garden – MOIRARTS

Day 147

Yesterday, I told my physical therapist that it feels like there’s nowhere to rest my eyes. Locals, news, obligations inside our family, even the blue light from the screen that gives me eye strain while I’m trying to relax and watch what turned out to be an uninspiring Pump Up The Volume knock-off. Nature was the answer I got, look to nature. Everything else is a dumpster fire.

I peer into the overgrown corner of the garden from the window by my desk. Watching the grapevine grow ever higher was stressing me out until last week when a medium small rabbit popped out from that section of the yard. Just yesterday, I spotted a house wren in the branches, staking out its territory from the more aggressive and ubiquitous Carolina wrens who live here. Years of time, money, and labor invested in the native gardens surrounding the house and bordering the yard are showing their value this year. While we’ve been low on butterflies, we’ve had more types of birds nesting (or bringing the young ones here to feed) than I can remember in past years. We were the regular hunting ground of the block’s mama fox and we have a rabbit who’s claimed the clover patch and is a nightly visitor. With the successful relocation of the overcrowded winterberries, I hold out hope that this fall will give the birds a bumper crop of berries.

Nature isn’t enough, though. While I’ve deleted Twitter from my phone, I can’t bring myself to turn fully away. There is human tragedy, policy failure, and societal collapse playing out in real time all around me. I feel it even when I’m not looking. I don’t need to witness all the things, every minute of every day, but I can’t ignore it all. Too many friends are teachers around the country being ordered to risk their lives; too many people I know are losing family members or being permanently incapacitated by this virus; too much is at stake. Also: I can do nothing about it except make the best choices for our family and community. All we can ask of each other is to survive.

Because nature isn’t enough, I have also been attending as many book talks as I can online. Crowdcast has become a lifeline for me, connecting me to writers and thinkers around the country who are having conversations about important things that are not always this wildness we find ourselves in the midst of. My favorite bookstores are still hosting readings, and I am able to attend more of them virtually than I ever did in person.

This is a low energy time of year. I remind myself. Every year we hit an August slump. Also, we are living in conditions of chronic stress, experiencing increased depression and spikes of anxiety. This is not the time to expect much. Just survive. If you can, find a place to rest your eyes.

Day 130

Thirty more days. Blink and a month went by. It got hot here, ushering in the time of year when I always start losing days to the fog of achy joints, migraines, and a generally sluggish pace of life. We’re still here, it’s just summer.

As the country goes off the rails, we have small bits of light. Our garden is home to young birds of many varieties: cardinals, robins, song sparrows, catbirds, wrens, woodpeckers, grackles, starlings, crows, a towhee. We watch them flop their way around the shrubbery as they grow wings; they catch moths and beetles in the grass and then, startled by their success, fly back to their parents to learn what to do next. Young rabbits slide under the gate and lounge in the clover, munching on flowers and then wriggling in the dust patch. A chipmunk appears inconsistently, darting so many places that it’s impossible to tell where it lives. There is so little to do, so we watch nature in real time, calling each other to the window to see the unremarkable yet always exciting appearance of one small creature or another.

My partner is still working from home, keeping us all in shelter, food, and books. The child and I fill our days with summer things, reading and watching cartoons, rousing ourselves reluctantly to cook dinner. (About which I regularly think, Every day? Really? Still?) Even before the pandemic arrived, we had decided to try a camp-free summer, after a school year that included, for the first time, evening swimming and after-school chorus. Then, after a spring of online meetings and homework submissions, the idea of online camp didn’t appeal at all. Instead, we lounge.

In the spring, we worked hard week after week to weed, edge, and prune the yard into something resembling a purposeful garden. We left a bit of wildness in the country style, plants spilling into each other whenever the crowding doesn’t create issues with mildew and rot. (It is, after all, a southern swamp here, no matter how much I’m striving to create a bucolic northern copse.) Now, we have only one patch of garden that didn’t get attended to before the temperatures rose above 90F and therefore won’t until they drop again. Now, we water the shrubs from the rain barrels and keep the birdbath filled with fresh cool water. We venture out as little as possible.

It seems irresponsible that a month has passed in this way, but what else could we do? We have also cautiously participated in swim team four mornings a week. I have gone to the store twice. We acquired frozen lemonade from the local coffee shop once, yesterday. I have attended online book talks, taken a writing course, participated in a scholarship committee. All of that is only as much as I would do in a typical month of summer, so I suppose it is enough. Throughout, we give to bail funds. We give to protest groups. We give to immigrant advocates. We give to support neighbors who have lost houses, jobs, family members.

We carry on.

won’t you celebrate with me

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

–Lucille Clifton

Day 60

As bizarre as this has been for us, we are starting to feel settled in our new routine. I hesitate to say normal, as there is the ever present mental tug toward the old, toward comparing our new reality with what we have known up until now. I resist that tug as much as I can, but resisting takes energy and contributes to the pervasive low-grade fatigue through which we move. I say we feel settled, though, as the initially pervasive mental resistance to our new situation seems to have eased.

