Little Gardens Everywhere

I had notes for my 101st blog post about my last days in the garden at 609 Edmund Street, but I have deleted nearly all of them. As I write this, I have left that garden, and I am looking forward. I said my goodbyes to each room and each garden before I went to the closing. I returned for the cat and got back in the car without revisiting anything. It didn't belong to me anymore.

What matters is what remains. I fell in love with the world in my garden－in the growing of things and the watching for new life; in the bird song; in the passing of the seasons. On Memorial Day, I took a vase of gardenias and hydrangeas to Mary's Oakwood grave. Flowers that she planted decades ago; and that remain in the garden today. My heart and soul, too, will linger in the walls of the house and the dirt in the garden, mingling with Mary’s. And now those rooms and that garden are open, empty, ready to receive John and Meredith’s love. "At some point you just have to let go. Move on. Because no matter how painful it is, it’s the only way we grow" (Grey’s Anatomy).

I am growing into my temporary residence in Five Points. I have new places to walk, with new gardens and different flowers. The first morning I head out for a walk at 6:00, stopping at Third Place for coffee. I learn they have $1.50 lattes on Tuesdays. A new weekly treat, for three weeks! Last night I travel on foot to a movie at the Rialto and return among crowds of happy movie goers and diners under the nearly full moon. I feel full. One day I will enjoy dinner at Lilly's Pizza, but in the meantime the aroma is free to all passersby. I discover, after plans were made to stay with Laura, that I had two options to stay in friends' empty residences. For a moment I regret not knowing and choosing differently. But what I am doing is just right. Learning to live again in a house with other people is a Venture itself; and the urban neighborhood is a whole new experience. It is a perfect transition.

I am not in limbo, though it is easy to think so. I can see today's date and the approximate date of my departure from North Carolina on one calendar page now. My job is for two more weeks, my current home is for three. I am embracing three weeks. Three weeks without the constant calling of yard work, cleaning, projects, grocery shopping and meal preparation (I have lots of eating invitations). Three weeks to explore what to do without the constancy of life as I have known it. I intend to live it.

“The thing most feared is that everything will stay the same” (The Most Exotic Marigold Hotel). I do not do well with a life in which everything stays the same; though I haven't always chosen the changes in my living－change has chosen me. And really, nothing stays the same for any of us; but we tend to be afraid of altered lives, I think. So we cling to what stays the same and close our eyes to transformations as if to make them go away. Children leave home and we work around the hole, trying to ignore it; putting a fence around it lest we fall in. We forget to look for little life-giving alterations in the necessary dailiness of our living. I confess, though, that I am more afraid of sameness.

There are little gardens everywhere: at 609 Edmund, in Oakwood and Five Points, in the Pacific Northwest. Life is a garden. We plant. We pull up. We plant again. And we bloom. "We all in the end－die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories" (Eulogy for Steve Jobs, by his sister, Mona). Am I leaving in the middle of a story? I don’t think so. I think my story here is finished; it’s time to start a new one. It is like reading a really great book－the kind you hate to finish－and yet it does end. And you go in search of another really great book. And all the time the favorite books are stored in your heart. Someone will argue that I am simply moving to another chapter. I don't think so. New book, same author.

The belongings with which I make my dwelling place a home is in a truck on its way to the place I will make my new home. One day new friends will join old dear friends in the marrow of my bones, in the soil of my garden. There is going to be another garden. The new garden will grow what I plant. I am excited to see what comes up.