MindSpinner

Three years ago, my bit of earth was a bare half acre, a farm field scraped bare for the coming of a house in an ordinary subdivision. People often buy their first houses here and begin to raise their children. The children in phase one are teenagers now; the children in our cul de sac, the final phase, are not old enough for school, except mine. Everybody else is starting out. I was starting over.

Last week I found more stone for the path that extends beyond the kitchen garden into someday shade garden. If you look closely you can see little specks of shrubs and trees out there. You can’t really make out the stick in the back. The invisible stick is an October Glory Maple. The path will end in a spiral with a small pool at its center. I’ve drawn a picture of what it will be, but my old scanner is not speaking to the new laptop.

Three years ago the kitchen garden was a quantity of topsoil corraled into a space about 30′ by 40′.

The dwarf peach trees were seedlings soon to be for sale from Miller Nurseries.

The Baptisia (False Indigo) was a small brown seed.

There was no place for a bird to visit.

Nothing to seduce a bee.

This sedum grew in the Georgia mountains.

This cat was a kitten.

This rock lay under the earth.

When I divorced five years ago, I wanted more than anything to flee. For a few months I even did my grocery shopping in a nearby town. (This does seem extreme unless you’ve weathered the efforts of well-meaning “save the marriage” committees in your living room quoting scripture and earnest correspondents convinced that you’ve given yourself over to the wiles of Satan). I would gladly have sought a place where I could begin again, just as myself, free of the stigma that comes of leaving a publicly owned marriage in a small community and of the gossip that necessarily fills any vacuum of human curiosity. For a variety of reasons, I did not flee. I commenced to living quietly on my own terms. I reached for life’s beauties where I could. Among these, some of the dearest proved ephemeral, but the garden grew, intimating that, if I just keep gleaning rocks, pulling weeds, and planting this here and that there, I can work in concert with sun, rain, and that life urge of which I and seed alike partake, to grow a small world, to make beauty out of barrenness. Whatever else is not, the garden is, in and out of seasons. And for the season of his life, so is the gray and white cat now napping beside me. I’ve learned deep gratitude for what abides; from what I abides I can derive my strength.