Taproot

Empty Chairs at Empty Tables

I'm not a big fan of musicals (excluding "Sound of Music", "My Fair Lady", "Mary Poppins" or any of the other musicals I grew up watching with my mom).  As an actor, I avoided acting in them.  My one turn in one was as Judas/John in Godspell.  I hated the choreography so much that I decided it was my "character" to screw up every number.  After that, I was done with them.  However, I did go through a phase where I liked the music in Andrew Lloyd Weber's plays.  Don't judge, I was young and ignorant.

In any case, there was one song from "Les Miserables" that really hit me in my clinically depressed, teenage angst sweet spot.  Towards the end, Marius is bemoaning the death of all of his revolutionary friends, which in true ALW fashion, he does with the over the top melodramatic "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables".  The last lines of that song always made me a little emotional (you can judge a little on that one, but again, I was young, ignorant AND clinically depressed, so cut me a little slack).

Marius sings:

Oh my friends, my friends, don't ask me

What your sacrifice was for

Empty chairs at empty tables

Where my friends will sing no more

I have no idea what it was about those lines that got me.  I was a "cool" kid with plenty of friends and they were most certainly not "dead and gone".  Yet, for some reason, something about the loneliness in the song resonated in a deep place.

Years later, I was again at the center of a cool kid crowd.  Most every night, Sharon and I were hanging out with people we called friends, laughing, drinking, eating family style meals.  We wondered how we had ever had fun without these people.  We told ourselves we were lucky to have such great people around us.  We thought we would all be friends forever.  We were lying to ourselves.  Overnight, it seemed (though in truth it had probably been a long time coming), it all imploded, becoming a blackhole that swallowed everything: the group dinners; the game nights; the laugh-filled nights.  Before it devoured itself, that dying star almost took our marriage, as well.

Though I will always be sorry for the way it came to pass, there is no question the outcome was the best thing that could've happened.  We had chosen our friends badly, and now they had been blown away like so much chaff.

So it is, that today I found myself in the backyard looking at empty chairs, thinking about "Les Miz" and Marius' cheesy song.  Not because I was lonely and missing those people, but because I was glad that they weren't around to screw all of this peace up.   I like the fact that, for the most part, no one sits in these chairs but Sharon and I.  In my life, there has been noise and fun and revelrie.  But there have been very few true friends.  I love these empty chairs, because it seems to me like they're reserved for a VIP crowd of two.  A place to have a cup of coffee or an afternoon beer.  A spot to watch the last bit of light ebb from the day.

These empty chairs have seen a lot of the good life, without having to deal with a lot of the bullshit that often keeps the good life at bay.

None of this is to say I don't have any more friends.  Throughout the last couple years, I have managed to keep a couple.  Managed to make a couple more.  I think Sharon and I would both welcome new friends to fill our chairs.  They just have to be the right ones.  They have to understand what this place means, and respect how hard we have worked to make it look like this...feel like this.

We must both be feeling optimistic about how many of those new friends are out there...because we just bought a BIG ASS TABLE!!!

   

Guest Gardeners

Here's to friends in floppy hats,

Who sacrifice Saturdays because they miss

The dirt they dug as children, because they miss

You.  They know

Where you came from, remember

The night you slept on their couch,

When everything had been torn from the Earth

And stacked in the back of the truck on the street.

That night, they said, would be sleepless. 

Tomorrow worse.  But someday

Would be better.  Now,

We laugh about the shape we're in, sweating over beers and shovels, 

April sunshine painting

The white we have worn on our skin all winter,

The marks the dark has left fading to red, and maybe brown.

It is hard work

To believe I have worked so hard

For this happiness. 

But as we take pickaxes to clay on this Spring

Someday, it pays to recall the price 

We've paid for it all -- how this soil still only newly turned,

Was bought with so many lessons learned with the help of friends

In floppy hats.  

