In Search of My Mother's Garden*

Changing gardens is hard. It's not the new flora and fauna﹣not even the fauna that eat the flora (later that might annoy me). In fact, it's not what is new at all; it's letting go of what is missing to make room for the new. The coffee shop doesn't open early enough and they don't make decaf drip coffee and I don't like the cups and it's not warm enough to sit outside and may never be in the morning. And I miss Brian and Kevin at Cafe Carolina, who knew my name. They knew my order, too; I don't even know my order at Santa Lucia. But it is a sweet place. I will give it until my gift card is used up and then assess.

My mother's garden is a bit wild and a lot beautiful. She is not satisfied with it; I don't know why, but I do know her dissatisfaction with so many things is something I am going to struggle with. It is part of her personal garden. I fell in love with the unfamiliar-to-me St. John's Wort and crocrosmia lucifer last summer when I was here. (Perhaps before summer's end I will learn to photograph the crocrosmia. I have discovered that true red flowers are difficult to get a good picture of.) And I am glad that my mother seems to have finally made peace with the tiny but invasive forget-me-nots, and given them a bit more space. It is one of those "weeds" that would take over the garden and the lawn if allowed, but kept in bounds are beautiful.

My childhood home is on the side of a hill in the woods. The ferns and fir trees frame the gardens. The deer live in the framework and like to come into the picture at will. In this first week, I have seen not a single squirrel; and, other than hummingbirds, only one bird. My mother doesn't feed the birds﹣they make a mess and, like the mourning doves in my North Carolina garden, the jays are greedy, so she opts out. I am getting seed soon. I am overjoyed to be able to sleep in the summer with the window open; and I miss being awakened by bird song.

I spend the week since my arrival building my nest. Part of my personal garden is the need for change. Changing jobs, changing homes, rearranging furniture, putting new plants in the garden. So I enjoy arranging my familiar possessions into my new space. As I install my yard art into my new garden, the one my sister created when she lived here a few years ago, I am disappointed that there isn't more to do in the garden. I was told it needed TLC, but my mother's garden helper "did pull the weeds." I like to pull weeds﹣at least the first ones of the season. The cleaning out cleans me out. Emptying and making space. It is creating that space that gets my creative juices and my imagination flowing.

Under the carport with the plastic bags and wooden crates and Maxwell House coffee cans filled with driftwood, beach stones, and shells collected by me and my sisters and parents decades ago, I discover the old iron kettle I used to make sandbox stew in. I put it in the garden. (I have replaced Mary's watering can with it in the sidebar of this blog.) I look forward to reconnecting with my childhood while I am here. Besides the beach stones and sandbox pot, I see in the sweet peas and daisies the wildflower bouquets I used to present to my mother. The ones she put on the dining table like they were the finest hothouse floral arrangements. What better place and time to return to writing memoir, which this blog interrupted.

Now that my nest is nearly finished, I feel anxiety creeping in. The next step is new relationships. I am not so good at that. Soon I will stop feeling like this is a vacation from which I will return to my life. I am already keenly missing my friends, who are now very far away. Friends are the true flowers in the garden. I know some of my sister's friends, and have met some more this week. That helps, but eventually I will need to grow my own. I loved Mary's flowers that came up in my North Carolina garden; but the garden wasn't mine until I added my own to the mix. I brought seeds from my poppies with me. I don't know if they will grow here, but I will scatter them in my new garden and see what comes up. And I have to figure out my mother's personal garden, too, and how I can be a companion to her and not lose my self. Change is good. Adjustment to change is hard﹣that time in the hallway between the familiar and the new, before the new becomes the familiar.

My Fresh Market scone clone﹣the one I made yesterday in my mother's kitchen using the beloved and familiar green crockery mixing bowl I helped mix chocolate chip cookie dough in as a child﹣is probably better than the FM one that has accompanied my blog writing and before that my journaling time for more than a decade. But it isn't quite right for me. It is a recipe I experimented with a few years ago when FM decided theirs weren't quite right and changed them, with poor results (something they were experimenting with again just before I left NC). But I haven't made it for a while. The recipe is right, but the patting out and baking need an adjustment.

