In Love with Compost

Garden Life

“Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going it spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.”

Anne Lamott

I wonder if you like to plant a garden this time of year. I do. I learned gardening from my father, who was old-school organic before it was cool. He had a truck full of composted chicken manure delivered to our back yard every year, much to the regret of my mother and the neighbors. This he worked into the red clay soil of North Carolina. He created mounds for the squash, and strung cord for the half-runner beans. He buried milk jugs with holes for watering his tomatoes at their roots, and they rewarded him by growing eight feet high and producing tomatoes the size of saucers. He killed insects by squashing them and hoed the weeds out every single weekend. My job as a little child, was to carry a bucket into the woods and fill it with leaf-mold—bucket after bucket of that rich, black, moldy muck was carted to the garden and spread by hand. Another of my assignments was to crush the small, fuzzy, yellow caterpillars that ate the bean leaves. Some days my fingers would turn the same color as those insects.

My mother, on the other hand, dealt only in flowers, and she planted by pointing—“Put the ageratum there, and the marigolds in front. Plant them close so they'll fill in that space.” Her hands never touched the soil because, God forbid, there might be a worm or something in there. I say this with a smile on my face, because my prissy mother and I were two sides of a coin in every single way; gardening was just the clearest example.

Living life is like planting a garden. We either dive into it, get dirt under our fingernails and smeared on our clothes, or we sit on the sidelines and point. We examine the health of the soil by feeling and smelling it, or we observe it from a distance and guess at what it needs. We tend and care for the plants in ways that stretch and inconvenience us, or we pay someone else to do it. We invest ourselves in the messy business of living, or we watch the years pass while we play with smoke and mirrors. We all choose which kind of gardener we will be.

                                                                    In the Spirit,

                                                                          Jane