never gained a sense of mutual love, never mind respect. There was the patch of vegetables I planted at my first real house in Natick, a Boston suburb, that quickly became overgrown with weeds. I didn't understand why I only got zucchini, which, as we know, cannot be killed even by the blackest-thumbed gardener, until my friend told me that you really had to pull out the weeds that were scaling the vegetable plants, even if you thought they looked cool. There were the brussels sprouts my ex and I planted one summer in the eight inch wide strip of dirt at the front of our parking area at our old house in Portland, stalks of which we pulled out of the thawing snow the following March. They almost looked edible although we didn't dare try eating them at that point -- the eating season was long gone, never mind the growing one. There was the comprehensive and detailed garden of mostly seeds planted in the raised beds in my adorable backyard in Cambridge a couple of years ago as a joint project with Kanha and my niece and her future husband. I provided the real estate and the three of them did the planting -- tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, lettuce, radishes, peppers, and probably a few more vegetables that one would dream of pulling out of their own ground and devouring right in that spot on a beautiful New England summer day. I'm sure it won't surprise you that the only thing we ever saw in full grown, edible form were the tomatoes and basil -- they had started their lives as baby versions of themselves and not just seeds, giving them a fighting chance of survival that our gardening skills did not. By the end of the summer, the blight going around had even destroyed most of the tomatoes and, in fact, most of my gardening will.
But here I go again. Perhaps I'll do better this time. I'm working with plants here, not vegetables -- maybe they're easier. (Or maybe not...). I have an incredible head start -- the garden is already mature, someone with real talent and love for the greenness of life created it and all I have to do is keep it alive. I'm committed to making this house my home so perhaps that commitment will blossom into skill when I drag out the trowel and hoe.
Today I spent an hour, digging up weeds -- well, really, digging up dandelions because they were the only green things I was sure were weeds. It's a start. I've invited my friend Barbara, gardener extraordinaire, over to exchange libations for advice. I'm humble and hopeful. Let the spring blossom, throughout the city and in my garden.
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