This recipe for my life is right. I am home. Home in the green. Home in the mountains. Home where the air is fresh, not sticky. Home with family. The patting out and baking will take some more time. As I search for my place in my mother's garden, I will enjoy her flowers and her gardens for now. Maybe I will find my own flowers to add to hers﹣at least in my little plot within hers. Or maybe that will wait until I have my own garden again someday. I will have to decide, too, if I put my inner garden on hold and just live in hers; or if I stay steady in creating my own plot inside her circle. Creating a garden takes time.

*I know, the title has been used before. But I'm just borrowing it for a minute. Apologies to Alice Walker.

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.

Spin Cycle

"It is not where we stand but in what direction we are moving." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I skinned my knee. Wow. I skinned my knee (the very expensive one). I haven't done that since I was 12. I am so stunned by the fact of the fall, I don't even think about it hurting. (Walking and texting. Not a good idea. As friend Charly says, Oprah never warned of the dangers of that.) I congratulate myself on keeping my head about me, and my feet in contact with the ground after I stub my toe, long enough to propel myself to the hood of a parked car where I stick out my arm and slow down the fall to hands and knees. And I didn’t drop my phone, either. Later, sitting on a bench reading a book just acquired at the library, three young mothers parade by pushing babes in strollers. Wow. Been a long time since I did that, too. I could feel old: clumsy and so way-past childbearing years. Oddly, I feel great! Young enough to be transported back to the babies-in-buggies-with-buddies years. Young enough to still skin my knee and get up and walk away from it. (Fortunately no one saw my mishap. That would have been a game-changer.)

Groundhog's Day was, of course, this week. I never paid much attention before--it's not, afterall, a day off work--until a few years ago when dear Dori revealed it as her favorite holiday and the movie her favorite flick. In the movie, Bill Murray--a news reporter covering breaking news in Punxsutawney, PA--wakes up to exactly the same day over and over and over. He cycles through all the emotions: curiosity, frustration, anger. His responding actions follow suit. He cannot make the day change no matter how negative he becomes, and how violently angry he is. Finally he figures it out. To make the day different, he has to change who he is in it--in a positive, life-giving rather than life-diminishing way.

How often I keep waiting for my environment, my circumstances to change; thinking they will all on their own. There is a woman, I will call her Oz, who has been at Cafe Carolina most Sunday mornings for the past year and a half. We have never spoken. I remain hunched over my laptop writing; she over her Kindle reading. Both of us throwing off don't-bother-me vibes. Both of us, it turns out, wanting to speak, but afraid to interrupt the other's sacred time. Last week, after arriving at the same moment at the coffee pot, she makes the break and stops by my table. She opens with a line that makes it clear she read my blog the previous week. Long story short, she got the name of this blog long ago, reading it over my shoulder from the booth behind me, and has been reading it ever since. She is in Raleigh long-term-temporarily and has spoken about me to her partner who lives in one of the northern cold states. Her partner encouraged her to just say hello. And she finally did. Thank you, Oz, for altering our little Groundhog's Day scenario. (We talk this morning for a long time. Delightful. And many discovered connections.)

The point is, we don't have to do much to change who we are in our day. And one little change has a domino effect. Yesterday I go to a Yoga for Women over 50 class at a studio other than the Y. A new class with different people, a new space, a new day for yoga, a change in Saturday routine. (Same wonderful instructor--I have my limits.) That hour changes the whole day. (It also helps that it is gray and raining.) The yoga opens me up and inspires a creative project involving magazines, scissors, and glue that makes me very happy; I bake bread and make soup, loving the mixing and kneading and chopping. And the aroma that permeates the house. The devouring is pretty darn good, too.

This morning I read last year's Groundhog's Day post. There is a photo of the emerging peony. We have all been exclaiming about the early spring this year, but I check this morning--no emerging

peony. But the banana tree has many new tightly-curled leaves this week; having never frozen back to the ground, it didn't have to start over. The tulip magnolia that bloomed too soon in Fletcher Park is gone, but I find another. And the cherry trees in the Park are blooming their outrageous-scented pinkness. A swinger of swings delights in newfound freedom, swinging so much higher than he dared a year ago. My blog of a year ago, also proclaims January warmth. Perhaps the pre-season warmth and bloom is not as unusual as we think it is. Maybe it is the same over and over. Could it be that we are different? I hope so. In spite of ourselves, we continually reinvent some small part of our Selves and then credit it to external events. I wonder if we are so afraid of change, that we deny that we have.

