Before reading this post, you may want to brush-up on the List of Characters, just in case.
Plants are condescending; anyone who has ever tried to make anything sprout up from the ground knows exactly what I mean.
The house I grew up in boasted a half-acre fenced-in yard surrounded by woods, and within that fence the front and back yards were always green and lush with life. My father can make anything grow. He would spend hours out there during the day when I was a kid tending to one island of beautiful bushes and trees he had planted twenty years previous and kept alive, and then move to another patch of flowers across the yard that seemed to bloom year-round regardless of whether or not they should. When summer came around I would join him, breaking up the roots and soil of some new potted plant he had brought home and putting it in the ground. They always grew with uncanny eagerness. As a child it seemed, at least through my eyes, that the plants knew my dad when he approached. It was as though when he walked over and bent down to take their leaves into his fingertips and inspect their color, they would lean ever-so-slightly into his hand.
When I entered junior high and high school my pre-pubescent love for gardening waned and eventually gave under the weight of malls and make-up and the general male population. It was not until I got to college that I even realized I had retained close to nothing of the green thumb my father gave me so many years before. It took several things happening around the same time to bring this to my attention: first, the summer after my sophomore year was the summer I stopped showering or shaving regularly and befriended a group of well-meaning (but equally as smelly) hippies who grew their own vegetables. We would sit around in our natural stench during those hot summer nights on their porch with lit cloves dangling from the corners of their mouths philosophizing about how ‘humanity is disconnected from the earth and nature.’ I would lean back in my chair, nodding in agreement and resisting the urge to scratch my underarm where the hair was beginning to get long and itch. The second thing that happened was at the end of that summer when our friend Danny moved in with my roommate Nanci and me. He had a green thumb that his grandmother gave him as a kid like my father had given me, only Danny was smart enough to till and harvest it each year. It wasn’t long before the front porch of our apartment was covered in countless blooming potted flowers, lush little bushes, and thick vines which stretched up the side of our building with vigor. My desire to take part in this miraculous and natural process–to once again become ‘one with the earth’–became so strong that when Danny went out of town for break that following Spring, I eagerly accepted his request to water the plants. “No problem, darling,” I said, “they’re in good hands with me.” I had overgrown armpit hairs and I rarely showered: surely this meant I was a natural at gardening!
By the end of the week everything was dead, I was in despair, and Danny was pissed and chain-smoking.
In fact it wasn’t but three days into Danny’s absence that everything began to wilt, so that by his return they were brown and crunchy. To make matters worse, it took a mere two days for him to get everything I had killed back to life, revealing me as the problem, not the plants. I had a black thumb. This eventually became the pattern for Danny, his plants and me over the next two years. That following summer we all moved into a fantastic house with a massive deck that ran the length of one side of it and a huge, beautiful yard. Danny brought all the plants with him, and soon added more. Every time he left town I would water them, they would die, and when Danny got back he would spend a day or two bringing them all back to life. On Saturdays I liked to sit out on our deck to write, and Danny would come out periodically to tend the plants. He would walk up to different ones, reach out his hand like my father would and take a leaf under his fingertips. The plants would perk-up and seemingly lean into his hand.
“Condescending little bastards,” I would mumble under my breath, and Danny would look at me with a cigarette hanging lazy from his lips and just laugh.
I eventually started showering and shaving again, but I still felt the desire to reconnect with the earth. Deep down I began to resent my black thumb. Even deeper down I blamed the plants–they knew it was me watering them, and they died every time just to irritate me.
Excepting a short-lived and final attempt at growing some potted romaine lettuce (it lived less than a week) I finally accepted about a year ago that my dreams of ever having a garden of my own one day need to be abandoned. For Christmas this year I gave my father a rather large gift card to the local nursery with surging but secret agony. Just before New Year’s Eve we took a trip together to that nursery to look at a few pricier plants he was anxious and excited to buy with his gift card. He was a kid in a candy shop; I was Tim Robbins wading through sewage in “Shawshank Redemption.”
So this past May when Lovely asked me to water her garden while they were out of town, I panicked. “I can’t!” I exclaimed, barely letting her finish her sentence. Her garden is massive–and beautiful. Azaleas, hydrangeas, rose bushes– “I’ll kill them.”
“Oh,” she said, slightly confused and rightfully so. I had just agreed to take care of their elderly golden retriever, Bear. But I explained to her about Danny, about my black thumb. “I see,” she said. “Are you sure?” I was sure. As a result when they left for their first of several trips this summer, Lovely had to pay the neighbor’s daughter to come over every day to water the garden. This is incredibly embarrassing, and even more so if we cross paths when I go out to get the mail. I knew it was best for everyone though, and soon the sharp sting of embarrassment receded to its normal, duller level of simple, bitter shame.
But a few weeks ago, just before they left for their last and longest trip–a two-week family vacation to their lake house in Michigan–I got an e-mail from Lovely while I was at work.
Anna–
You sure you don’t want to give watering the garden a chance? I’ll pay you the same as the neighbor. $**/wk. Think about it.
–Lovely.
I stared at the screen. It was a tempting offer, and I could use the money. Finally,
Lovely,
Okay, I’ll do it. But under one condition: you have to show me exactly what needs to be done.
