Mrs.
Larkin’s Garden
“Mrs.
Larkin’s garden was a large, densely grown plot running downhill behind the
small white house where she lived alone since the death of her husband. The sun
and the rain of that summer had not discouraged her from working there daily.
Now the intense sun like a tweezers picked out her clumsy, slight figure in its
old pair of men’s overalls rolled up at the sleeves and trousers, separated it
from the thick leaves and made it look strange and yellow as she worked with a
hoe—overvigorous, disreputable, and heedless.”
Eudora
Welty (“A Curtain of Green,” from Garden Tales, Jane Gottlieb, p. 25, Viking
Studio Books, 1990)
I love
this image of Mrs. Larkin in her garden because it reminds me so much of “Mama
Rich,” as everyone in Jefferson City, TN called her. One could, from time to
time, see her neighbor, Dr. Muncie, trotting across the street with his stethoscope
and blood pressure cuff. He’d saunter into her garden, squat beside her,
fussing about the heat and her hard-headedness. If her blood pressure read
high, which was most of the time, she’d be sent inside to cool off and have a
glass of water.
Dr.
Muncie and his wife had five unruly children, who lived in one part of their sprawling
white farmhouse, while the parents inhabited another. The children’s area
looked like a garbage dump, but Dr. and Mrs. Muncie’s rooms were islands of
order and respectability. Like feral animals, the children, one of whom was named
“Estell-P” had the run of the neighborhood. When I visited Mama and Popa, they
were my only playmates. We spent our days swinging from trees Mowgli style, and
loping around the small town wild as bucks. That freedom is the definition of
summer to me.
Another
thing I love about Eudora’s Mrs. Larkin is her overalls, rolled at cuff and
heedless. Like the Muncie children, she is not concerned with what others think
of her, or how she looks. She’s in her garden and that’s good enough for her. The
dirtier the better. Garden’s give us that freedom—we expect to get sweaty and
dirty. We can have hair plastered to our heads, sweat staining our clothes, a
sloppy bandana tied around our forehead, and shoes with gaping holes. And it’s
all okay. No need to apologize for how we look or smell. Working in a garden
may be the only thing left to remind us that we are, in fact, animals. Domesticated
animals, yes, but still having a whiff of the wild in our nostrils.
I hope
we never lose that. Wildness is essential to self-control. Oxymoron or not, if
we never experience our wildness, we will never be able to ground ourselves. In
a culture that seems to think that life exists on a cell phone, we have never
needed more to get in touch with the feral in us. I hope you have a wild and
spirited day.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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