Category Archives: Gardening

My Gardening Attire

Posted on by
7

Anyone can get dressed up and glamorous, but it is how people dress on their days off [that’s] the most intriguing.

Alexander Wang (b. 1983; American fashion designer known for his urban designs and his use of black)

It’s no secret. I love to garden. Actually, I talk about gardening a lot in my posts. Three focused exclusively on gardening. You may recall Two, Together and Less Is Not More Until It Is. And if you don’t recall those posts, you may remember The Joy of Weeding.

But unless you are a gardener yourself, you may be wondering why on earth I’m writing about gardening when we’re reaching the end of October.

Of course, you’re wondering. I understand. Spring, which ushered in the end, is so far behind us that it’s nothing more than memories of sudden and energetic growth spurts, filled with verdant hope and promise, poised on the threshold of new life.

Then came summer ushering in such fulsome lushness that it transformed the world into a landscape of sensational, razzle-dazzle impressions, but its memory, too, is on the wane.

Now, fall. Here we are midst October mist, with decadent decay exposing bony branches beneath blooms and leaves still clinging, sighing the song of letting go, rustling ghostly memories right before our eyes.

Soon and very soon, winter will bring freezings, earth-heavings, and dead stillness, with roots connecting underground, communing in generative darkness.

The seasons come. The seasons go. And then they start all over again. (But only when publishers see fit to send out new gardening catalogs.)

But my goodness! Here I’ve gone and let me and you get snowed by reveries of the gardening seasons.

Sadly, putting in the seed is not the thrust of this post.

Instead, it’s all about putting on my gardening …?

Threads? As in the slang word going all the way back to 1926? Let me unearth its origins and see what I can find. Threads was first recorded in Wise-Crack Dictionary: More than 1,000 Phrases and Words in Every-Day Use Collected from 10,000 Communications Received during a Newspaper Prize Contest and Other Sources (eds. George H. Maines and Bruce Grant, vol. 1).

Well, it’s doubtful that I will don any gardening threads, although it was fun trying the word on for size today.

Maybe, instead, I will put on my gardening costume. Sometimes–and this really is true–sometimes I think about what I happen to be wearing–whether in the garden or out of the garden–as my costume. I’m chuckling to myself right now because that usage puts me in the good company of Samuel Johnson who used it in his A Journey to the Western Island of Scotland: “Dr. Johnson in his Hebridean Costume” (1775).

But for this post it’s a Greenthumb down for costume and another Greenthumb down for threads.

How about Clothes? It has an interesting origin as well, going all the way back to c888 when it appeared in Ælfred’s translation of Boethius’ De Consol. Philos.: “Wæpnu, and mete, and ealo, and claþas” (xvii).

I had to dig really deep for that Old English origin. But come on: I can’t even pronounce the words in the sentence where clothes appeared. Let me edge up to the surface a bit to 1484 Middle English when clothes as we know them appeared in Caxton’s translation of G. de la Tour-Landry’s Book of the Knight of the Tower: “She … arayed her with clothes of gold, and flouryshynge of ryche ermyns.”

There. That’s much better. I like being able to pronounce the names of whatever it is that I might be wearing when I garden.

Since I seem to be tilling in the right direction, perhaps I will narrow my definition of clothes, especially since mine are certainly not of gold and furs. I would look perfectly silly in clothes like that, and, besides, I couldn’t afford them anyway since I teach at a c-mm–ity college.

Let’s see. Ah, yes. Dress clothes might work since I have a few. Dress clothes goes all the way back to 1838 when it first appeared in Lady Charlotte Maria Bury’s Diary: “All the gentlemen … looked beautiful in their dress clothes.”

For my dress clothes I have things like suits and sports jackets. But I rarely wear them when I’m teaching, unless it’s a special event. On normal days, I wear Oxford dress shirts–usually blue or purple (Those are the only colors, right?)–with button-down collars; Windsor double-knotted ties; double-pleated, cuffed pants; and wingtip, lace-up shoes with real leather soles. (Please tell me that they do not make dress shoes that do not have leather soles. If you must tell me otherwise, break it to me gently and have some smelling salts handy.)

Ironically, my colleagues and my students think that I wear my dress clothes when I garden. They even think that I wear my dress clothes when I split wood.

