The Neglected Garden, Part II

The Neglected Garden, Part II August 16, 2016

14374480496_991ff96353_zContinued from yesterday.

The dollhouse my father was building for me was still unfinished when he draped a boat tarpaulin over the top, to protect it against the summer rain. The doctor had told my parents that there was a tumor in his lung. He was being sent to the M.D. Anderson hospital in Houston, along with my mother.

My oldest, married, sister was coming home to take care of me temporarily, along with my 22-year-older brother, who had bottomed out back home after a period of college-dropout wandering. Together, they cobbled together a backyard party for my eighth birthday, and in the now-faded, garish color of the Kodachrome prints, the unfinished, covered dollhouse is visible.

Four months later, my father was dead. It was the coldest winter there had been in my lifetime. For the first time, a crust of sugar snow dusted the brown pecan leaves that had scattered, unraked, across the yard.

The tarpaulin stayed on the dollhouse, but the seasons changed. My siblings were gone, and my mother had withdrawn to the house, and would not come out any more.

Over the next few years, the backyard trees grew tall and untrimmed. In the springs and summers, their foliage grew wild: the pears fell to the ground and burst in the hot sun, flies buzzing over them. In the fall, the pecans lay on the grass in their shells until they became black and sodden.

I don’t know when the tarp blew off the top of the unfinished dollhouse, but I remember the way that the rain slowly scoured the paint off the outside, then set to work on the plywood itself. Eventually (how? I have no idea), the shell ended up in the corner of the yard, before falling apart entirely.

By that time I was gone, too. But in visits home over the next two decades, I witnessed the collapse of the backyard entirely: for some reason, the apple and pear trees had ceased to bear fruit, and the pecan, nuts. The sweetheart rosebush disappeared. My mother’s response to the backyard cataclysm was to ignore that it had happened, though she would periodically declare that she was going to “get someone in here to take care of all that.”

What I learned was not the inevitable death of living things—a useful object lesson, admittedly—but something more inchoate and neurotic: That there was but One chance to ensure that something would flourish, and once squandered, there would be no more chance of abundance again, only the gravity of nobly facing failure.

Along the way, though, I became a believing, born-again Christian—the heart of which is belief in Jesus the Man-God, and a trust in his Resurrection. That is a story I want to tell, though the thrust of it focuses on how I have continued, somewhat improbably, to believe the Good News, while walking in paths through a mostly-secular and avowedly post-Christian world.

It’s the oddest thing, though—whatever I believed about Christ, “the renewal at the end of all things,” what I felt instead was the stockpiling of loss on loss: The apple tree would fall down (which, in fact, is what happened). My mother never returned to herself. I went from one place to the next. The bucket of impatiens on my apartment porch withered, and it seemed an impossible (read “hopeless”) task to revive them.

It wasn’t until I was married and became an older mother myself that I was finally able to see that across my life, all along the way, there had been graces, shoots of green—even when all evidence suggested otherwise.

Last year at the end of winter, all that was left of a potted basil plant on my windowsill was a bare stalk with one remaining green leaf clinging to it. It seemed an absurd thing to try to save, when I could have just thrown it into the scraps from the yard.

But I was determined not to succumb to the impulse that had driven me in the past to throw out wilted plants, and to avoid serving a home-cooked dessert that was flawed. I took the clippers and held my breath as I swiftly hacked off the plant’s wooded trunk. I repotted the plant, watered it diligently, and inspected it daily, wondering whether I was wasting my time.

One day there appeared a small green leaf. By late summer, the stalk had grown high and was wreathed in stems of leaves that my five-year old daughter pulled off and tasted, or crushed in her hands that she then held up for me to smell.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, it is believed that when St. Helena—of Constantine-and-Helen Roman Empire fame—journeyed to Jerusalem in search of the True Cross—everyone likely thinking she was crazy—that she found it buried at the base of a fragrant basil plant.

I can believe that story. On the day in September that we commemorate her finding of the cross, the priest hands out a bundle of redolent green stalks to everyone in the congregation. The smell fills up the car, and at home I chop the leaves minutely to throw into spaghetti sauce.

Right now, though, on the day that I am writing, it is the darkest time of the year, and the basil plant has shrunken back to its one brown stalk and fading fronds. I’m about to whack the top off once again, pot it in rich dark earth, and wait for the winter months to pass.

 

This post is an excerpt from a memoir in progress.

GL banner

A native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, Caroline Langston is a convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church. She is a widely published writer and essayist, a winner of the Pushcart Prize, and a commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered.

Image above by Marcus Spiske, used with permission under a Creative Commons license.


Browse Our Archives