  

An Invitation to the Banquet -- My Own Take

**Note: my father is writing/has written (?) a book by the same name, so I think it's important to point out I am borrowing his title and the views expressed are solely my own...though it is the nature of fathers to heavily influence the views of their sons, and therefore my views are probably his fault. :) **

When my siblings and I were kids, my father used to tell us that grades were the least important indicator of knowledge. 

The best way to judge how much someone knows, he'd say, is to listen to the questions they ask. 

I think we all took this as a personal challenge to ask as many questions as possible...one of the first ones being: "Does this mean our parents don't care if we get bad grades?"  That question, it turns out, is a good indicator that you don't know shit. 

I personally made "questioning" my mode of choice, particularly when it applied to authority.  And, I quickly learned that nowhere was there more authority worth questioning than in the Church.  It's important to point out that I have always been, and will always be of Christian faith.  I have a home church.  I believe in Jesus the Christ and God in Heaven.  More importantly, I believe in the principles of acceptance, forgiveness and redemption that are at the core of my faith.  But it is a far cry from professing that faith, to defending the wholesale ignorance of most people who go to Church.  Ignorance, mind you, not stupidity.  Ignorance demonstrated not by them getting a failing grade in their Jesus Test, but in their steadfast insistence on checking their real questions at the door.

That's right, I said "real questions".  That's because most churches (Protestant ones, anyway) I've been associated with will tell you they want you to ask questions.  But what I learned early on was that there was a list of "acceptable" questions, the ones the Church felt they had a good response to.  And then there were the tough ones, the ones I started asking silently in Sunday school.   The ones that went something like this:

Does anyone else think that Samson guy was a total dick?  And why do we think it's awesome that he killed all those unsuspecting diners?

Why are the disciples the stupidest people in the Bible?  And what does that say about the fact we call ourselves "disciples"?

Why doesn't anyone read the parts of the Psalms where David dashes the baby brains on the rocks?

Am I the only one who things the statement, "I only slept with my daughter because I was trashed and she came on to me" should disqualify you as a Biblical hero?

And, just for good measure, I'll throw in one to get my dad a little worked up:

Was there anyone in the Bible MORE arrogant than Paul?  I mean who says, "we are all sinners...but I'm pretty sure I was the BIGGEST sinner.  Like, if we're judging based on sin, then I was the BEST sinner...EVER"?

They may sound trite, but these are not silly questions.  These are questions that everyone who hasn't taken the "shepherd and sheep" analogy to mean that we should literally act like sheep, should be asking.  And, I would venture to say, questions like these would probably lead us around to discussing things that might get us a little closer to the truth of the matter:  We need to get a little more comfortable with not knowing what the hell we're talking about.  We claim a God who is bigger than us.  Smarter than us.  Beyond us.  That means God is more than the bite sized pieces that even the smartest among us (I'm talking to you, Paul!) can absorb, much less regurgitate in a doctrinal thesis or spew on a family values talk radio show.  And guess what?  I like that about God.  It means some of the questions I can't answer, I don't have to.  That's why God is God, and I'm just me.

I've been dealing with one of those questions for a week now.  As you may know, we have some plum trees next to our back porch.  Over the past couple years, one of them has given exactly one fruit per season.  So, this year, in an effort to encourage cross pollination, I put bird feeders in each of them.  The thought was, if I could get birds to fly back and forth between the trees while they were flowering, I might see a little more fruit.  Basically, I gave God a shot for a couple years, but this year we're gonna try it my way.  Typical of me, by the way.  The results of my meddling are yet to be proven, but one thing is already abundantly clear:

There's nothing like a banquet buffet to bring out the riff raff.

 Don't laugh.  This is a Biblical concept.  But before I get to that, let me tell you what I'm talking about.  You see, the birds LOVE the feeders.  I took this picture this morning after having filled this feeder to the top yesterday morning...we got us some birds eating out of that thing!  In fact, since I put them up, it's like I have a birdie Vegas buffet right outside the sliding glass doors.  I truly didn't know some of the birds we're seeing lived in our neighborhood:  Blue jays, robins, flycatchers.  I like to think of them as the chic tourists, the Hollywood day trippers, the European faux-hawk crowd.  And, of course, we also have the midwestern crowd, the out-sized mourning doves that literally sit beneath the feeders all day long stuffing their faces.  I can almost hear them saying, We made the trip, now we're gonna get our money's worth.  I don't mind  any of them.  I love watching them.  After all, that's who the feeders are for. 

