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© 2005 Ann Mrowicki. All rights reserved.

The Unintended Garden

Preface
This was originally written for a Seminar I took last Winter/Spring at Vermont College entitled “ This place so far from home” that primarily examined the experiences borne of shifts Class and Economic due to education. Asked to write about our journeys from our origins, I wrote about my arrival in my new life with my female partner after twenty-five years with my husband. November 18, 2004

In reading all of these essays, I think of my own journey from home. Placed besides these other accounts, my story does not offer the apparent drama. But I have traveled ground my mother never intended. I have slipped through a weave of economic differences, joining other idealistic members of my generation into a willingly downward mobile life. I later decided that being dirt poor was too vulnerable, frustrating and emotionally costly while raising kids. I was then blessed with a fulltime job that was not mind-dulling and meaningless. It gave me a finger-hold in the lowest economic rung of middleclass life. I did hold a mortgage on the house I lived in. We ate well. But my parents were still put off by my life, with its simple country ways. Besides I hadn’t fulfilled the family dream of a college education, that most of my siblings, veterans of a Roman Catholic schooling, had achieved or were poised to achieve. My parents did not finish college themselves but wanted it for their brood. We were raised to move up in the middleclass, not down.

Now, I am finally in college and so are my daughters. Again though, I’m living outside the life my mother had intended. I am a supporting mother, but I have again slipped down the economic pole. I have left my husband. In this new life, I wondered if I dare to put down new roots, my old ones still torn and tender. Then more than a metaphor, strangely, I spent my first couple months in this new town, in this new life, compulsively digging in the dirt. I didn’t see this compulsion coming.

Those summer mornings often replayed this scene: I carefully slip out of my sleeping lover’s embrace and silently don the tattered jeans and old tee shirt. The wooden stairs groan inadvertently under my light barefooted tread. The gardening gloves stuffed in my back pocket leave a telltale trail behind as yesterday’s dried caked mud crumbles off of them. Emerging from the door, I’m blinded briefly by the morning light spilling over Woodford Mountain, east of town.

The rumblings of the beasts of Main Street greet me. After years of living down a peaceful dirt road, I now inhabit Main Street of a town, which by Vermont standards, is not so small. This Main Street is also an important artery across the spine of the Green Mountains. A perpetual caravan of tractor trailers screech, thunder and grumble up to the stoplight just a skip and hop from this big old white house.

I dart over to the garage and gather up tools into the ancient, sturdy wheelbarrow and gingerly make my way over the chilly shadowed west lawn. There lay the new mistress in her bed, a strip of earth wedged below a tumbling rock wall, bordering the back driveway. She reaches out four feet from the wall and stretches maybe forty-five feet westwardly away from the house. This I slowly discovered had gone unattended for more then twenty years.

It had started out innocently enough. I asked our new landlady if I could plant a few kitchen herbs, something from my old life. She showed me around the various beds, left long to their own devices, surrounding the house. I fixated on the eastern pointed end of this long strip. It was closest to the back door, thus the kitchen.

I had the remaining weeks of spring to dream of a little triangular bed planted with oregano, parsley, basil, chives and a few pansies. I had only brief opportunities in my few visits to this faraway new town in the interceding weeks to pull at the exploding jungle of weeds as they reasserted their annual dominion. I didn’t live here yet.

Finally the weekend after I perched onto this new life in this second story walk-up, I went to my future garden.

This was my second great departure. I had been preparing for it in a host of ways for months, for years. Now I stood at the tip of this long bed. I had left my large, Catholic, middleclass family as a young woman to live the simple life in the woods of Southern Vermont and to bear and raise my daughters with their father, my husband. Now here, more then twenty years later, I stand at the edge of this ungoverned wedge of earth in the center of a different town.

I had meant only to pull up enough roots to plant a few utilitarian, sensual necessities. The tangle was deeper and thicker then I knew. And the earth was compellingly rich and dark, though it only had a few worms. Earth needs air, light and water. The silent labor of worms supports this. So I dug deeper. I could plant a few more herbs: sage, tarragon, cilantro and oh, lavender! Lavender’s tangy, fuzzy soft scent is a balm for the aching, weary soul. I dug further.

I dug that first weekend because digging was necessary. The growing season was well underway and this was only the first step. I told my partner, as she left for a music festival that first weekend with her son, I would be fine. Digging here, preparing this ground with my hands would free my mind to reflect on this brand new life.

Dig I did, but reflect I did not. My only thoughts were “how long is this root?” and “how far will I go to get it out?” or “where are all the worms?” or “what does this bit of earth need to bring it into balance to support healthy plants?” The bed worked its magic on me. I was hooked into a bigger task that snaked across summer to fall, when I finally had to get a job with paycheck.

My overwhelmed heart was numbed silent. I didn’t expect this reaction from myself. I had planned for this, longed for this, barely tolerating the wait for this life with the woman I love and for the different career that beckoned even longer. Joy, grief, sweat and tears mingled into that uprooted ground.

All summer, I slipped from her arms in the dawn light to work the garden in the protective shadow of the house, sparing my pale, flecked skin from the high sun. I couldn’t help my self. Now the bed, nearly cleared of deeply rooted weeds, is filled with many herbs, flowers, annuals, biennials, perennials and even bulbs for spring. I had not intended to become a gardener; I had done this so poorly in my husband’s garden. He was the master gardener there.

In this new town, who would know I worked all my life with my hands as a baker, especially with my now new work as caseworker? And they would think, by my present life, I am lesbian, which I’m not. I have loved and still love both men and women: I’m bisexual. But those who don’t know me well can’t see my roots quite entangled, reaching deep, deep down. Who knows of the compelling mysteries and whispered promises in the earth?

Editor's Note: This essay was first published in the Biwomen newsletter, a publication of the Biresource Center in Cambridge, MA. Responses to this essay e-mailed to Dale will be forwarded to Ann. Many thanks to Ann for sharing her work and personal thoughts with Dale's readers.

© 2005 Ann Mrowicki. All rights reserved.