Visitors

I was going to write about figs.  The monster is starting to yield the first of its excesses, and we will soon be inundated by a purple avalanche of fruit, so it seems a logical topic of conversation.  But thinking of figs makes me think of my parents, both of whom are fig lovers...both of whom will be in town this afternoon.  While it is a welcome visit, at least for me, visitors in general bring a strange kind of "outside" to what has become a very insulated household.

Outside is hard and uncomfortable and painful, so forgive me for making it easier to explain by slipping into garden talk.

In the beginning, the garden was mine, an intensely personal expression of shame and contrition.  Despite the circumstances from which it sprang, from the moment I first turned the soil, it was beautiful to me.  I look back at the rapturous awe with which I described its first days.  Given how little I'd done, and how much has come after, it borders on embarrassing.  But I was comparing it to nothing.  I was not trying to recreate Huntington Gardens.  I was re-building the ruins of my world.  In the context of my life, it was on par with the great gardens of the world.

Then it became something Sharon and I shared with each other.  We worked there.  We stood there in silence when we had nothing to say to each other.  Come what may, we could believe we were getting something done...that we were redeeming our wreckage.  There were days when the sheer unexpected beauty of it, even when glimpsed through our back door, would make our knees buckle, bring us to tears.  We could track the regrowth of our relationship with flower buds and salvia.  We didn't know what it would be, but we both began to believe it would be good.

Now there are others who see this garden.  We bring them into it and say, "Look how much we've done," as if they will understand.  Some of them want to.  Some of them would rather not.  None of them truly get it.

They see all the things left to do.  They see the things they would've done differently.  They compare our garden to ideals in magazines and movies and find it lacking.  For all I know, it even makes some of them uncomfortable, a worrisome reference point for the shortcomings of their own yard.  They are not mean-spirited, most of them.  They are merely visitors.

Visitors do not live with it everyday.  They do not water it or weed it or watch it change.  They pass through it, give the requisite "oohs and aahs" and "this is greats".  And we watch.  Wait for their reactions and try not to care if they don't care enough.  It's not their fault.  It's just not their garden.

I know my parents care.  They will pile through the door with their baggage and will want to see how it's all going.  In some ways, it will be the first time they see it for themselves, as opposed to hearing about it from me.  Their attention will be genuine, loving...and uncomfortable.  We will give them the grand tour and then sit down for dinner, and all the while it will be awkward because it is our garden, not theirs.

But they will only be here briefly and, when they leave, we will send them away with figs. 

Comments

[Anamarie]

The Garden
"See this my garden;
Large and fair!"
--Thus, to his friend,
The philosopher.
"Tis not too long,"
His friend replied,
With truth exact,--
"Not yet too wide,
If somewhat cramped
On every side."
Quick the reply--
"But see how high!
It reaches up
To God's blue sky."
John Oxenham.