Then there's the riff raff.  Squirrels, refusing to acknowledge I have purchased the "squirrel proof" feeders, make daily attempts to make me feel like I wasted my money by not having gotten the pretty ones.  Full disclosure:  I don't really mind squirrels, either.  They're greedy little bastards, but there's something endearing about them.  Okay fine, they can eat, too, as long as they don't keep pulling the lids off and pulling seed out from the top.

But they aren't the only riff-raff.  The other day, just as I let one of my dogs out, a hawk flashed into one of the plum trees about 10 feet from me.  Now, I love hawks.  They are my favorite bird, and I have a large tattoo of one on my back.  But, I don't want one as a pet.  And having one death dive into a tree and land 4 feet above my dog's head is a completely different story.  Thankfully, realizing last minute that the dog below was of the 70 pound variety, it flew off to sit on a nearby telephone wire for a few minutes.  It was breathtaking in not an entirely bad way, and I like to think it was there for the squirrels and not lying in wait for Einstein, my 7 pound toy poodle.  Regardless, this banquet of mine was attracting predators.

It was the tree rats that put me over the edge.  Everything else has some kind of redeeming quality.  Beauty. Predatory grace.  Just plain cute.  But when you walk out just after dark, see several rats running through your trees and hear them clambering over the porch awning, something happens inside.  It's that oh, HELL no! moment when you say I'll be damned if I'm going to feed a family of freakin' rats!  So, over the past week, I've been putting out poison for them every night.  In case you're wondering, poisoning rats works just like poisoning people at a buffet: you put out something that looks nothing like food, but apparently tastes damn good, and they ingest mass quantities of it before going back to lay in their room in agony, wishing for death.

I did it without remorse, even watching to make sure they were coming to eat it.  I did it with complete discrimination, as well.  I put it out at night, when I was sure the squirrels were gone and after my dogs had been out for the last time.  And, I brought any leftovers back in at the beginning of the next day so the rest of the wildlife wouldn't accidentally eat it.  I didn't want to hurt anything else.  I only wanted the rats gone.  They ate ridiculous amounts of the stuff, and every night I had to deal with seeing them swarming through the trees, all the while wishing them dead.  Then, on Thursday, they were gone.  We didn't see them that night and, the next day, the poison was still there.  Mission accomplished.

Perhaps it's because it's Easter.  Maybe it's because my "honey-do" list today includes getting up on my roof and in the attic to find out if the rats decided to die on my property.  I don't know.  What I do know is this whole thing has me feeling pensive.  I have questions I can't answer...that probably no one can answer.

You see, the Bible recounts one of Jesus' parables, where a king sets out a marriage feast and invites all the best people to come.  For whatever reason, the cool kids think it's a big joke and decide not to show.  So the king says to his servants, "Hey I've got a feast here.  Find me someone to eat it."  And the servants go and grab every Tom, Dick and Sally from the streets and fill the hall and have a much better party than they probably would have if the original folks had showed up.  The way this story has been explained to me, is that God is the king opening his banquet to all the riff-raff through forgiveness.  But something isn't quite right for me.  Never mind that the king kicks one of them out for not being dressed properly, what bothers me about this story is the tough question behind it that no one asks: 

What if the first people the king invited had showed up?  Would that mean the others would have been persona non grata?

I look at my bird feeders and I desperately hope God is more forgiving than me.  Because all my preferred guests showed up...so I made it difficult for everyone else.  I bought feeders that made it harder for squirrels to share the bounty.  I kept a suspicious eye on the hawk from afar, ready to rush out and scare it away if it got too close again.  And I poisoned the rats.

