Trying to Get to the Root of the Matter

Well, I was thinking I'd plant my garden tomorrow, but apparently it's going to rain. I've been thinking about planting my garden all week, though, and I can't quite let the dream die. I also am in dire need of a little escape. So I'm going to try a little experiment: I'm going to try to recreate the experience of planting my garden as a writing exercise. (Stop yawning; I'll try to make it good.)

Before I begin, though, I have also been thinking this week about how gardening is one of those things, like dogs, or cheese, or professional basketball, that is immensely important to me, and to millions of other people, but leaves others dead cold. It's so funny how you can meet someone with whom you have literally nothing else in common, but if you find out they are obsessed with their tomato plants you can talk to them for hours. I love this--this notion of people with their true passions sort of orbiting around them, and the fact that sometimes the passions bump up against each other in a like-meets-like sort of way allowing real connections to be made. When I discover some common passion with somebody, the more obscure the better, in fact, it always endears them to me no end.

So now, for you like-minded gardeners AND those who think they have zero interest in the subject alike:

I hate exercise. I do it sometimes, when I am feeling the need, but for me it is like taking medicine, only slower and less tasty. I find it monotonous and tiresome and frustrating, and I have never once, really, had that rush of endorphins associated with rote exercise such as jogging or using a stationary bike. I feel good when I'm done, but in the same way I do when I swallow an antibiotic pill after a long illness: as though I'm being proactive.

I do, however, love exhausting myself physically, almost running myself into the ground intentionally, in ways that engage the mind as well as the body. The examples that come immediately to mind are ballet, which I used to do full force for hours on end, in a state of exhilaration,and full court basketball, at which I have no talent but am able to completely immerse myself in, or used to be able to, back in high school, the last time I played. Skiing can almost do it, although I need to concentrate a little too hard to keep from coming face to face with a tree.

In my adult life, the times when this happens, when--and I apologize for the overused sports metaphor--I find myself "in the zone" are most often when I am gardening.

My vegetable garden is a large fenced-in square with a small extension off one corner in the back yard of our house in Connecticut. When we bought the house, it was clear this fenced-in square had once been a garden, but it was so overgrown it took me and two strong friends most of a weekend simply to clear out the brush. Once we had, I was a bit overwhelmed. I'd grown up gardening, but I'd never had one of my own: all mine, to plan, plant and tend as I saw fit, all of the responsibility and all of the reward.

So I just plunged in, bought dozens of seed packets, seedlings, bulbs, sets, and decided one Saturday morning to tackle the thing. This first year, although I had grown seedlings myself, indoors under grow-lights, I didn't actually do much planning at all. I bought on impulse, dug in some random rows and sections, persuaded hapless visitors to poke in peas or beans around the edges to fill things in. I think I was worried on some level that nothing would come up, but of course it did, lots of things, in that way that seems like magic: churned up soil to a sea of green in what seems like an hour but is actually more than a week.

But I am not doing what I said I was going to do. I said I was going to try to explain what it feels like, and instead: this preamble, this neither here nor there about exercise and connections, again. I will try to do this right, what I wanted to do, this weekend.

Stay tuned.