On Thursday afternoon, I can't figure out why my left arm and my expensive right knee are sore. By evening, the pain has spread to my shoulders. Friday morning, my lower back. Oh. Yes. The Fall. Today I am pretty much back to normal. It is a good lesson. Changing direction can be painful; but we survive, and our days look different because we are different in them. This week I am determined to rise 15 minutes earlier and get back to my dawn walk. Missing the sunrise affects me all day. I will miss the 15 minutes of mattress time for only a nano-second.

"Get yourself to your life...Rise above the aches and pains, the nausea, exhaustion, general malaise. The show won't last forever." -Patti Digh

Like a Rolling Stone

Omniscient They say rolling stones gather no moss. And I guess that is true (though they may pick up a good bit of mud as they roll on). So does it follow that a stone at rest, growing moss, becomes stuck; trapped in its opaque moss casing? It is also true that one must slow down in order to notice that the constantly moving stone is gathering no plant matter.

Because we humans have well-honed selective--dare I say faulty--memory, we must record and compare to be sure of whether or not one something is different this year from last. I am a recorder, if not much else. Last year in a mid-January blog post, I included a picture of the first bloom on the winter jasmine. The photo above is this year's mid-January winter jasmine.

I started this blog in May 2010, thinking I would record a year in the garden, and after that there would be nothing new to write about and I would stop. But I just keep on rolling. And neither I nor the garden gather moss. I am different. The garden is different. The blog has become my journal of a life--all that's fit to print (which means a lot is left out). I no longer keep a journal in my own hand, which is a little sad to me, but there is a lot less verbal diarrhea and a lot more intentionality. When I did keep the journal, though, I often looked back at the same time in a previous year. And I often thought, "Good God, nothing has changed." I wondered how I could get unstuck. But the truth is, everything changes; it's just so tiny and slow that it doesn't always seem like it. The days whip by, the seasons cycle through at lightening speed, and our lives roll on inch by excruciating inch. That doesn't mean there is no change.

A year ago this month I tore my meniscus. In May I had surgery. My record of healing comes in the form of yoga. In fact, noticing change throughout my body is recorded in Julie's yoga classes at the YMCA. My very least favorite pose when I began yoga--when? three years ago, four? I must look back in my journals--was the dreadful pigeon (Eka Pada Kapotasana--I don't think I have heard Julie use the sanskrit name for that one). I don't know why it came to be my favorite over time. Perhaps because it is one that initially I Could Not Do At All. And then I could. It is a major victory. But after the injury and even more after knee surgery, I couldn't do it again on the right side. I suppose I did notice that each time we did it, I could bend it a little more and for a tiny bit longer, but I had given up thinking I would ever again do it completely. And, frankly, all I really cared about was the end goal. But this week I did it, a full year after the injury. (I still can't do a straight-legged forward fold with my palms on the floor. I think Never is a safe word with that one.)

That caring only about the end goal gives me pause. That's why we don't notice change. We tend to overlook the miniscule. We look too far ahead. And too far ahead looks too far to ever reach. And so we imagine that we are stuck--no longer a rolling stone. When we get stuck, stuff sticks to us, and that keeps us more stuck. There is a mathematical principle that I read in some novel several months back. It got my attention, so I wrote it down in my electronic file of Things I Might Want to Explore in a Blog Post. "Never start with the unknown variable." Even though we might think we know what's down the road, we really don't. It is an unknown variable. So we start with what we know. I think the same thing might be true when I begin the time in my life that what's ahead is most certain to be decline. The variable might be worse or better than what I imagine; but what I have is what I can notice and fall in love with today. My mother has started calling me, or sending me a note or even an email! about things she is falling in love with in that moment--like the fog in the valley. She often tells me what she has not been able to do; I love when she tells me what brings her joy. 

Shake off the moss. Shake off the mud. You are not stuck. Notice that pigeon is easier this month than it was last month. Start noticing the tiny buds on the hydrangea. One day they will have extravagant orbs of tiny flowers, or there might be a blight or an insect infestation or a hydrangea-loving deer. But right now the leaves are budding and beginning their slow rolling journey toward fullness. Rejoice in today's tiny bud. And eat your muffin one delicious bite at a time.

The Way We Were

All over the world--or at least in America--religious leaders and bloggers are sharing their words and arguable wisdom about the events that happened in this country ten years ago. And people are recalling where they were and what they were doing when they heard about what was happening in New York and Washington, DC and Pennsylvania. Some are remembering the event and some are wishing they could forget.