Heck, while I'm at it, I hope God is more forgiving than the Church.  We talk a big game about having an open table, but we act like all the preferred guests are already sitting at their seats, and we treat the riff raff like pests.  Predators.  Rats.

For good measure, I pray God is bigger than the Bible, too.  I pray God had a plan for feeding everyone who was hungry, whether the A-List showed up or not.  I pray that the Word of God, the one that leaves me with so many concerns, isn't the only word God has.  I have too many questions left unanswered and I have a feeling I'm not the only rat tired of eating poison.

 

Life in Context

Everywhere I look there is Spring.  After an abnormally cold and rainy winter, the weather has finally settled into the sunshiney 80s and the world around me is responding with a burst of new growth.  In the garden, there are flowers that weren't there two weeks ago and there are tomato seedlings sprouting in little pots on my dining table.  Tis the season of promise and new beginnings.

Yesterday I came home early.  I was feeling sick and needed to rest.  But, before I crawled into bed and shut down, I took a walk through the garden and had a good look around.  Shrubs and perennials, planted in uncertainty and expectation, were making it clear they are here for the long haul.  Annuals, determined to make the most of their limited time, were blooming furiously and there were birds working on nests in the trees overhead.  There is a dizzying variety of color and song, yet they are unified in their message:  Life is coming.  Life is here.

They are unified in one other thing, as well.  Not a single plant or creature out there has any idea of the role they have played in the rejuvenation of my life and marriage.  Even if those plants were sentient, there is no way they could know the simple fact of their existence would provide the hope Sharon and I needed to get through the winter of our discontent and see this Spring together.

I am struck by the thought that, in many respects, we are all similarly ignorant of our importance to the bigger picture.  We live because it is our instinct to do so, rarely realizing the impact this function of biology has on the world around us.  Life is just what we do.  Yet, if we are ever lucky enough to be gifted with greater perception, we might realize there are people to whom our survival matters.  In the damp and despair of darkness, they hope for our happiness.  And, when it blooms, their lives are better for it.

Today, my father and younger brother celebrate their birthdays.  When taken in context, I'm sure the significance of the event is different for each of their lives.  But for me, it is a chance to take pleasure and joy in the role they have played in mine.

Daddy and Daniel, my life and the lives of others are better because yours continue.  I love you both.  Happy Birthday.  

Priorities

There is an agapanthus by the back porch that has probably been there for 40 years.  Despite being initially indifferent to it, it has grown on me.  It didn't hurt that Sharon kept a photo log of it blooming last year.  Yesterday, I came out of the house to find it looking like this:

Apparently, Holli and our newest dog, Einstein have a new favorite game that involves Einstein tearing around the plant in circles and Holli obliterating the plant by bisecting the circumference.  A great geometric strategy for tag.  Not so great for gardening.

I found it impossible to be mad.  We are often called to sacrifice things we have grown fond of for the happiness of the people, or pets, we hold dear.  Maybe the plant will bounce back, maybe it will exit the circle of life in a blaze of puppy and German Shepherd.  Either way, it is simply the way things are.  There are many things we care about, and a few things we care about more.  I refuse to hold the loss of the former against the existence of the latter...especially when they have a face like this one:

 

A good first draft...

I have always been a procrastinator, never more so than when it came to writing school papers.  In high school, the night before an essay was due was a frenzy of activity, as I hurried to put together an argument, research and footnotes in one fell swoop.  It didn't help that I was a perfectionist, too, especially when it came to writing.  Regardless of how little time I'd left myself, I refused to scrimp on quality.  I agonized over spelling and content and did my best to deliver an elegant turn of phrase or witty argument whenever possible...and that was the easy part.  The hard part came at the end: my father's proofread.

Aside from one's self criticism, one's parents are often the toughest critics.  My father was no exception.  In fact, given his lifetime devotion to intellectual pursuits, he was tougher than most.  This was never more true than when it came to writing.  Still, the child in me wanted his approval, knowing if he liked it, it must be good.  So, after putting together my last minute masterpieces, I would print them out, find my dad and ask him to look at it.