Sure. Right. Dress shoes. Dress pants. Dress Shirt. Windsor double-knotted tie. Genuine leather shoes. Imagine. They really think that’s how I dress when I garden. They have even told me so. Right to my face. The nerve.

But let’s move on. Someone’s trying to tell me something.

“Say what? I object vehemently. They do NOT call me a stick-in-the-mud.”

Well, I don’t think they would call me that, but let me see what my trusted friend Mx Oxford has to say. “Look at the old stick-in-the-mud!” (Satirist, or, Censor of the Times, 1832) (I was hoping, with great verdancy, that mud in stick-in-the mud would have something to do with garden soil. Was I ever wrong!)

Now I’m hearing someone else whispering in my ear.

“Stop goading me! They don’t call me a dandy, either.”

Hmmm…dandy might actually be better than stick-in-the-mud. Mx Oxford will know. “A Dandy is a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes” (Thomas Carlyle, Sarto Resartus, 1834).

Isn’t that just dandy? I admit, though, that the usage of dandy in the quoted sentence seems as contorted as a willow.

Now that I think of it, however, twelfth Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin was sometimes seen as a DANdy. Well. Yes. Of course. He always wore his signature bow tie. Bow tie Dan.

While I’m not sure that I like having people perceive me as a dandy, I don’t mind it at all if it puts me in Dr. Boorstin’s company. Who knows. His bow tie made him stand out in the world of learning and librarianship. Maybe my clothes will make me stand out in the world of education, and, when it comes to gardening, maybe my clothes will make me outstanding in the field.

But let me get back to the word attire that’s part of this post’s title. I struggled with that word choice. I’ve never thought of using attire to refer to what I wear, on any occasion. “And do you now put on your best attyre?” (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1623).

However, since I do put on my best attire for my students and my colleagues, it seems appropriate to include the word in the title. All of my protestations notwithstanding, they are certain that’s what I wear when I garden.

Maybe this post will convince them otherwise. I have taken off my threads. I have taken off my costume. I have taken off my clothes. And I have taken off my attire which I never had on in the first place.

Now look at me. Well, on the other hand, don’t.

Give me time, at least, to get dressed in the sad clothes that I actually wear when I garden. As will be evident, even a wordster like me lacks the ability to gussy up clothes like mine that are pitifully mundane.

When I garden on my days off, I wear an old, tattered baseball cap–faded burgundy–brim forward.

When I garden on my days off, I wear the oldest, grungiest t-shirt that I own. I own several. I like grunge options.

When I garden on my days off, I wear blue jeans so faded, so wholly holey, so fringed, and worn so bare in all the right places that they would fetch a fortune on all the wrong fashion racks.

When I garden on my days off, I wear steel-toed, unstylish, waterproof work boots that allow me to be comfortable and confident in all the tough places where I tend to go.

That’s it. That’s what I wear when I garden on my days off.

It goes without saying that I am thrilled beyond thrills that my students and my colleagues see my attire, my clothes, my costume, and my threads through a lens that commands such respect.

If they could only see me on my days off–especially on my gardening days–they would be intrigued by my ability to reinvent not only myself but also my attire.

Two, Together

Posted on by
8

I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with the beings called human, but I want to realize identity with all life, even with such things as crawl upon earth.

Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948; Indian lawyer, politician, social activist, and writer; embraced nonviolent resistance; inspired movements for civil rights and freedom around the world)

The blacksnake and I friended the moment we first laid eyes on one another.

The early, dew-pearled spring morning remains as fresh in my memory as if it were yesterday. I had gone to my towering compost heap, bucket in hand, to retrieve some black gold. As I knelt at the base of its old, sweet-smelling richness, I suddenly sensed eyes. Someone or something was scrutinizing me. I was being watched. I could feel it deep in my bones. I looked all around me and saw no one. Then I lifted my eyes, and there on top of the compost heap was an incredibly beautiful, brilliantly glossy blacksnake, leaning over, looking down at me with its small eyes, its tongue darting, in red contrast to its white under chin, mellowing into soft yellow. I felt neither chill nor threat. I continued my task, all the while the two of us kept returning glances as if to make certain that we did not snap our nanosecond bond, perhaps never to connect again.

Surprisingly, the bond stretched and sunned itself over the summer. Even though I was always hoping to see my blacksnake–so much so that I often went looking for him–our encounters were sudden, unexpected ones.