We know that our child won’t be returning to their school building this year and we have accepted that. We see they have genuinely accepted it in the way that they express the eagerness for the school year to be over that we’ve seen every May. It’s a relief to see such a typical display of emotion, and the fact that said display moves me almost to tears is an immediate countersign that we are still swimming in uncharted waters. We, the adults, have accepted that there will be no summer camps, no barbecues, and no swim team this year; very likely no community pool at all.

We have framed the summer as a unit of time through which we will move with a certain understanding, when we will not have the structure or obligations of school but will create our own rhythms of work, play, and rest at home. If any portion of this time period–which I personally conceptualize as the entirety of calendar year 2020 because that is the only way I can adjust my expectations in a manageable way–could be said to be agreeable, it will be the summer. The loss of access to our community pool will definitely be felt keenly and deeply, as it is our family’s budget-conscious summer camp alternative and has been the place where we eat, relax, and socialize for the past decade. We will also miss the library. We miss it now; our biggest unexpected cost of this situation has been books for our child to read. (I have dozens of unread books on hand, and my partner has lost his appetite for pleasure reading after days spent interfacing with coworkers via machines.)

However, those losses will require only fairly minor changes of plans after the dramatic upheaval of going home from school and work one day and never returning. We are fortunate to have a grill, an income, and the space for a ridiculous inflatable pool that seemed a necessary investment as refuge from the incessant drone of our window a/c units once summer really gets going. Our child had already asserted they didn’t want to go to summer camp, they wanted to lounge around reading and watching TV. I had already agreed to that plan with the additions of working around the house and in the yard; I myself planned to make art and organize the basement and attic, two activities that my child was eager to add to their roster. Yes, we will miss our friends, but we hope that as the weather warms, DC truly does move over the peak, and we start to have access to antibodies tests, we will be better equipped to selectively engage with our closest friends in distanced and controlled ways.

Am I trying to brightside a global pandemic that the US continues to exacerbate into a stunning clusterfuck at all turns? Absolutely not. I am only trying to apply what I’ve been taught, to look for the ways–moments, spaces, parts of my body–in which I am okay and breathe into those. The past two weekends, we have worked on clearing weeds in the garden, dividing and moving plants, pruning and staking trees, and generally caring for the patch of earth we are privileged to occupy. I have turned my attention, however momentarily, from worry and powerlessness to identifying concrete tasks such as reseeding the bare patches in the lawn with beneficial clover and relocating the crowded shrubs so that they receive the light they need to thrive. I have allowed myself to breathe in the spring and hope for all of us to receive more of what we so desperately need this summer.

Surprise! Sunchokes

Today we went out to the yard to get started on the annual effort of beating back the weeds and giving the garden beds edges again. Over the past couple of years, volunteer sunflowers have blown into our back garden from the yard of the neighbor down the alley. At first there was just one, then a few more, then last year they kind of took over. Today I decided we would weed most of them out before they got big and leave just a little patch for our kid to enjoy. (We all enjoy them, they’re just in the part of the garden where they get to plant what they like, mostly consisting of plants I don’t like that I’ve weeded out of other areas and my child has rescued from going into yard waste.)

The first thing we do is walk around and decide on how many plants will be allowed to live. Then we start pulling out the extraneous sprouts. Or, I should say, we try to pull them out. They are tough and require some tugging, when I finally do get one to come out, it has a little rutabaga attached to the bottom of it. Which is confusing. We get a trowel and start digging around more, and all of them have these tubers on the bottom of them.

Which is when I realize that they are sunchokes. Jerusalem artichokes, native sunflower with edible tuberous roots renowned for their habit of taking over any space you give them. Oops. I guess I should have put more effort into identifying the variety of sunflower that first year when I noticed that it got ten feet tall and didn’t resemble any of the other native sunflowers we had around the yard. Or even the year after that, when I noticed that our neighbor down the alley had dug out the patch of them that used to line her driveway for no obvious reason. (I guess we now know the reason.)

Good news: we have free food growing in our back garden! Bad news: we have (yet another) plant taking over our back garden! I think this now makes five natives I’ve introduced to the garden that have tried to take it over in some way. In the front, we currently have an aster that is OOC and due to be dug out; a couple of years ago it was something I forget the name of that formed a carpet and tried to crowd everything else out. In another part of the yard, it’s a different kind of sunflower that is smothering my favorite rose. Let’s not forget the milkweed, which, while much wanted and loved, still requires constant effort to keep it limited to the places we want it to grow.

The only thing we know how to make from sunchokes is latkes. Sunchokes are a perfect substitute for potatoes if you cannot eat white potatoes and still want to celebrate Hanukkah with friends. Time to get down the electric griddle, rewatch my child’s favorite holiday song video a million times, and Skype in our friend who is the latke expert, who usually does the actual frying for us, for some on-the-fly coaching!