I was doing pretty much what I am doing right now, except in a journal. I had been working part time at my current job for about a month. I wasn't working that Tuesday morning, and I was at my outdoor table--as I am today--at Bear Rock Cafe, down the street from home. A young woman sitting at the only other occupied table was talking on her cell phone. This was before cell phones were pervasive--it would be a few years before I had one--so that in itself was of some interest. It was 

her conversation that was really getting my attention, though. She was talking about an airplane and fire. Her voice was serious, but calm. I thought "There must have been a plane crash somewhere," and I said a prayer for the pain the loved ones of those lost were experiencing. I finished my journaling and my coffee and scone, and walked toward home, stopping at the Hallmark store, perhaps for a card for my nephew's birthday. Over the radio piped through the store, I heard what really happened. I abandoned my search for the perfect card and ran the rest of the way home, where I turned on the TV. I watched in horror the live view of what was happening in New York City, and the replay over and over and over of the planes hitting the skyscrapers. And then I saw the second tower fall.

Yesterday on NPR the news anchor said it was the "worst terrorist attack in history." And that is what I have been thinking about for the last 24 hours. Who decides, I wonder, what is "worst"? Who defines "terrorist"? Nature's terrorist attacks have changed lives this year: floods, tornadoes, typhoons, earthquakes, hurricanes, and fire. Certainly those cataclysmic events have changed the people they affected far more than 9/11 did. The holocaust was surely the worst terrorist attack for European Jews in the 1930s and 40s, when nearly 6 million of them were murdered. Surely two atomic bombs dropped on Japan was the worst terrorist attack if you lived in Japan in 1945. Being black in the US south in the 1950s was daily terror. The Vietnamese in the 1960s and the Americans who involuntarily joined them there could not possibly have imagined more terror. And we didn't and don't have to live in those places at those times to be horrified at what human beings can do their brothers and sisters.

And that, to me, defines terrorism: one person treating another person with disrespect for their humanity. Any act of physical or emotional aggression is a terrorist attack, one-on-one or many-against-many. A husband against a wife, a mother against a child, a boss against a subordinate--just because they can. Some straight married people who think their way of life is threatened by love between two gay people. And gay people who are terrorized because of who they love. One religion or one political party thwarting the efforts of another just on principle. One socio-economic group holding another down just so it can stay on top.

But, one could argue, flying planes into skyscrapers changed the whole world. Did it? Or did it just change for privileged Americans? The vast majority of the world's people have never and will never fly in an airplane. They don't care that people have to stand in line to take off their shoes and go through security now. I admit to waxing nostalgic at not being met at the gate by someone who loves me, but already my children barely remember that. We grow accustomed to such change. I don't mean to make light of what happened ten years ago, but is keeping me safe from a terrorist more important than feeding people in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Women and children in Africa were starving before 9/11, and they are still starving. It didn't change their world. In fact they are dying in greater numbers, perhaps because money is being diverted to killing the terrorists we can see, rather than the invisible killers--the one that kills a child somewhere in the world every six seconds. Yes, for some--for my children's generation--it was the beginning of a loss of innocence and feeling safe in their own land. But generations of people in the Middle East and many other places--including America--have never experienced that. Not in their country, nor in their cities, nor in their own homes--if they have one. They didn't have innocence and safety to lose that day.

And was it the attacks that changed us, or our reaction to them? We in America certainly had the opportunity to change the world because of that day. The whole world was watching to see what we would do. The whole world was in our corner that day. Yep, we changed the world alright. For the better? Each of us must decide what we believe about that.

Defining moments. Moments that changed the way we were.  The historical event that defined the moment of lost innocence for me was November 22, 1963. I was sitting at my desk in my sixth grade classroom when the principal came in and, without speaking, put the radio on my desk near the door. We heard that the President had been shot. That was the day I knew there was evil in the world.

I am also thinking today of the good things that changed the world in ways we will never return from. I just feel like looking at the positive and hopeful on this day of remembering sadness. Penicillin. The electric light bulb. The automobile. Air travel. The telephone. Internet. These were not events, of course, but all were tied to someone's aha moment. Moments when everything changed.  Some days even some of those things seem evil, but there is no stopping ideas from blooming. Plastic! Environmentalists may disdain that aha moment, but I am glad not to have the slippery glass Breck shampoo bottle to deal with. "What?" my children might ask. "Whoever thought glass in a ceramic bathtub was a good idea?" My dears, plastic was not affordable to the masses until I was nearly through my teenage years. And now, of course, most bathtubs are plastic, too. It is hard to believe. What we so recently thought was life-changing, like airport screening, quickly becomes "the way it has always been."

