“I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”F. Scott Fitzgerald, spoken by Daisy in The Great Gatsby
Did you ever want a Doctor’s Kit set for Xmas and receive a nurse kit instead? In the war between your brains and your looks did you ever lose a battle? The whole war? Did you ever feel suddenly isolated, like the kid in the bubble? Are you losing your ability to hear and be heard through the thick glass walls of your bubble? Has your ability to hear become as compromised your ability to rebound when life hits back, really hard?
Then, this post has come a long way for you, baby.
I love to garden, to get dirt beneath my fingernails, to wipe sweat from my forehead as I rest in the shade, and look up, and see sudden beauty that I made with my own hands. Ok, me and mother nature, but still. Those are times when I can see the here and now, when I really stop racing into the future. A moment of the most wonderful exhalation of tension, frustration, pain. In my garden, I feel like who I am, not who I’m masquerading as the rest of my days.
Here, I live and breathe. And most importantly, that real deep part of me is intact, safe and not threatened. I don’t have to run to try to keep ahead of the anger that breathes down neck and makes me hunch my shoulders in pain. I don’t shoulder the weight of the world out back, just my own lightweight little foolish self.It’s only here, in the backyard summer afternoon heat, creating beauty that I enjoy and relish in, that I meet my self coming and going. I’ve become Daisy’s happy fool. My garden is, finally, the best place a girl can be in this world.
6 comments:
I totally empathize...my garden is my escape from the crazy world where we pretend to have our rat race...
Although a garden is essential to 'being', I think I feel more truly 'real' when writing.
I think I could just about exist (though not truly happily) without a garden. But I couldn't 'live' without writing.
If I were prevented from writing, I would write in my head and memorise it. If I were prevented from gardening, I would walk in the woods.
(And yet, my writing is totally geared towards finding a way to earning money from it so I can afford a house with a bigger garden - so it's a bit contradictory-comlimentary really!)
Lucy
Wow! You've put into words what I always feel when I'm working in the garden. Just being - with the rest of our stuff suspended - I've never quite been able to describe it as you have. Now I don't have to - you've done it for me.
What I remember is being disappointed when I got a nurse doll at Christmas and had been hoping for the new talking and decidedly tacky Chatty Cathy!
I feel the same way, in my garden at times. Lately though, I've been waging war against the clover my darling husband planted last year as a dust supressant. I've been feeling quite murderous.
Now you're being hysterical, you really are! There is a linear point outside the circularity in a woman's life where she tells her husband: "Honey, I think I'm perimenopausal, and my hormones are acting up," and he (listening not too attentively as usual) replies: "Whore-moans? Now we're talkin'." Seriously, though, you are right about losing and finding yourself in a garden. It happens simultaneously and, best of all, without anyone else noticing.
Oh, walk2write, "whore-moans" is so totally great!
Weeping Sore, this post is a real keeper, very eloquent and evocative. But tell me if my memory is faulty: I recall you, some 40 years ago, deliberately digging up the far left corner of the backyard at Kinross, because you did NOT like to get your hands dirty. You were facing and handling sowbugs and grubs as a kind of immersion therapy to overcome a phobia. It would appear to have worked. Am I making this up? If not, do you remember what you planted there and how it turned out?
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