Not long after our initial meeting, I was hard at work, planting a new specimen tree in the upper yard. The curly, contorted willow was already a large tree with a root ball that seemed far more immense when delivered than when purchased. By the time I dug the hole and positioned the tree, I was exhausted, but I still faced watering, backfilling, watering again, and mulching. Edging near tiredom, I walked a few steps to the nearby waterhose. Reaching down, I lifted with an intent to pull. In an instant, I realized that what I had in hand had no drag. I looked. There I stood holding in midair my blacksnake friend whom I had mistaken for my black water hose. It was my second one-on-one experience. Once again our eyes locked. But this meeting was more special than the first. Now we knew one another’s touch–warmth against cold, cold against warmth. I put the blacksnake down as casually as I had picked him up, and we each continued what we were doing. I could not see him, but I sensed that he watched from somewhere nearby as I finished planting the willow.

On another occasion, I had spent the better part of my day laying stone pavers for a short walkway through the garden bed outside my kitchen and building a low stone wall along the walkway’s meandering edge. The sunny day bordered on scorch. I sat on the walkway, leaned back into the flower garden, admiring my handiwork. As I gloated, a cold black stream soft-bellied itself across my sweaty outstretched arm. I looked back and my eyes met the eyes of my friend, the blacksnake. I remained motionless, holding my breath, hoping that the snake would stop, linger, and perhaps even explore. Instead he slithered on his way, calmly and unhurriedly.

My next visitation was perhaps my most unexpected and the most short lived. One summer evening, I had gone for a walk in the yard. When I went out, I didn’t consider turning on the outdoor lights. But darkness had fallen by the time I started back. I could see my way easily enough because the indoor lights were on, including those in the foyer. Even if the lights had not been on, I could have footed along without really looking. And that’s exactly what I did, that is until my hand clutched for the storm door and instead of an iron handle I felt a cold, smooth, muscular surface, pulsing to my touch. Only then did I look. The foyer light dimly illuminated my blacksnake friend, partially coiled around the door handle, upper body stretching toward the door top and lower body draping downward. I opened the door and went inside. My friend remained outside, leaving me to wonder whether he had hoped, for once, to be visitor in my world as I had been so often in his.

That rendezvous was the most fleeting. My fifth was the most lasting. As autumn started, my late partner Allen and I grew weary of removing fallen leaves from our Koi pond and cascading waterfalls. To make our task easier, we covered both with invisible black netting.

Our solution was perfect. The leaves floated on top of the netting instead of on top of the water. But the day came when our hearts sank as we discovered a scarlet red, black-faced cardinal struggling to escape the black netting’s grab. We lifted the netting to winged flight.

“So much for that brilliant solution,” we sighed simultaneously.

I rolled the netting into a ball, left it on the small patio beside the pond, and went back indoors to help Allen with dinner.

After dinner, I went back out to throw the netting away. Reaching down, I saw my blacksnake inextricably interwined in the ball.

Allen came out to see what I was doing.

“Look at what we’ve done. This is all our fault,” I lamented. “We have to get the snake out of the netting.”

“And just how do you plan to do that without getting bitten?”

“Go get some scissors, and I’ll show you what I have in mind.”

Allen came back out with a pair of surgical scissors that he was so skilled in using.

“I’ll get a hold of the snake just behind his head so that he can’t bite me, and you cut away and remove the netting.”

Ever so cautiously, I knelt and took gentle hold of the blacksnake behind his head. Allen starting cutting away at the netting, gradually freeing the snake’s tail.

As he snipped away more and more netting, the blacksnake began coiling his emerging body ever so slowly and calmly around my arm.

As Allen snipped, I gently rubbed my other hand against the snake’s skin, making certain that no black netting had been left behind.

Finally, the moment came when Allen finished. I remained kneeling on the patio with my blacksnake friend coiled entirely around my arm.

What was I to do now? I had not planned for this moment of release, this moment of letting go.

I stood up slowly, all the while watching my blacksnake friend watching me. It was as if he knew that Allen and I had rescued him. It was as if I knew that my friend would do me no harm.

I walked up to the bank beside the waterfalls, gently lowered my snake-coiled arm to the ground, and let go my grasp around the snake’s head.

Two, together, frozen in spirit and frozen in time, just for one second and one second only. In the next, our eternity melted. My blacksnake friend started uncoiling himself from around my arm, pausing to look back. Our eyes locked one last time before he slithered his way back into our world.

