This Saturday, I enjoyed a (fleetingly) serene morning in the garden while helping my mom repot elderberry trees. Marcia Goldstein doesn’t merely have a “green thumb,” but rather an entire green person — such is her prowess in the art of gardening. Throughout my childhood, plants have blossomed and flourished from all nooks and crannies of the house: devil’s ivy in the windowsill, aloe by the kitchen sink, a mishmash of flowers lining the front walk. A thousand shades of green surround our house, and amidst the olive/crocodile/fern/pickle-hued paradise, my mom wields her watering can, coaxing flora towards the warmth of the sun. In the morning and the evenings and the afternoons alike, she turns soil and buries seeds, the dirt under her fingernails a testament to her passion for plant life. While I’m slightly ashamed to admit it, compared to my garden-prone mother, I’m a veritable city slicker, unversed in the world of growth and decay and cultivation taking place just beyond our window. Historically, plants have shriveled and died beneath my touch (case in point: Chester, the cactus in my dorm room, who I mistakenly recycled). My mom tells me to harvest garlic and I mistakenly pull up the still-youthful onion patch. This morning was no different: I drove shovel into the packed earth, forming a circle around the elderberry tree, only to find I’d mistakenly cut through its pale green roots. Ack! The act of preserving a living thing depends not only on knowledge, but also on a sturdy awareness of the plant itself — an awareness of the way it thrives beneath the soil. Sure, I can pose as an amateur gardener, awkwardly thwacking my way through weeds and thorn-ridden berry patches. To garden as my mother does, however, would require a knowledge of the earth that takes years to accumulate.
Even considering the fact of my paltry gardening knowledge, I have little excuse for my abysmal failure this Saturday morning. This epic failure occurred not while mistakenly sawing the roots of elderberry saplings in half, but rather a few minutes later when my mother asked me to move a cinderblock from inside the chicken fence. Thinking myself a strong-armed gardening type, I decided to heft the cinderblock and attempt to hurl it over the fence. As you might suspect, this turned out to be … not a great idea. Actually, I might go as far as to say it was a Very Bad idea. Since I am not, in fact, powerful enough to throw a cinderblock, the block in question slipped from my grasp, tumbling to land directly on the big toe of my right foot…. *ouch.* I would like to say I handled the agony with dignity, nobly waving away my very concerned mother, yet instead I did quite the opposite. Hopping around rather madly on one foot, I proceeded to yelp in abject agony. Limping to our vine-fringed patio, I watched in detached horror as a dot of blood blossomed across the fabric of my shoe (technically I’d been wearing my mother’s shoe, but luckily she is not overly concerned with vanity). While my injury proved minor, my disgruntled toe has since made movement rather …..painful, and therefore quite a bit slower.
The Great Cinderblock Catastrophe of several days ago rendered me more fully cognizant of the perpetual frenzy of my everyday existence. Rarely is it that I pour the entirety of my focus into any one action or task; rather, I find myself contemplating some future task or action or trivial worry. Moments — indeed, the stuff that makes up the very substance of my reality — slip by unheeded (much in the same way the cinderblock slipped unheeded from my fingertips).
As I smeared mortar across my cob oven’s base, I was — quite literally — forced to slow down, to contemplate the patterns in the gritty cement-like substance. Its dark grey smears held a myriad of swirls, the ebb and flow of its texture looked like water solidified. I hobbled back and forth from the wheelbarrow to the cob oven, unable to stay on my feet for long. Ultimately, the tasks I’d hoped to accomplish on Saturday went *completely* undone, and I found myself lying beside the blackberry bushes while icing my throbbing toe with a bag of frozen peas. I haven’t sat down and read a good portion of a book in quite some time, and — by virtue of my toe’s misfortune — I spent most of the day horizontal in the blackberry-tinted shade, enthralled in the lyricism of Mary Karr’s Cherry.
While I don’t recommend dropping a cinderblock on your big toe, I *do* recommend taking the time to bask in the garden on a Summer day, to set your to to-do list by the wayside and remember your own humanity.