gardening

I'm sitting here with my hands swollen up like two baseball mitts, feeling as though someone has kicked me in the side of the neck with a pointy shoe. One hip is seized up about an inch higher than the other one, which puts quite a hitch in my giddyup. I am in pain, and I am lopsided. And I have gardening to thank for this state of affairs. One weeks worth of weeding, digging, cutting, trimming, planting and roaming around with my hands on my hips going 'Huh....' and my shit is RACKED UP.

There is simply something in my DNA that makes me want to annoy vegetation. I don't always love it, but I have to do it the same way I have to sleep or eat. I don't feel right if I can't.

I had a few forewarnings....once, when I was 13, I started a few flowers on my windowsill that quickly went from mint out of the back yard to a redwood burl to marijuana, and just as quickly got quashed by the parental units (never plant dope in the street side window of a house, kids.)

A few years later I 'got the call' to become a nun. Not just any nun, though; one of the Sisters of Canaan- a cloistered order that was reclaiming unused land for agriculture somewhere in the Midwest. It sounded great to me at the time...of course, so did Elton John.

Years later I asked for a job at a local garden nursery. I was spending most of my time there anyway, so why not get paid? That's where I really learned how to garden-how to pot up plants and take cuttings and make medium and all the other stuff. And I liked it real good.

Now, my grandmother gardened, although by the time we moved next door the main work had been done for years and all that was left was trimming and weeding. My father gardened too, and he did a damn good job of it. The problem was, I was the kid, and so I never got to do anything but tote and pull weeds, which didn't suit me one bit. I finally put my foot down and refused to do another thing after I found a tomato hornworm and made a giant dramatic screaming scene about it.

...EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEW.

I didn't want the garden to be associated with punishment or drudgery, and so I didn't insist that my daughter be my yard slave*. She learned to garden from the same woman I learned from, which probably was all for the best. And now my daughter is teaching my grandson, and he goes out into the yard and digs holes so that Grandma will give him a flower to plant in them, and is proud to select a baby flower to take care of at the nursery. So I feel like my job is done.

Gardening can be hard work. I don't mind that. I don't mind being cold or filthy or wet or miserably tired if it's related to gardening. Gardening is also, for the larger part, a sheer joy. I certainly don't mind wandering around the pretty flowers with a pair of clippers going 'snip, snip...la la la....snip, snip' all afternoon with the fat bumbles making circles around my head. And let me tell you, after wasting two years in college on a business degree and another year trying to convince myself that I didn't mind wearing nylons every day and making copies for a living, I can state conclusively that I would much rather be ankle-deep in rotting pumpkins wearing a 'Fuck Off And Die' t-shirt, and drinking cheap warm beer in the sunshine.

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*watch the comments, though. accounts may vary.