Less Is Not Always More Until It Is

Posted on by
9

Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says, (I know his name, no matter)—so much less! Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.

Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto”

Less is more has been around since 1855 when Robert Browning coined the phrase in his “Andrea del Sarto,” a dramatic monologue inspired by the Renaissance artist having the same name as the poem’s title. Nearly one hundred years later, architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe made the phrase really popular when he adopted it as a mantra for architecture, art and design. Today, less is more is more popular than ever because minimalism is gaining more and more traction.

I get it. I guess. Well, actually, I guess that I don’t get it. To prove that I don’t get it, I had to Google some examples of less is more so that I could include them here at the start of this post. I can’t believe that I couldn’t come up with any examples on my own, but I couldn’t.

Fortunately, I found a lot of examples on the Internet. However, only one or two of them found me nodding in agreement.

I really do understand that putting less focus on material things–consumerism–allows us to focus more on things that really matter and that bring us lasting happiness. Got it. Endorse it.

And I really do understand that minimalism can help the environment by reducing our carbon footprint. Got it. Got it. Endorse it twice over.

Those two concessions are about as far as I can go. Some of the other less-is-more examples leave me shaking my head.

Sleek, smaller design, often in a black and white scheme. Nope.

Decluttering. Nope. Nope.

Digital decluttering. Nope. Nope. Nope.

(If you desire a full understanding of why I dissed sleek design, decluttering, and digital decluttering, see “OHIO on My Mind.”)

Having scoffed at those examples of less is more, you can rest assured that I would never consider less is more when it comes to gardening. That’s when I draw the line in my compost heap and step across it to join sides with Robert Venturi, one of the major American architects of the twentieth century, who proclaimed that less is a bore.

As for me, I want my garden right now. No. I want it yesterday or the day before, and I want it to look as if I have been enjoying its lushness for years, if not forever.

Hear me and hear me well. Less is not more when it comes to the way that I garden. I garden, I garden my way.

I want nothing–absolutely nothing–to do with seeds. They take days to sprout, more days to grow, still more days to selectively thin, and even more days to bloom.

I want blooms, blooms, blooms. Glorious blooms. And I want them instanter.

“Those 4-inch pots are gorgeous! Look at all those blooms.”

“You must like them a lot to be buying fifteen each of three different annuals.”

“Oh, my. Yes. I love mass plantings.”

That’s a typical conversation as I make early spring pilgrimages to local garden centers, always to be reminded right after I have made my purchases:

“Keep ’em indoors until the danger of frost has passed.”

No big deal. I’ve never minded dragging a gazillion potted plants day after day–from mid-April to mid-May–in and out of my home, kitchen to deck and back again. Hey. Like I said. I want my garden yesterday or the day before. And either way I want it looking like it’s been there forever.

If you think that I have a bad attitude when it comes to seeds, I have an even worse attitude when it comes to saplings. (Think of me as a modern-day-Mae-West gardener: “When I’m good, I’m good. When I’m bad, I’m better.”)

If I’m going to plant a tree, I certainly do not expect to sit under it from the get-go and be shaded–Hmmm, that is something for me to think about–but, at least, I want it to be big enough and bold enough to cast a shadow.

When it comes to how many plants and trees I consider to be enough, it’s really simple.

For specimen plants and trees, I’m fine with one of each.

For all others, if one is good, then three, five, seven, or nine have to be better, especially since I garden in odd numbers when it comes to layout and design.

In fact, my odd-number planting rule struck me as perfect when I decided to plant bamboo. Nine clumps. Not to worry. Non-running.

That rule seemed equally perfect for my hardy bananas. Three groves. They were so small when I first planted them, that I hoped my neighbors would not notice. Trust me. They didn’t. Bigger is better even when it comes to bananas. But these days my neighbors get whiplash as they drive past, and it’s not because of our well-rutted road. Groves of big banana plants on a Virginia mountaintop make heads turn and make cars turn around.

Let’s see whether I have anything else to prove that less is not more when it comes to my gardening. Goodness! How on earth could I forget English ivy. Well, I nearly forgot it, no doubt because for once I broke my cardinal rule of planting in odd numbers. I planted the ivy in twosies. I needed ivy to hide not only a humongous and hideous stump just below my driveway but also to hide the rock wall that I built to hide the stump.