-Anna
The night before they left we took an hour to walk through every part of the front, back, and side yards. These will need it only every three or four days. These just once next weekend. These here every day, and those every day–but no need to worry about these at all. I should probably write this down, I thought, but I never did. They left the next morning and I spent the first few days slowly reclaiming my roots in the garden each evening, little by little. When at the end of the first week everything was not only alive, but thriving, I went from fearing that time to looking forward to it. That first weekend I had a trip planned to visit my cousins in Lexington and I was worried about leaving the garden for that long, but at last minute Lovely had to come back for the funeral of a friend who had been sick and passed away. The circumstance was heartbreaking, but the timing was good. I left Friday morning, she flew in that afternoon. She flew out Sunday morning, I returned that afternoon. She later said that it worked out perfectly because the garden helped keep her busy between funeral and flight. On Monday of the second week I walked back out into the garden and felt natural and easy as I picked up my watering routine where she left off.
Then, on Tuesday morning, everything changed. I walked down the driveway in my pajamas with my coffee to grab the paper, waved to the neighbor across the street doing the same, and turned around only to see it: a patch of flowers on the side of the house that were wilting. It was too late in the morning to water them without risking them being scorched, so I decided to tend to them diligently after work, which I did. I went to bed that night feeling confident in all my new-found gardener’s wisdom that they had simply needed just a little extra lovin’.
The next morning they were dead.
By the time I got home from work, so were half their friends. “No!” I shouted as I ran frantically at them with the hose, and then followed what seemed to be an endless trail of death that stretched all the way around to the back yard. I called my mother in tears and shouted in unleashed hysterics, “I killed them, Mom! I killed them all!!!”
“WHAT?!?” she screamed. After taking several minutes to figure out what was going on, and then several more to calm me down, my mother finally reminded me that not only was there a heat wave sweeping across the Southeast, but there was also a dry spell, “so just water everything extra and it will be fine.” That night, what would normally take me about an hour to do I elongated to two. When I woke up Thursday morning everything was alive again, but barely. When I got home, it was all dead again, along with a young, very pathetic-looking tree which had decided to join them in the afterlife.
Then I saw the pattern. Alive in the morning, dead in the evening, and I realized: I was at war.
My hysteria quickly turned to rage. As I marched across the yard with hose in hand to begin another two-hour watering regiment I suddenly stopped and leaned over some brown-budded flowers laying flat on their sides as though they had been trampled, and shouted, “You will live! YOU WILL LIVE!!!” and then hit them at full-blast. This was also the evening that Bear stopped joining me in the garden, probably because I decided to get him with water at high speed at one point. I saw him trotting through a flower bed I had been scrambling to save, so I turned the hose on him. He gave me a stunned and irritated look, and then trotted defiantly over to a patch of dirt, rolled in it, and headed back up into the house and strutted through the kitchen, leaving a massive trail of mud and dust for me to clean. I deserve that, I thought, and kept watering.
By Friday the front, back, and side yards were beyond repair, at which point I replaced anger with alcohol. Lovely and the rest of the Hill family–including their three children Lively, Amiable and Youngin’, who had been gone all summer and barely knew me–were all coming home the next day. That night I stood out in the garden wearing a white cardigan and tank top, bright pink pajama shorts and old flip-flops with the hose in one hand–the hose-head locked in the “on” position– and my umpteenth Magic Hat Pale Ale in the other. I sprayed endlessly into a large patch of brown somethings and and sang Adele’s “Someone Like You” at the top of my lungs into the bottleneck like it was a microphone. This was defeat, and I had decided to go down sloppy and singing.
The morning the Hills were due to return I was too hungover and in despair to go outside. I let the dog out but did not join him down the driveway to grab the paper. I refused to see it. I spent my time instead cleaning the inside of the house from top to bottom as penance–dusting, sweeping, mopping, doing dishes, vacuuming. All the while I rehearsed a speech I planned to give Lovely about how I could not take the money she had offered me. “Why not?” she would say. “Because I am the bringer of destruction and death,” I would reply as I led her out to her dead yard. I then imagined her falling to her knees sobbing at the sight of the ruins, at which point I would turn around and head back into the house to pack my bags a week premature.
I finished cleaning in just enough time to change my clothes and come walking down the stairs as they opened the front door.
“Hi!” they bellowed with smiles and hugs. I smiled back and held down the vomit of failure.
“How are you? How have things been here? Everything go okay?” Lovely asked as she set down her purse and walked toward the kitchen–which led to the back deck, which overlooked the back garden.
“Oh . . . good. Great. Everything’s been good.” The muscle behind my right eye was twitching uncontrollably.
“Yeah?” she smiled. “Good! And how’s the garden? How’d you do?” She was already walking toward the door and before I knew it she had her hand on the knob and was turning it. My stomach turned with it. Here we go, I braced myself, and then raced to catch up with her.
“Hey, Lovely, wait. I need to tell you something–”
“Oh, my!” She was standing at the edge of the deck looking out. I ran up next to her, and began my speech.
“Yeah, about that. I tried to salvage it–”
“It looks beautiful!”
“–but I’m the bringer of destruc–huh?” I turned my gaze from her face to her focal point: it was alive. Everything was alive. The flowers were standing tall, the bushes were green and full, all of it was alive. My jaw dropped wide. She paced the length of the yard from end to end, stopping every few feet to put her fingertips under the leaves of this flower and that one. They leaned into her hand. A few minutes later we walked back up to the deck toward the house, and Lovely gabbed and gabbed about their trip as we went. I followed close behind simply nodding and smiling. I walked into the house behind her, wiped my shoes on the mat, and turned to shut the door behind us. As I did, I paused briefly and surveyed the perky vegetation standing tall and bright all around.
“Condescending little bastards,” I mumbled, and shut the door.
-Anna
