by Kathy T. Camp
I didn’t ever plan to garden. It started as another project. A good friend, the kind that tells you what you don’t want to hear, started this thing.
“You need to do something with your anger, try weeding your flower bed,” she suggested.
“But I don’t have a flower bed.” I responded. That wasn’t a good answer. Before she said it, I could hear it in my head, “Well, plant one.”
I am not a gardener. But I admire them. Growing things just makes sense. It’s not just about the economics, though. Putting tiny flakes of organic matter in the ground, covering them with wet dirt, and watching little white arms reach out to me, is something I’ve come to enjoy.
A few days after the conversation with my friend, I piled my kids in the car and headed for the dollar store. A rack of seed packets, with a sign: “10 for $1.00,” stood in the distance. I cheered. “Kid’s help me pick out some flowers!” My two year old son grabbed sunflowers, carrots and rutabagas. My girls handed me varieties of flowers I couldn’t pronounce. I didn’t read the backs of the little envelopes, I just plopped them in the buggy, grabbed a watering can and headed to the check out.
That same day, as I began heaving the hoe, my oldest asked, “Mamma, why are you chopping up our grass?”
“I’m chopping up dirt so I you can plant your seeds.”
Each child had their own area in the yard, and I had mine. We planted flowers in all of them. I waited. Not for the seedlings, but for the weeds. I couldn’t wait to pull them. I recalled the advice, “Pretend you are yanking out someone's hairs- by the root.”
Then it happened. The moment I’d been waiting for. I was angry, really angry. I rinsed off the breakfast dishes and coaxed the kids outdoors. I went to the closest flower bed, knelt down, and started pulling. I wasn’t sure which sprouts were the weeds. The seedlings were so tiny still. I felt the sun on my back as I made a pile of seemingly harmless little green stems.
My kids ran around the yard, rode trikes, played in the summer sun. I turned on the water hose and asked for help watering. We all ended up wet, muddy, laughing. Day after day I weeded those flowers, certain that I’d figure out a way to change the things and the people that made me so angry.
By the middle of the summer, I wound up with three flower beds bursting with color. My favorite one was an awkward cluster of sunflowers in the middle of my yard, connected to absolutely nothing else. It was like an oasis of summertime.
I began to spend my mornings outside sipping coffee and admiring the previous owner’s plant selections: blueberry bushes, azaleas, dogwood trees, a single tulip tree. I liked my yard.
One of my children pointed out, “Mamma, don’t you think you need to weed your flowers?”
As I sat on the porch gazing out at the flowers, it dawned on me that I hadn’t weeded in more than a week. Then I realized it. The tightness in my chest was gone. My usual inner dialogue of ‘what if’s’ and ‘if only’s’ had fallen silent. Somehow, I had weeded out my own personal kudzu: anger.
I haven’t had a flower bed in a couple of years. That’s because I don’t need to weed anymore. But I do need flowers. Today and enjoyed the absence of the arctic blast; he wore out his welcome here in Georgia three weeks ago. As I walked around my yard, looking at the brown areas where my flowers used to grow, I felt an urge. Not to spread a blanket on the ground and read a book, which is my true nature, I wanted to grab a hoe and start chopping up the thawed earth. I wanted to put my hands in the soil and rub it between my fingers, pinching large clumps into tiny crumbs. Then I wondered, “Does the dollar store still have the seed special?” I guess I am a gardener.
