In the Gardens of God

I spent last weekend near Asheville in the mountain-side home of my son and daughter-in-law. You can see the sunrises, sunsets, and stars from there. You can see out from there. I grew up on the side of a hill (we call them hills in Washington, to distinguish from the snowcaps). Living in  bottom-dwelling towns for all my adulthood, I miss being able to look up to land masses that are taller than I am, and down to those lower. Coming up over the rise on I-40, where one gets the first view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, always makes my spirit soar. And I feel how deep down it has sunk while I was away. I spent a day hiking and cooling my feet in the river in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Just the name gives me goosebumps. But it wasn't always so.

Vacations in my childhood were spent camping at or taking day trips to Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens (which could be viewed from the deck of my home). We hiked and picnicked and picked huckleberries. We canoed on Spirit Lake (at St. Helens). I attended Olympic and Cascade mountains backpacking sessions of Girl Scout camp. I rode my bike up and down the freaking hill we lived on and wished I lived on a city street in the flatlands like regular people did. We also took vacations to the GSMNP, my mother's childhood playground. My sisters and I teased her mercilessly about the hills she called mountains every time we went. Afterall, there is no permanent snow cap and you do not have to be a mountaineer to climb to the top of anything; and one can drive to Clingman's Dome, the tallest point in the park, for goodness sake. How can that be called a mountain? And then, after seven years of young adulthood in the hills of southwest Virginia, my young family moved to Mississippi. And I got my comeuppance for my provincialism. I learned not only to appreciate, but to love the Appalachian Mountains.

My mother used to say something to the effect (tweaked by me) that one can experience the face and grandeur of God in the majestic mountains, dense forests, and alpine meadows of the Pacific Northwest, but one dwells within God’s soul in the calm, accessible beauty of the Blue Ridge. It is true. Due to the accident of birth to a mother who grew up in the shadow of the Appalachians and a father who fulfilled his dream to “get on his [Michigan cornfield] tractor and go west until he got to the ocean,” I have had the privilege of knowing both the face and the soul of God. Next to my two beautiful children, it is the greatest gift of my life.

I am back this weekend from the southeast garden of God to my own garden. This week I have enjoyed the summer's new generation of birds coming to the feeder; they look so inexperienced and unsure of what they are supposed to do and what they are supposed to be afraid of. They make me laugh. I harvested the last of the sunflowers, drying now to feed them as they grow older and the days grow shorter and colder. And it has finally rained. Good, multi-day, soil-soaking rains. And when it's not raining, it is so humid it might as well be. The crab grass in my lawn is finally filling in the dried out spots and crowding out the plethora of other lawn weeds. The cosmos fell over from the unaccustomed moisture keeping their roots from being cemented into the ground and had to be tied up. In spite of the rain, though, it has come to my attention that the garden is not really thriving. The banana tree continues to produce new leaves, but it’s not gaining the height I expected it to. There are many hostas and ferns, but they have not grown large and lush, as I expected them to. The cosmos are barely blooming, though the stalks are healthy; the shade annuals are not much bigger than they were two months ago. Only the marigolds and vinca--and the grape tomatoes--are doing well. It is a drought year. We all experience those years. But I have concentrated so hard these past three years on quantity in my gardens, that perhaps I have overlooked quality. I water and weed and deadhead, but I wonder if I am missing something in the care and pampering of my plants. For one thing, I don't fertilize as I should; but what else should I be doing? Or do I just have too much expectation?

I asked someone last week how she was doing, and I received a litany of what she was doing. In the garden and in life we continue to think that if there is just enough on the menu, we can ignore the quality; if we keep busy and keep checking off the items on our to-do lists, we can avoid looking at how we are doing in our personal garden. We can skip the self-care fertilizer. Yes, there was a drought this summer and too much heat. And sometimes in our lives--as in the garden--survival is all we can manage. Just keep our heads above ground and get through. But at what point do we have to go deeper? At what point do we have to go deeper, in spite of our busyness or our drought? At what point do we need to pull out the plants that aren't blooming but whose healthy stalks are shadowing other plants that might bloom if they could get out of the shadow?

My children grew up on suburban streets. As I caught fireflies in a jar and pinned toads in the beam of a flashlight with my grandson, Max, and his mom and dad last weekend; as we looked at the stars and watched lightening flashing between the clouds in the dark skies over the mountains, I felt so glad for Max's childhood, and I wished that my children could have known that kind of play. But their father and I, in our love for the gardens of God, took them to places beyond their suburban homes. We planted a love of the dwelling place of the face and the soul of God into their bloom. I am growing my own garden in the city, for now; and they have returned to the gardens of God, beloved by their mother and grandmother: Emma to the Pacific Northwest, and Nicholas to the Blue Ridge. I guess I did okay after all.