Air travel, television, and the internet have made the world smaller. And mostly that is a good thing. It brings with it the opportunity to see the terror in the daily lives of others; and what we know about we can potentially do something about. And it sometimes brings the opportunity to perpetuate terror. Unfortunately we have spent more time and money dealing with those who hurt us than we have on the more prevalent issues that face our world. I fear that we have only brought more terror into the garden.

For good or evil, our world changes with great frequency. It is not just a single biggest or worst event. I believe, or at least I hope, that the events of September 11, 2001, eventually will prove to have strengthened the search for love and hope and compassion among all the world's peoples.

“A pattern that others made may prevail in the world
And following the wrong god home we may miss our star.”
                                        --William Safford

Ch-ch-ch-changes

It seems, according to an NPR story yesterday, that Saturday mail delivery is again being considered for discontinuance. As far as I am concerned, they could have ONLY Saturday delivery; keep all that fourth class mail to one humongous box full. I wonder, though, if house-to-house mail distribution will one day be only a distant memory to my grandson, Max; and completely unknown to his children. As milk delivery, the clinking of the glass bottles against the wire basket announcing its arrival on the front porch, is to me and mine.

Change. It is inevitable, whether we welcome it or not. Change can cause upheaval and challenge, and it can bring renewed energy. The new (to me) yoga teacher led her first Wednesday gentle class this week. I could have not gone. I could have decided I would rather do without than learn a new teacher’s way of teaching. But I went--because, after all, it’s the practice of yoga that is important. And it was okay! Every teacher teaches different poses and puts them together differently. The change was actually a good thing--it gave me new energy. Teachers aside, I have noticed again recently that my body is continuing to respond differently to one pose or another, as it steadily relearns and expands its boundaries, to stretch and open through the practice. What strikes me this week is that the words “prepare for pigeon pose” no longer strike terror when I hear them gleefully announcing the coming torture. 

My co-workers and I heard this week the recommendations for staffing changes. If approved, there will be considerable change to my position. I am choosing to welcome the change and view it as a possibility for new challenges and new energy. I also know that there will be activities required of me that I won’t enjoy. Change is rarely all good or all bad. One thing I do know about myself is that I need some change from time to time. In fact, I need it pretty regularly. I get restless. Last Sunday, after thinking there was no other viable configuration, I rearranged the furniture in my hearth room--where I spend most of my time. It works; perhaps not as well, but it is good to have a different feel to my living. The important thing to me is that I didn’t settle for “it can’t be done,” even though I couldn't imagine it. (What I also know about myself is that I am a visual person.) I took the plunge, even with doubts.

Yesterday was a magical day. I went to the Farmers’ Market and chose a Christmas tree. I haven’t had one for the past two years. I just haven’t felt up to Christmas itself, let alone the hassle and stress of dragging out all those decorations and then having to put them all away. I guess I thought that maybe if I didn’t do Christmas things, it would just go away sooner. The truth is, I have not enjoyed Christmas for many years, as I wrote in a recent blog. Something has shifted this year, though; something has changed in me. I have been having fun with the preparations. I have even thought up some new creations, and resurrected traditions. A winter solstice party. Baking my special Christmas bread. Returning to worship for Advent. And so, a tree.

