And So, We Grow

So I wrote about gardens yesterday because lately I can't stop thinking about gardens, and gardening, in all kinds of ways, and sometimes a subject sort of has to whack you over the head to get your attention, and when this one finally did I thought of lots and lots I wanted to say.

Although I am fortunate enough to have a house with a yard on the weekends, a house where I have a vegetable garden and an herb garden and a perennial bed and way too many other planting projects that seemed like a good idea before I had children, I can't seem to stop gardening here in the city as well. In fact, I seem to be on a manic gardening bend, poking seeds into soil wherever and whenever I can.

But I waited too long and have a damp-haired, red-cheeked feverish baby to tend to, so I can't right this minute tell you about my urban gardening adventures, and my visits to Home Depot and the greenmarket and the hardware store and the flower district with my trusty equally gardening fixated four-year-old conspirator in tow. I can't tell you about our building's roof garden, which I created and maintain in spite of the lack of a water source, or the garden boxes Lily and I gave to her class and are teaching them to plant. Or the little gardens on the sidewalk in front of our building that my neighbor and I have been planning, bright squares of variegated color in the flat cracked sidewalk.

I will; I want to write more about this almost unconscious need to plant things in this inhospitable environment, how it makes me feel I am fighting back, mastering the landscape, refusing to take no for an answer. Staking a claim, I guess, too, making this place that still feels indomitable, impenetrable, a little bit mine.

But instead, because it will take less time, and my baby is stirring again, I will quickly write about my grandmother, who has gardened all her life, and is now 93. I have noticed that as she has grown older, although she is less and less able to physically garden herself, to get down on her knees in the dirt, is more and more interested in gardens in general: in mine, in anyone's, in her own.

When the swimming pool that was such a focal point of my childhood was filled in, erased in her yard, there was suddenly a vast expanse of dirt visible from my grandmother's sunporch, where she spends much of her time. When I sat with her there, watched her pale eyes gaze out the window at this expanse, I knew what she saw: the garden that could be. And now it is: it is planted, it is a garden, and though I have not seen it yet, don't know what it looks like firsthand, when I think of her looking out that familiar window at what could be the ghost plot of my childhood, I don't feel sad anymore. I smile.

I think I know why gardening is as compelling, as important or more so to my grandmother than almost anything else these days besides us. In a world, or a place, or a moment in time when we feel powerless, growing things gives back the power. To poke a hold in soil and place in a seed is to throw back your shoulders, fling out your arms, acknowledge--embrace--what will be.