"Dad, check out my paper on Euthanasia!"

Dad looks up from his newspaper, takes the offered essay, makes himself comfortable and starts reading.  I stand there waiting, pride in my work pending parental validation.  I know it's good.  I just need him to sign off.  He reaches the end, grabs a pen and starts over, making occasional marks on my perfect paper.  What could he possibly be correcting?  Seconds become minutes, ticking away towards his inevitable comment.

"It's a good first draft."

 Are you kidding me?! 

"Dad, it's due tomorrow."

He hands it back to me and shrugs, the implication clear: "Due tomorrow" should be enough time to get it right.  And that was it.  No suggestions for how to rephrase or re-word.  Just a bunch of extra "that's" crossed out and a bruising blow to the ego.  I slink away to my computer to fix it.

I don't think I ever showed him a second draft.  One emotional beatdown per paper was more than enough.  Truth be told, most of my "first drafts" were good enough to get an "A" in any class.  But Dad was bigger than grades.  So, I went back to the drawing board and fine-tuned until I felt it would meet his standards, promising myself that next time I would only have to do it once to do it right.  His nitpicking propelled me to perfection and, by the time I graduated from college, I was a master at one draft papers.  But, no matter how good I got at it, the thought was always in the back of my mind: "It's just a good first draft."

Like writing, if you want to get it right, life is not a one draft process.  No matter how disciplined and vigilant you are, there are always things that can be done better, said better.  Unnecessary words clutter communication of ideas and even the things we think we are especially good at can be revisited and improved upon.  If we're lucky, we start off with a good first draft, but if you're like me, the first run through can be remarkably rough.

It's been over a year since I started the garden.  In its own way, it's a one draft A+ paper, especially if you put it in a forgiving context.  But we've seen a few beautiful gardens in the last few weeks, Descanso Gardens, the Getty and some enviable personal gardens.  Just as I'd never rank my writing with that of the scions of literature or the stars of academia, I don't expect our garden to rival the quality of those gardening masterworks.  However, with planting season approaching, I think we could do with a few more edits.

The writing is constantly improving, too.  A couple weeks ago, I was finally able to get my dad to read this blog.  When my parents visited, I sat him down in front of my computer, told him to read the "I Come to the Garden alone" post and walked away.  When I came back, he was crying.

"This is good," he said.

I've waited years for that, but it as far as compliments go, it was as polished a final draft as any I've heard.

Thanks, Dad.  I love you.  Get better soon, okay?

Go figger.

I've been cranky for three days,  the kind of cranky usually reserved for when the Angels are losing and 120 degree days with no air conditioning...only the Angels are on a 5 game win streak, the weather has been unseasonably comfortable and my AC works great.  So what the heck is my problem?

I golfed yesterday.  Badly.  That didn't help.  Then I came home with a headache and found a large bag of freshly picked figs sitting on the kitchen counter.  My parents picked a bunch and forgot to take them.  Great.  Now what?  

The Angels killed the Twins for the second day in a row, Sharon came home and did her best to cheer me up.  Still cranky.

A full night's sleep, a lazy morning and a leisurely day weeding and watering in the garden and I was still acting like a baby with diaper rash.  

I like to think this is Sharon's game, picking fights about nothing and trying her best to avoid being tricked into feeling better, but I'm just as bad.  She doesn't do it often, but when the spirit takes her, look out.  Like the time she blew up at me in the car and wanted me to drop her by the side of the road.  I took her miniature golfing instead, forced her to pick a ball and a club and walked her to the first hole.

Fine!  I'll do it but I'm not going to enjoy myself.

She struck the ball with all her anger and walked away without looking to see where it went.

Hole in one, baby!

She didn't believe me, knew that if it was true, she wouldn't be able to be mad anymore.  She walked up to the hole and looked in.  Done.  She walked back with a sheepish look on her face and folded herself into my arms, laughing and crying at the same time.  When things are so good, being mad is a losing battle.