I arrive at the Market and quickly realize that my $40 limit is going to be impossible, the range being more like $55-$70. I am very particular about Christmas trees. Okay, I am a Christmas tree snob. My forester father always asked the woodsmen who annually brought a trailer-load of trees from the tree farm to the employees and their families, to bring us three skinny noble firs. Noble firs have short, stiff branches in widely-spaced whorls. There is plenty of room between the branches for the ornaments to hang freely, and without weighing down the branches. He put the three trees together in his specially designed three-hole triangular stand; the result was beautiful and unique. I dare say no one else in town (or in the universe) had a Christmas trees(s) like ours. The tree of choice in the Pacific Northwest back then was Douglas fir, their limp branches perfectly trimmed into a dense cone shape. When my own family lived in Mississippi, I insisted on a Frazier fir imported from North Carolina and damn the cost that we could not afford. No pine tree perfectly trimmed into a dense cone shape would do. And cedar? Spare me. Later, when we moved to NC, my family would endure hours with me searching the lots for something that looked vaguely like a noble fir. No Frazier fir, perfectly trimmed into a dense cone shape would do. Yesterday, actually before too long as I whip from vendor to vendor, I find a lonely 6-foot tree with space between the branches. And a $30 price tag. Apparently what I like is considered defective, and priced to sell. Lucky for me. At home, I manage once again to accomplish a two-person job solo, and haul the tree in its stand into the house. I drag the boxes of decorations from the under-the-eaves storage and more carefully than ever adorn my perfect tree with 250 white lights and put on ALL the ornaments, while Pink Martini Christmas music soars through the house.

And then, wonder of  wonders, it begins to snow. Has it ever snowed here as early as the first week in December? I put on my jacket, grab my work gloves and get to my other planned task for the day: cutting down the frozen and brown banana tree, the elephant ear, and the translucent yellow hostas lying prostrate on the ground. As the snowflakes float through the air around me, I pull the coleus, the geraniums, and the rest of the impatiens. Interestingly, there are two perfect impatiens with cheerful white flowers among the frozen ones; and a tightly furled new banana leaf hidden down among the curled and crumpled brown ones. Life protected by death. I am tempted to leave the banana stalk that holds the new leaf, but I know that without the protection from the elements provided by the other stalks, it will be frozen by daybreak. How often, I muse, do we protect a sliver of life from our past when the end is inevitable; allowing that tiny shred of familiarity to keep us from moving on as long as it remains?

More insidious, perhaps, is how often we let the dead past keep the spark of new life from emerging. We keep what is or might be struggling to emerge firmly trapped within the brown leaves of fear, complacency, familiarity, resignation, can’ts and shoulds; we allow ourselves to  distracted by all that is superfluous. We learn to ignore the quiet voice of the One Who is More calling to us to come out, come out, come out. She called to Moses, and Moses said surely you don’t mean me. I have a speech impediment. She called to Jonah. Jonah preferred to risk death than to answer the voice. All wrapped up in their leaves of familiar protection.

Among the very odd tasks that the staff at the church performs (under the guise of “other tasks as assigned,” I suppose), this week some of us hung a 12-foot vinyl banner of a very pregnant black Mary (from original artwork created by my dear friend Dori) from the third floor windows to adorn the exterior wall at the church entrance. (Yes, we broke a pane of colored glass, but it has already been replaced; all is well.) Of course we could have left her rolled up on the top shelf of the storage room...safe and sound, free from controversy. But we got her out. The church will probably be in the paper yet again. Mary. A very young girl, called by God to be the Mother of the Messiah. Talk about change! Talk about controversy! I suppose she could have said, “hell no!” After all, what could possibly have been more terrifying, more life-changing, than a tween having a baby (and where the heck did it come from?), let alone THIS baby. It seems a bit much to ask. But she accepted the challenge; and we know the rest of the story.

Ch-ch-ch-changes. Change moves us forward. Refusal keeps us stuck. If life is a process, so is gardening, and so is this blog. Each step on the journey is a continuation of what has gone before. Sometimes the steps are giant leaps, but more often they are barely discernible. For me, writing about it helps me to see it. What happens when there is no more process? In life you die, if not physically, then emotionally. Boredom is not being open to seeing the process; not being able to say yes to change. Death is staying locked in and protected by the dead leaves. Life is learning to say yes, or at least maybe.

“Have a pleasant stay here, and wherever your continuing travels may take you.” (American Airlines) Journeying on. Saying yes to change.

Planting Promises

Finally, the leaves are turning jewel colors; some are even falling off the trees. On a walk during the work day this week, I suddenly realized why the approach of Christmas sneaks up on me every year: because autumn in the south doesn't conform to the calendar year. The leaves are the same colors as the Christmas decorations in Cameron Village; lights that should be on bare trees, glow through red foliage. Granted, commercial Christmas comes way too soon. I heard the first TV commercial the day after I heard the last political campaign ad.

