Back to the Land

I am back at the Bean Street. It’s been awhile since I’ve been here. I joined a small group of women who hike on Sunday mornings. Our fearless leader is out of town, so I have the morning off. The guitarist had not started playing yet, so he came to the counter to greet me as I ordered my coffee and breakfast. He asked about me and wondered where I had been. After our pleasant exchange, I am settled into my chair, ready for the opportunity to play again with words and meaning.

Yesterday, I went to a potluck. I drove to a part of the area that I haven’t been to before.
I enjoyed driving by the small farms, lakes and creeks before heading up the mountain to the host home. The countryside has it’s own untamed order that appears to us to be chaos – trees growing where a bird has dropped a seed, weeds growing mindlessly wherever they want, and creeks that have meandered through the path of least resistance.

There is one seemingly incongruent feature I notice in the surrounding countryside. It is a gated community. The land around it is manicured and landscaped. I wondered about people who live in such places; how the orderliness might make one feel safe and secure. Humans are apt to bring our own sense of propriety and harmony to all that we do.
I compare this to my own struggle for dominance in my yard.

I confess I haven’t gotten too far with it this spring and summer, and I haven’t been entirely forthcoming about some of my landscaping woes. After I planted my small plot of lettuces, cabbages and edible flowers, I began what is going to be a long journey in taming the rest of front yard. Armed with a machete and Felco Pruners, I spent a couple of weekends cutting and killing the Japanese Knotweed that was growing the length of the front yard along the fence. Poison ivy is growing all over the place. Some vines are growing up the trees are as much as 2 inches in diameter. The difficult part of both of these undesirable plants is that they have extensive root systems. I was determined to pull the poison ivy by hand at the roots. What I discovered is that as you start pulling poison ivy, you can follow the root 3 to 4 feet from the original plant, and still not get to the end of it. After I did as much as I could by hand, I had a truckload of mulch brought in. I picked up carload after carload of flattened boxes from the recycling plant. I laid those over the worst areas (about a third of the total front yard) and then spread the mulch over that. The idea is that is that if the root system can’t get leaves out to the sun, then it would die. The cardboard eventually disintegrates leaving a nice mulched area for new useful, desirable plants. I then cleaned, raked and seeded the rest of the yard in grass.

Then, one day after my weekends of hard, backbreaking (and health building) work, I noticed a surveyor on the empty lot next door. I realized that I had procrastinated about buying the lot – thinking that it was too small to build a house, and that it was overpriced. I was wrong. The bulldozer where out there within days, uncovering all the red clay underneath the wild weeds next door. Shortly after that, the rains that followed the first hurricanes of the season came, and the next thing I know, red clay is running over my drive way and onto my dark mulch. The sight sickened me.

However, over time, the builder has proven to be a decent man and promises to replace the mulch and make it right again. I’m inclined to believe him because he has done several things that indicate that he is honest and caring.

But the whole affair - the house sitting so close to mine, my own responsibility of not acting quick enough and the red clay spread on top of my delicious black, rich looking mulch - threw me into a darkness about my landscaping and gardening plans. I lost interest and could only rush into my house when I got home. I go for refuge on my deck, which is on the opposite side of house and offers a view of greenery and sky.

After a month or so of this, I have grown tired of my situation and now want to move forward. I realize that there isn’t really much I can do about lot next door. The closeness of the house probably doesn’t bother me as much as it might some people, after all, I’m use to living with someone on the other side of the hollow walls of my apartment. Once again, the Universe provides the opportunity to practice acceptance. I can only control my attitude and perception. After a time of grieving the loss of my illusion of how things should be, I am working to accept it and trying to see the blessing in this. I have reasons to believe that I will have good neighbors. And I confess that there is a comfort in knowing that someone will be just a quick few steps away when I might need them. It’s an experience I appreciated in my building of good neighbors and friends in NYC.

So, now, I have asked the “Dirty Hoes” landscapers to create a plan for me. I’m willing to do the work, but I’m not always sure what I should be doing. They followed my guidelines for creating a landscape of useful plants – fruit bearing shrubbery, food plants, herbs for teas and medicine. They are coming this Wednesday to help build compost bins and show me how to create my garden beds for next spring. Their design efforts have already been paid out of the money I saved in their approach. One example is their idea for a compost bin. Not ever having ever built one, I was thinking of buying one already made. Their proposal is to use recycled pallets (free) and wire to create them. With their interpretation of my hopes for my yard, I have a road map to my landscaping and gardening destination.

The host house for the potluck was on top of a mountain. As I drove back home, I noticed how the journey is always longer when you don’t know where you are going. Perhaps this concept is the real Fountain of Youth – to travel to unknown territory as much as possible so that we can slow ourselves down and pay attention to the landscape and designs of our lives. Once we travel the same roads over and over, we cease to see them and allow our minds to travel to past regrets and future worries. When we are at we deem to be our destination, we realize the trip passed without our notice and happened all too fast.

There is comfort and security in landscaping our lives to our will. But when we do bravely travel new roads and notice those unexpected plants of chaotic, yet natural order that come our way, I think it’s just a way that the Universe is helping us to notice the journey of our lives, and an opportunity to accept what we can’t change, and even transforming it into the benefit that it often can be.

May you too travel a new road soon and enjoy the beauty of the surrounding landscape of your life.