But this morning I was still fighting it.

Sharon refused to be goaded into a petty fight. Instead, she plopped a cookbook in front of me and proclaimed we were making fig spread with my parents' forgotten fruit.  Desperate to deny happiness, I took the opportunity to accuse her of bossing me around, being overly critical of how I diced.

If you think you can do it better, you do it!

And she did, chopped figs into neat 1/4 inch cubes while I performed the more appropriate task of juicing lemons.  Some honey.  Some pepper.  Some stirring.  Some sulking.  Some sesame seeds.  45 minutes of unadulterated adolescent attitude.

All I can smell is lemons.  It's going to be sour.

Undeterred, she tasted it.

David, this is good!

NO!  It can't be!  But it is.  Hole in one.  The next 30 minutes are spent stuffing our face with crackers, Iberico cheese and warm fig spread.  Who can do that and be angry?

We eat well in this house, she said.

Despite ourselves, we love well, too.  

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. 

Not everything makes it...

In the early days following Sharon's return from Scotland, she accompanied me on a trip to find a centerpiece for the garden.  The idea was to find a fountain to place in a circular flower bed I had built, so we drove to various local wholesalers to see if there was anything that caught our eye.  As we drove, Sharon talked about how far I'd gotten in so little time. 

If it had been up to her, she said, she would have taken it much more slowly, one plant at a time.  I told her about how scared I'd been when I planted the first three brush cherries, how I'd worried about how their survival, or lack thereof, would reflect on me...on our relationship.  I explained that my solution had been to plant as many things as I could, so that one casualty would represent a much smaller percentage of the overall project.  With so many things in the ground, something HAD to survive.  It was a perfect picture of our differences: Sharon, the meticulous planner and I, the full-speed-ahead-even-if-I'm-not-quite-sure-what-I'm-doing renegade.

In the first weeks, the first collateral damage of my strategy appeared: of the three brush cherries, the ones whose survival I'd agonized over, only one was thriving.  The one on the left had gone into shock and was losing all its leaves, barely clinging to life.  The one on the right died an ignominious death in Holli's jaws.  It's body was never found, an empty hole with a root bulb next to it the only evidence it had ever existed.  Constant attention and some plant food eventually saved the former, a quick trip to Lowe's replaced the other, and a temporary fence prevented any further canine inflicted carnage.

But there were other casualties.  The snapdragons I planted by the duranta withered into diseased and dessicated stalks.  My first attempts at growing basil, planted against the advice of a nursery worker (Sharon and I refer to him as the elf, not to be confused with the gnome), were destroyed by slugs and sun, and despite a glorious run of spectacular color, my marigolds and pansies eventually had to be pulled out and replaced.  Unable to keep up, my green waste bin overflowed into a pile of garden rubbish piled against the wall outside the boundaries.

Yet, for every death, there was an abundance of life to outweigh it.  The trumpet vines climbed, the ground cover spread.  Even some of the plants that seemed to be destined for the discard pile, would stubbornly shout, "I'm not quite dead yet," every time I went to pull them out, new growth defiant in spite of their struggles.

THIS is gardening, I've discovered.  Every day, there are choices to be made:  what to prune; what to plant; when to let something go; when to admit that, if I give it time and attention, this plucky little bastard just might pull it together.  And, most importantly, when do nothing at all.

Of all the lessons, the last is the hardest for me, as it is the one that contrasts most violently against the natural color of my inclinations.  It was the one I had to learn, and relearn, and relearn again as my marriage struggled through shock and loss of beauty.

I could not uproot it.  There were too many signs of growth.

I could not ignore it.  There was too much potential.

I could not fix it...because I had no idea what I was doing.

So, despite my urges, I did nothing.  Well...almost nothing.  I watched and watered and made some minor, and major, adjustments.  And one day it became clear:  This little bastard just might make it.

We didn't buy a fountain that day.  There were too many unanswered questions to make a hasty decision, so I deferred to Sharon's carefully considered caution.  But as we left a wholesaler, Sharon spotted a stone rabbit that made her smile.  It was on sale.  I said, "Let's just buy it," and she let me be spontaneous.

