The view from the road to nowhere
I see a huge vegetable garden on my way to work every day, set in the sunny side yard of an old farm house. I began to track my jealousy in early spring when the vast, rectangular patch of dead weeds got turned under and became a perfect blank slate of soil. All through the spring, I slowed my truck as I passed so I could check out the various additions. By early summer, the entire bed was set with precise rows of beans, tomatoes, peppers, squash, eggplant, okra, cabbaage, leeks, garlic and goodness knows what else. That’s just what I could see from the road. All of the plants were neatly tied to perfectly straight stakes. The walking rows in between remained bare dirt all season long. Someone either spent a lot of time on hands and knees, or they walked a small tiller down between the rows almost daily.
I never witnessed a single person in this garden, not in the morning or during my commute home in the evening. Never saw anyone bent over the plants, or yanking weeds from the between the rows. But this garden thrived. The plants grew enormous and set what looked—from my distance—like prize-winning fruit. State fair worthy. Oh, how my jealousy thrived on this double-daily reminder of what my garden is not, of how my pantry will go unfulfilled for yet another winter because I don’t have enough sunlight on my vegetables.
It reached a nearly unmanageable level, my jealousy, once the tomatoes began to ripen. I nearly drove off the road every day as I gawped at the fat, red globes of love hanging in clusters from every available inch of row after row of healthy, hearty, robust plants. Why can’t I have that? Why can’t I move my big backyard garden at the old place into town?
But recently I’ve noticed that the fruit is rotting on the vine. Hundreds of tomatoes and peppers unpicked, just wasting away before my very eyes. Where is the gardener? Why are the rows all overgrown with choking weeds? The purslane is now half as tall as the pepper vines. What’s happened? Has the gardener lost interest? Was it only ever about making them grow and not about the end product? Or is something wrong? What if the gardener has become somehow incapacitated and has no other person to help harvest and process all of that food?
Now every day I drive past and fantasize about pulling into the driveway to ask if I can help. But what would I say, exactly? And when would I carve out time to do whatever it is that I think needs doing? I press my foot deeper into the accelerator and drive on past, late for work again. Then I slow as I pass on the way home, picturing myself with my stranger’s offer to harvest and can the crop, then split the bounty. Instead, I hurry home to get dinner started. And this fact gives me a bit of a tummy ache. This makes me think about what Jim Kunstler said about redirecting our culture more toward things-we-do-with-other-people. How are we, the average people, going to do this when we’re all living at full-speed?
I don’t know. I try every day to make some effort towards a more simple life. I’m teaching myself to say no more often to the gadget-credit-have-it-now lifestyle I had become addicted to, and that feels like a solid step in the right direction. But there’s so much more to it. I’m driving past it every day. On my way to what, exactly?
"Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity; but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?"
~Hal Borland
October 3rd, 2007 at 8:55 am
That you notice the garden. That you consider the gardener. That you intend to help but respect your own time/energy limits. These things indicate to me that you’re already exactly where you wish to be; living a simple, gracious life. Stuart Wilde calls it ‘the new dignity’:
“With a new dignity you shift your mind from travelling towards where you might want to go and striving endlessly to get there, to becoming instead, “the same as” the place you would like to find yourself in. It is an ambient resonance in your heart not a “residence” that is established by arriving someplace. It is very subtle.”
I’ve been dying to share that with someone. Beautiful, isn’t it?
October 3rd, 2007 at 10:46 am
Knock on the door. It will bug you forever if you don’t and it’s a now-or-never moment, while the fruits are still ripe. I’m not an experienced gardener but I never heard of a vegetable gardener who wasn’t interested in the final product, maybe something happened.
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Love the Stuart Wilde thing above and also the idea of just loving where you actually are, vegetables in the cupboard for winter or not! Loving whatever is. Trusting it’s perfect. Maybe the Universe of your garden is sparing you all the extra work of canning things because you don’t need extra work.
Maybe it’s keeping it simple for you. I think it might be the perfect garden. It’s really taking care of you.
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:54 pm
I’d assume the gardener just lost interest. People seem to do that; it’s something I just don’t understand. I will never understand.
But I also wonder about “community” too. What if that gardener just became incapacitated, either physically or mentally, and the task is now too big? (And is there something about our own lives that others see as weed-strewn and rotting?) I’d stop by and see. I’d butt in.
And I also wonder about something you put in a post or two back, about supporting/underlining the person we see in ourselves. Is the “I’m a hugely busy working mom” shtick that I put on myself like a worn pair of jeans the actuality of that which is me? I have loads of free time. I just need to shuffle my time around a bit. And I need to wear different pants to really see it.
October 4th, 2007 at 10:50 am
I am living half way across the country from you and have never met you in person, so it is quite likely that I will never really know shit about who you really are or what you really need. That said, knowing the limitations that our friendship naturally imposes, I would say that you will have to find your way back to filling the pantry from your garden. I think we go through periods where we really have to just focus on the task at hand which may take attention away from what we ache to be doing. But eventually you have to make decisions that are going to support what your spirit really needs.
I think the reason you need to grow food and fill your pantry is because it is one of the only things we can really do about the unknown world that’s unfolding. Maybe empires are about to fall, (ours?), maybe oil is about to run dry, maybe more civil wars closer to home are going to erupt, or perhaps a huge reshuffling of the world is about to happen. The one thing we can all know for sure is that we have to eat and to eat we must grow things. Think what better shape we’d all be in if every single one of us was keeping a garden and putting food by against a bleak winter.
So, if what you’re doing now doesn’t feel like what you really want to be doing, or isn’t fulfilling you the way your life should, figure out how you might edge closer to the life you want. Save money so that you can quit your job and get a less well paid one closer to home with fewer demands on your energy? Sell the other house as soon as the market allows? Sell off a bunch of the things you don’t need from your garage to make room for a new life? Sell a car and become more frugal than ever? I don’t know, but if you start mapping a way you just might end up with a life that feels less dizzying.