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One of Those Days
Aug. 3rd, 2010 06:45 pmSome days feel like a rollercoaster. Some days are blissful, some are floaty, some are dragging and leaden. This day is that animal that got hit by a car and won't die but just lies there convulsing in the road.
It started innocently enough, it was one of those mornings where you wake up tired and don't have enough time for enough sex before work and people are in the shower in your building when you are so the water goes too cold and too hot. It was one of those mornings where it takes forever to find matching socks and all your smoothie ingredients are gone so you need to buy a crappy breakfast and there's no seat on the skytrain and your ipod is wrecked and it's awfully hard to make out the words in podcasts over the morning commute noises. These things happen.
It was one of those days where my plants started to show chlorosis-- they need to be fed a nitrogen-heavy plant food --but I had just put predatory nematodes on and chemical fertilizer would surely kill the nematodes and there isn't much of an organic option indoors, and I can't just cut back their water and so send them into dormancy because the nematodes need moisture in the soil. The scale had just popped so there were bugs everywhere, and I've been neglecting my indoor pruning because I don't want to sink the time into it so everything looks terrible.
It was one of those days where someone is giving spanish lessons in the boardroom so you can't get in to water, and where some guy turns around without warning in the hallway and bumps your watering can, drenching you, himself, and the floor-- and then looks blankly at you for several minutes. It was one of those days where the hotel keycard demagnetizes itself halfway through so you need to get another one and wait on the elevator yet again.
It was one of those days when you realise someone you really really wanted to get together with is going to PAX when you'd just decided not to.
It was one of those days where you get off work at rush hour and decide to brave transit instead of working longer because your boyfriend is leaving tonight instead of tomorrow for his week-long trip and you'd kinda like to see him before he goes even if you won't have a long comfortable evening together as anticipated.
It was one of those days, though, where you meet a friend you haven't talked with in awhile for lunch and it feels great, you lie on the grass, you convince your bosses to use descented fish fertilizer (fish fertilizer is not really much better for the environment, but at least it helps with your cutesy little contained designer ecosystem you're trying to build), you have a fun twitter exchange with someone you don't talk to half enough, one of the office guys successfully flirts with you (this may never have happened before), and you half-laugh at everything because hey, who doesn't have these days?
It was one of those days.
Then I came home and finally ventured into my garden. I go into my garden for comfort and solace. I go there for joy. I go there because it's full of my children, because it nourishes me, because I love it. I never buy flowers for my garden but this year on a whim I got a flat of begonias from work and they were so beautiful and huge and glowing and perfect that people kept asking me if they were fake-- over the years I have learned to consider this a compliment. My tomatoes, so late this year, were little and green and the bloom had given way to fruit on more varieties than I'd hoped for. I had bought wolfberries in tiny little pots and was nursing them along-- that would be several years of investment before I'd see any return, but that's the nature of gardening; to trust the future to exist and to be as hungry for interesting and beautiful things as now. My nasturtiums, the first seeds to come up this year, were blooming their fool heads off and my good king henry which is still tiny was bolting like crazy. My curry plant, which I was a little dubious about getting because I didn't want the smell to clash with my mints and oreganos and basils and lemon thymes and verbenas, has spiked up like summer icicles to flank the rusty blood reds of my coleus. I was hoping my jasmine would flower despite the shade. My horehound was tall and silver-furred and thriving. My mahoganies had got over their sunburn and were starting to put on leaves. My kale--
I write eulogies. When things end I come here and pour it out as if words could anchor something I desperately want to keep, as if they could hold it close to me in even a tattered and fragmentary way. My garden is not dead, it will never die; I am my garden and as long as I'm living I'll have plants that are my own in some fashion. My plants have not even all died. The painters and the roofers came by my garden last week, though, and I hadn't been out until today. I had to water; I couldn't put it off any longer, and--
it breaks my heart to write this. you're not a gardener, it may mean nothing to you. i want you to imagine a tomato stem snapped, though-- and the leaves are slightly wilted above the snap, curling around tiny green marbles that are the world's promise to you. i want you to imagine that a dozen times over. can you see it? do you know the smell of tomato leaves? it was such a late year, and you weren't sure the tomatoes would make it, but they did their best for you, and now this.
i want you to imagine a deep footprint-- all your soft soil in pots had never been trampled, and so when the boot sunk into it it must have sunk ankle deep, and there at the bottom of the pit of the footprint is your good king henry, still alive, leaves snapped off but still valiantly sending a seed stalk up out of the shadow of the foot-shaped pit it now calls home.
i want you to imagine three tiny pots of wolfberry, miniscule shrubs with little straplike leaves, that you had prepared yourself to nurture for years just to see what happened-- broken, black, tossed over sideways, no green left on them.
...or the horehound, silver fur on black snapped twigs.
...or the curry plant, broken over to the root.
...or your begonias, your luminous huge useless beauties that used to catch your eyes when you were typing and just hold you entranced for half an hour at a time, flowers shaken off, branches broken here and there, leaves hanging by strips of skin.
...or.
...or.
...or.
Things will return. Even after the one good watering I gave and a few nights things will start to perk up, to regrow. Some plants are just dead though; others, like the tomatoes, have lost most of the crop for the year because there's no time to regrow that fruit before frost. Some are just bereft of their innocence and will take time to recover their dignity.