The leaves are beautiful; and so much is blooming at the same time. In my garden are azaleas, camellia, roses, lantana, penta, violets, wild phlox, gerbera daisies, geraniums, Mexican heather, cosmos, salvia, and of course the pansies and violas I just planted. The dogwood is a lovely burgundy and the Japanese maples glorious red. The ruffled-leaf coleus continues its variegated red and green output, the Persian shield still wears its purple coronation garb, and the burning bush glows brighter and brighter. The Lenten rose is putting out new growth, which surprised me last fall; this year I watched for it.

Yesterday I planted more than 150 bulbs: narcissus, tulips, anemone, dwarf iris, alium, and freesia. Planting bulbs is planting promise--a true act of faith with no immediate gratification. Think about it: a gray/brown/black, dried up bulb with only the slightest evidence of a root is planted several inches underground at the tail end of the growing season, just before the ground freezes solid. And then you wait through darkness, weak sun, ice and snow (if we are lucky). Usually you forget where you planted them, perhaps even lose the memory of planting them at all. And then in the spring, little green shoots; sometimes poking through snow. Then the glorious color. But for now there is only promise. 

I made myself a promise this month. Actually, I amended a promise I made nearly four years ago. After I bought my house--before I moved in and before I embarked on my gardening adventure--I renewed a promise I had made to myself many years ago: not to live out my days in the North Carolina Piedmont. I had no idea then how or when I would keep that promise. I felt very mired in the status quo. Four years ago, as I revisited that vow for the umpteenth time, I set a ten year goal for myself. When I was 65 I would return to the mountains, either the Appalachians or the Pacific Northwest. I made a list of all the reasons that would be a good time. Mostly, though, my list was all the facts that were keeping me stuck here now, at least in my mind. Relationships, job, my church community that I couldn't imagine doing without or being able to replace, the house I had just purchased. Fear. This month, though, as I sat under my dogwood tree surveying my garden and all that I have created in the nearly four years I have lived in my not-so-big house, I woke up. My list of reasons to wait has dwindled away to nothingness. Some of the facts remain, but they no longer seem like reasons to postpone my next big adventure. As I have said, I am a traveler; and I am getting restless. (Smudge has even boxed herself up, ready to go.)

There is a maxim on a greeting card I once saw (I am sure it comes from somewhere other than a greeting card): "Start living the life you imagine." My quandary is I haven't known what I imagine; so I have changed it to "start imagining the life you want to live." Life has always happened to me. Of course, I have taken the initiative to act on the inevitable, but I have only rarely planted a promise for myself. As I start imagining, I find that the fear of change, of moving forward into the unknown, holds less power over me.

Some years ago, my dear friend encouraged me to "just be open to the possibility of a new significant relationship." I tried, but I am now realizing that it is hard to be open to something I don't really care about. I pulled most of the rest of the vinca and impatiens yesterday; leaving only what is in places that will lie fallow over the winter. Letting it lie means I won't have to pull anything up to put the spring plants in the ground. Perhaps I have been afraid of engaging in a relationship that might keep me from fulfilling my promise to myself. I prefer to keep the land fallow so that I won't have to pull up anything more. Finally that promise needs to come first. Opening myself this month to the idea of moving back to my soul home, has me very excited. I have amended my promise from ten years to five--most of it already gone by. Sometimes the bulbs don't come up on our timetable; we just keep watching. But left unplanted, they will never come up. I put cuttings from the coleus in a vase in my sunny upstairs window. I am watching to see if it puts out roots to be replanted in the spring garden.

Leaves have been falling from my tree of life for some time now. Relationships have changed as other people move on in their lives; church has become hard for me and I am currently not attending; my visions for my garden are nearly complete; there probably isn't much hope that my house will increase in value, as there was when I bought it; while I still enjoy my job, it is just a job. Two more leaves fell off this week. My spirited sister-bottom-dwelling co-worker in the basement, windowless offices, moved upstairs. I feel a bit abandoned. And gentle Julie yoga instructor told the class that she will no longer be teaching the gentle yoga class on Wednesdays. To say that she changed my life is probably a bit dramatic; but she certainly contributed significantly to altering its quality. Had I begun yoga--nearly two years ago--with any of the instructors who have subbed for her, I don't think I would have continued. Thank you, Julie. Namaste.

Change. Change is hard. Change often comes unbidden, but we can choose to let it be a slamming door or make it one opening to opportunity. The forced changes that I have experienced have mostly resulted in opportunity, because I made it so. It is more difficult to choose change… I believe I am nearly ready. I know I am ready to begin planting promise.