It worked so well there that I decided some ivy would soften the stone wall surrounding three sides of my Koi Pond. The fourth side, lest you think that I slighted it, is a dramatic waterfall, cascading from a height of five or seven or nine feet or so.

I wouldn’t want the world at large to know this–and I know that I can trust you, Dear Reader, to keep what I am about to say to yourself–but in my insistence on having my gardens look as if they have been around forever from day one, I confess that I may have made a mistake or five.

Mistake #1. Planting things too close together. Let’s face it. Too close is too close.

Mistake #2. See Mistake #3. My mistakes come in odd numbers only.

Mistake #3.  Not paying close enough attention to how big things will grow. Double disaster. Too close and too large.

Mistake #4. See Mistake #5. My mistakes come in odd numbers only.

Mistake #5. Not fully understanding that gardeners like me who nurture and care for their gardens end up with plants and trees that are much larger than expected. Miracle Grow grows miracles.

In case you’re wondering how my less-is-not-more approach to gardening played out over time, let me share with you.

Year One. Oh, joy. This is gorgeous. This is proof. My garden looks as if it’s been here for a while. It almost has that old-garden look. So there! I knew from the get-go that less is not more.

Year Two. See Year Three. I garden in odd numbers only.

Year Three. Oh, joy of joys. Everything is so lush. The garden really does look elegant and established.

Year Four. See Year Five. I garden in odd numbers only.

Year Five. Joy to the fifth. Cheers! This is an English garden at its best. Blooms, blooms, blooms. Glorious blooms everywhere. Everything in the garden is touching. I can’t even see weeds between the plants. Maybe there are no weeds. Better still, even if the deer have been in the gardens, I can’t tell what they’ve eaten.

Year Six. See Year Seven. I garden in odd numbers only.

Year Seven. Well, if I must say so myself, the stone walls really do look mysterious hidden beneath the English ivy. Here and there the sunlight bounces off a stone. For all that I know, what I’m walking past might be the foundations of ancient Roman ruins awaiting an archaeological dig. And I am rather glad that the manicured borders around the garden beds have disappeared. Too formal was a tad too much for a mountain man like me.

Year Eight. See Year Nine. I garden in odd numbers only.

Year Nine. The season of the slow awakening finally came. I looked out my windows one day, and I realized that it was gone. All gone. To be certain, it’s all there, but now it’s all so overgrown and all so close together that it looks like an Impressionistic study in shades of emerald green.

From afar, it’s rather dramatic. But let’s face it. Gardening cannot be done from afar. Gardening requires down and dirty.

Recovery from my initial Impressionistic shock was slow, and I confess to having been in denial for a year or three. It was a downer. I felt overwhelmed by the “muchness” of it all, just as Frost’s farmer felt in “After Apple-Picking”: “For I have had too much / Of apple picking: I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired.”

But I started to take heart when I started ripping out enough English ivy to fill five, seven, or maybe nine forty-five-gallon yard bags.

I got really hyped when I discovered the stone wall surrounding the red-leaf Japanese maple. Now, though, the maple has overgrown its stone wall boundaries. Joy!

“Mr. Gardener, tear down that wall.”

I did, and I rebuilt it sufficiently far away from the mature maple–exactly where I should have built it to begin with.

Then I repeated the ivy demolition on the three sides of the Koi Pond. Wow! What rocks I have! I can’t believe that I dug those stones out of the ground using just my pick and then managed to position them so expertly. They are stunning. Simply stunning. And with all that ivy gone, the pond is every bit as big as I recall it.

In case you’re wondering about the bamboo, let me just say this. Those nine clumps have an impressive diameter of six feet. Each. Non-running? Right. This bamboo is leaping! I have renamed it Bamboozle Leptomorph! (Patent pending.) I’m still trying to remove as much of it as I can from my gardens, while leaving the original clumps intact. They are gorgeous. Nonetheless, Dear Reader, if you would like to gift your best enemies with some of my bamboo, please leap out to me. You can assure them, if they ask: Clumping. Non-running. Caveat inter vivos. 

No doubt you’re wondering about my bananas. Of all my less-is-not-more gardening ventures, the bananas might be my greatest success. A recent visitor commented that they reminded him of Peru! Imagine that! My own piece of Peru right here in the Shenandoah Valley. Rest assured: I’ll keep the bananas. Even though they are hardy, I have to work hard at wintering them over. When they start to outgrove their allotted space, I simply overwinter smaller sections of the groves. Or I dig up perimeter pups and give them to friends. (Enemies get the Bamboozle Leptomorph, sine caveat.)