Still, I'm not laughing philosophically anymore. And I'm not looking forward to the evening anymore. So much for my home.
It's one of those days.
It started innocently enough, it was one of those mornings where you wake up tired and don't have enough time for enough sex before work and people are in the shower in your building when you are so the water goes too cold and too hot. It was one of those mornings where it takes forever to find matching socks and all your smoothie ingredients are gone so you need to buy a crappy breakfast and there's no seat on the skytrain and your ipod is wrecked and it's awfully hard to make out the words in podcasts over the morning commute noises. These things happen.
It was one of those days where my plants started to show chlorosis-- they need to be fed a nitrogen-heavy plant food --but I had just put predatory nematodes on and chemical fertilizer would surely kill the nematodes and there isn't much of an organic option indoors, and I can't just cut back their water and so send them into dormancy because the nematodes need moisture in the soil. The scale had just popped so there were bugs everywhere, and I've been neglecting my indoor pruning because I don't want to sink the time into it so everything looks terrible.
It was one of those days where someone is giving spanish lessons in the boardroom so you can't get in to water, and where some guy turns around without warning in the hallway and bumps your watering can, drenching you, himself, and the floor-- and then looks blankly at you for several minutes. It was one of those days where the hotel keycard demagnetizes itself halfway through so you need to get another one and wait on the elevator yet again.
It was one of those days when you realise someone you really really wanted to get together with is going to PAX when you'd just decided not to.
It was one of those days where you get off work at rush hour and decide to brave transit instead of working longer because your boyfriend is leaving tonight instead of tomorrow for his week-long trip and you'd kinda like to see him before he goes even if you won't have a long comfortable evening together as anticipated.
It was one of those days, though, where you meet a friend you haven't talked with in awhile for lunch and it feels great, you lie on the grass, you convince your bosses to use descented fish fertilizer (fish fertilizer is not really much better for the environment, but at least it helps with your cutesy little contained designer ecosystem you're trying to build), you have a fun twitter exchange with someone you don't talk to half enough, one of the office guys successfully flirts with you (this may never have happened before), and you half-laugh at everything because hey, who doesn't have these days?
It was one of those days.
Then I came home and finally ventured into my garden. I go into my garden for comfort and solace. I go there for joy. I go there because it's full of my children, because it nourishes me, because I love it. I never buy flowers for my garden but this year on a whim I got a flat of begonias from work and they were so beautiful and huge and glowing and perfect that people kept asking me if they were fake-- over the years I have learned to consider this a compliment. My tomatoes, so late this year, were little and green and the bloom had given way to fruit on more varieties than I'd hoped for. I had bought wolfberries in tiny little pots and was nursing them along-- that would be several years of investment before I'd see any return, but that's the nature of gardening; to trust the future to exist and to be as hungry for interesting and beautiful things as now. My nasturtiums, the first seeds to come up this year, were blooming their fool heads off and my good king henry which is still tiny was bolting like crazy. My curry plant, which I was a little dubious about getting because I didn't want the smell to clash with my mints and oreganos and basils and lemon thymes and verbenas, has spiked up like summer icicles to flank the rusty blood reds of my coleus. I was hoping my jasmine would flower despite the shade. My horehound was tall and silver-furred and thriving. My mahoganies had got over their sunburn and were starting to put on leaves. My kale--
I write eulogies. When things end I come here and pour it out as if words could anchor something I desperately want to keep, as if they could hold it close to me in even a tattered and fragmentary way. My garden is not dead, it will never die; I am my garden and as long as I'm living I'll have plants that are my own in some fashion. My plants have not even all died. The painters and the roofers came by my garden last week, though, and I hadn't been out until today. I had to water; I couldn't put it off any longer, and--
it breaks my heart to write this. you're not a gardener, it may mean nothing to you. i want you to imagine a tomato stem snapped, though-- and the leaves are slightly wilted above the snap, curling around tiny green marbles that are the world's promise to you. i want you to imagine that a dozen times over. can you see it? do you know the smell of tomato leaves? it was such a late year, and you weren't sure the tomatoes would make it, but they did their best for you, and now this.
i want you to imagine a deep footprint-- all your soft soil in pots had never been trampled, and so when the boot sunk into it it must have sunk ankle deep, and there at the bottom of the pit of the footprint is your good king henry, still alive, leaves snapped off but still valiantly sending a seed stalk up out of the shadow of the foot-shaped pit it now calls home.
i want you to imagine three tiny pots of wolfberry, miniscule shrubs with little straplike leaves, that you had prepared yourself to nurture for years just to see what happened-- broken, black, tossed over sideways, no green left on them.
...or the horehound, silver fur on black snapped twigs.
...or the curry plant, broken over to the root.
...or your begonias, your luminous huge useless beauties that used to catch your eyes when you were typing and just hold you entranced for half an hour at a time, flowers shaken off, branches broken here and there, leaves hanging by strips of skin.
...or.
...or.
...or.
Things will return. Even after the one good watering I gave and a few nights things will start to perk up, to regrow. Some plants are just dead though; others, like the tomatoes, have lost most of the crop for the year because there's no time to regrow that fruit before frost. Some are just bereft of their innocence and will take time to recover their dignity.
Still, I'm not laughing philosophically anymore. And I'm not looking forward to the evening anymore. So much for my home.
It's one of those days.