She named him Boris.

It's been about nine months, a significant period of time when one is speaking of life and death.  It is a hopeful number, full of possibilities and dreams...but not everything planted takes root.  Not everything makes it.  The past months have been full of things that have not come with us: plants, plans, friendships.  Other things I will not mention.  I think about those things some days, the days when I weigh the cost of coming so far so fast.

And some days, I see Boris, sitting beneath the myrtle with a yellow pot of lemon thyme balanced on his head.  On those days, I am reminded there is a place for all of it in the garden, caution and care tempering bravery and bravado.  There is room for life and for death, for success and for failure, for dreams and for reality.

On days like those...on days like today, I see ever so briefly through God's eyes.  And I see that it is good.

We want things to be simple...

In a simple world, my first blog entry in "real time" would be a nice little bow on a beautiful, if painful, story.  I would say my hours of pain and labor created a beautiful garden (they have!).  I would say my marriage was stronger than ever (it is!).  Then I would say, "thank you for reading and have a nice life."

But, fortunately for the blogoshpere, life is not simple, so this entry could just as easily be about how the time I spend enjoying the garden I (we, now) created is only a fraction of the time I spend working on it.  I could talk about how we spend our weekends with our faces inches from the dirt, digging for weeds and hunting slugs, and only rarely stop to be staggered by the beauty of it all.  I could tell you how, despite the amazingly magical growth of groundcover, it takes a conscious effort to remember to take my shoes off and walk barefoot in it every once and a while.

Life is like that, isn't it?  We work so hard for things we forget to enjoy.  We fight to create beauty that too soon becomes another thing we have, another thing we do...another thing.

Just the other day, I listened to Sharon have a conversation with her mom about her parents' landscaping adventures.  Her mom (jokingly?) said she wanted a garden, but didn't want to do the "after" work, the weeding, the watering. 

We want things to be simple.

Sharon told her if that's what she wanted, they should "plant" an astroturf lawn.  Simple.  But then, what happens on the days when you remember to take your shoes off outside?  There would be no cool sensation on the sole, no give to the ground, no (gasp!) dirt between the toes.  There would only be the knowledge you were trying to enjoy something you laid down to cover the earth you only wanted to deal with once.

No matter how much we forget to appreciate them, we earn our simple pleasures.  Our hard work, inasmuch as it distracts from the fruits, is still the means by which we cultivate the fruits.  Sounds complicated because it is.

Still, we want things to be simple.

Not easy, mind you.  With the exception of folding and putting away my laundry, I have never shied away from a hard day's work.  Yes, I consider folding laundry a hard day's work, but that's beside the point.  The point is, I readily accept, enjoy even, the challenges put before me.  The walls, I climb.  The obstacles, I get around.  But when it comes to standing still and taking in what's on the other side, I am a resolute failure.  I run hard and fast, to find the place where I can run hard and fast again.

It's complicated.

After she'd spoken to her mom, Sharon's dad got on the phone.  He told her how he ached all over from leveling the ground behind the house, where they planned to build a deck.  Sharon asked why, if they were going to cover it with a deck, did it need to be level?  Why not just make the supports on one side, taller to compensate for the difference?  She didn't share her father's answer, but I can fill it in.

Sometimes, we make it more complicated than it should be.

It took me a week to figure out what I wanted to say next.  Even though it's a blog and not literature.  Even though no one's really paying attention to begin with.  Even though it's really not that complicated.  It took me a week to find my voice, to find what it was that I wanted to say that was worth saying to anyone, not to mention worth saying on a regular basis.

I haven't figured that out yet, but it's a process that has to start somewhere.  I pray the mere thought of wanting to say something meaningful will find me focusing on the beauty that surrounds me daily.  I mean, it's a garden for God's sake.  What's the point in having one if you don't stop to enjoy it every now and again?

When I think of it that way, it's simple...in a complicated sort of way.