The annuals? Never a problem because at the end of the season, Voila! They’re gone. If I want more, I’ll plant them again next year.

No doubt you know exactly where I am. That’s right. I am ripping out lots of my gardens that have exceeded by far my wildest dreams nightmares.

This fall, just as an example, I’ll be lifting and replanting 55 or so peonies that have been anchored in their spots since 1998 when I planted them with fierce determination to make them look as if they had been there forever.  Trust me. These days they look as if they have been there forever and a day.

The same can be said for all of my gardens.

As I move forward with these gardening challenges opportunities, I will be gardener enough to own up to the fact that “Less is not more until it is.”

What worked great for me for so many years is now simply too much. And too much is just too much.

But, as I own up to the shortfalls, I am seeing wide open expanses opportunities that I have not seen in decades. At the same time, I am seeing metaphorical steel and copper plant markers nudging their way up through the soil here and there and everywhere: “Gardening Opportunity.” “Plant Tomorrow, Today.” “Just Plant It.”

Yep. I will savor the landscape’s openness through fall’s brilliant blaze and through winter’s snowy silence.

Come spring thaw, however, my unrepentant self and I will be right back at all the local garden centers. In all likelihood, I will do it all over again unless I somehow discover that sweet spot, somewhere between less is a bore and less is more.

The Joy of Weeding

Posted on by
11

“Look deep into nature, and you will understand everything better.”

–Albert Einstein

Personally, I hate weeding! It’s tedious. It’s time consuming. It’s tiring. It’s never-ending. Absolutely.  Never-ending.

I would much rather harness myself to a weed whacker, clearing great swaths of wilderness with every swing to my left, with every swing to my right, and with every step thrust frontward as I charge ahead to tame the untamable. I reckon a weed whacker is a reckoning force.

Yet, some folks (so I have been told) actually enjoy weeding. Apparently, they like to pull up weeds, one by one by one. Apparently, they never grow tired or weary of pulling up weeds, one by one by one. Their mantra? You guessed it: “One by one.”

My late partner, Allen, was one of those folks. He liked pulling up weeds and did so with the same care and precision that he used as a surgical technologist.

He would plan his weed work a week in advance. The conversation below shows how it all came to pass. I see no reason to say who’s saying what. The differing approaches to weeding–mine and Allen’s–are abundantly clear without naming either of us and without calling either of us names.

“Thank God! The weekend is nearly here. What would you like to do on Saturday?”

“Weed.”

“How about doing something fun? You really want to weed?”

“Yes. Weed. I just need some quiet time.”

“Well, okay. Sure. While you weed, I’ll weed whack. We’ll get a lot of yard work done.”

On reflection, I’m not certain that my part of the bargain provided quiet, especially since we usually played Gospel music in the background, full volume, while we worked in the yard. And when the music stopped, no problem. I would fill in by singing at full throttle the handful of words that I knew from some Gospel song that I liked, over and over and over and always painfully off key, though never deliberately so. Soon thereafter, Allen would slip inside and slip back out again, protected fully by his smartphone and earbuds. He never said a word.

But, hey. I’m no dummy. He made his point loud and clear. Quietly. Immediately. I got it. But since he was now listening to his own music with his own earbuds stuffed into his own ears, I just kept right on singing, as loudly and as off key as ever. It made me feel good. Besides, I take the Bible literally when it says, “Make a joyful noise.” And, equally important, I take folklore seriously, too: I have always heard that making noise while doing yard work keeps snakes away! So there! Even if indirectly, Allen still reaped the benefits of my singing: all the snakes disappeared into the woods, all except for the black snake that loved my off-key singing and slithered all around the yard to stay close to me, but that’s copy for a future post.

When it came to weeding, it was no big deal that Allen and I listened to different music while applying different weeding methods. Working together, we always accomplished a lot within four or five hours.

I mowed down an acre or so, and I was covered from head to toe with vestiges of grass and leaves and dust. But, hey! I got my weekly weed whacking joy.

Allen removed every single, solitary weed from an established flower bed, perhaps 20 feet by 15 feet, and, sometimes even refreshed the mulch. He would be drenched in perspiration, with muddy jeans from butt to hem. But, hey! He got his weekly weeding joy.

Inevitably, as we admired what we had achieved individually and collectively, we would mutually agree to a quick shower (individually, not collectively) and a backroad drive (collectively, not individually) to a farmers’ market, followed by lunch!

The after-joy of weeding and weed whacking meant as much to us (collectively and individually) as the actual joy itself.

Since Allen’s death, though, I have often wondered what those treasured weeding days meant…to him. What was it that he experienced deep down inside?

Recently, I decided to re-create, as nearly as possible, one of Allen’s typical Saturday weeding days.

I won’t bore you with all the pre-weeding details, like getting up at 4am, reading the New York Times and Washington Post, both online, cup of coffee in hand.

Or, having leftovers for breakfast, from dinner the night before.

Or, putting on bluejeans and a favorite flannel shirt–plaid, with sleeves far too short–and always a baseball cap from somewhere memorable like Geneva Falls, NY.

And I’ll not mention heading out to start weeding almost always at exactly 7:30am.

Those were the things that Allen did. So I’ll skip right over all those details and commence with Allen’s weeding tools.

A black plastic yard bag, for sitting and kneeling. An old dull kitchen knife for cutting out the roots of each weed. And a yard basket for collecting the weeds and their roots. And, yes: no gloves. He liked his fingers and hands to be one with the soil.

That was it. A simpler array of tools for such a noble task cannot be imagined.

Sometimes, as he weeded, it was as if he were descending into the earth that he tended, rising up from time to time, carrying to the compost pile the red yard basket filled to the brim with weeds and their roots. And so the cycle continued–descending, rising, and carrying–until he was done for the day.

That was it. A simpler approach to such a noble task cannot be imagined.

On my appointed day for re-enacting Allen’s day of weeding, I did not need to think about method or tools or pre-weeding activities. All those were so ingrained in my memory, my heart, and my soul that everything fell into place naturally.

My morning–this past Saturday, in fact–started with cool temps in the mid fifties, gradually warming to the upper seventies. A mix of clouds and sun. A gentle breeze. Low humidity. Just right.

As soon as I positioned myself with intentionality on my black plastic bag, I felt grounded–no pun intended. I knew that I had sat down exactly where I chose to sit. I knew that I had no where else that I wanted to be. I knew that I had no where else that I  wanted to go. “In the moment” vibrated with new meaning.

And then I felt totally in control. I knew that I could do as much or as little as I chose to do. I knew that I need move no further in any direction than the limits of my reach. Suddenly, I no longer felt overwhelmed by the enormity of totality. I could sit right where I sat, forever and forever and forever, and work my own postage stamp of mountain earth.

To my surprise–and, again, with no pun intended–I could smell the coffee that my neighbor higher up on the mountain was brewing, and I could nearly taste the bacon that he was frying. Closer to home, I could smell the lilac in my upper yard, just beginning to perfume the air, but even now its purply fragrance was so heavy that it nearly took my breath away.

To my great surprise, I could hear tractor trailers racing seventy miles an hour up and down the interstate, their roaring engines muffled to a monotonous drone by ten miles or so of puffy clouds and winding river. Closer still, I could hear the chirping of robins, never alone, always calling one to the other, always with the other returning the song.

And I could hear and feel the rustle of dry decay as my hands grabbed and bagged leaves from yesteryear. I could even hear the blue buzz of a horse fly as it circled my head, and, more joyous by far, the whir of a ruby-throated hummingbird–my first of the season–as it helicoptered all around me with quizzical uncertainty, darting deliberately, continuing to hover nearby, singing its high-pitched chips.

To my greater surprise, I started seeing things at the granular level. The grit in the soil. The veins in the weeds. The spidery whiteness of roots. The leaves and blooms on nearby plants. The house looming ever so large above my grounded perspective. The trees towering above the house. The clouds and sky arching over all, including me.

To my greatest surprise, one hour slipped into two. Two melted into three. Three faded into four. Four, into forever.

By then, the sharp, cutting edge of my morning angst had become as smooth as  well-worn marble stairs.

By then, my hope had heightened beyond my reach, stretching as far into the future as my senses could carry me.

By then, I had experienced deep down in the inner recesses of my soul what Allen had experienced in his.

By then, I knew the joy of weeding.