Of Seed Potatoes and Dandelions

It’s been one of those times when nothing goes horribly wrong, but nothing goes just right either.

Last night, after searching online, I found the part that Serendipity needs so I can drive again– an engine wiring harness, an ugly thing that looks like an electronic octopus. Jimmy was going to buy one and have us pay him back, but he ended up not having the money when he thought. The one in Serendipity is dry rotted so all the plastic came off, meaning the battery drained right into the ground and the sparkplugs do whatever they do when they don’t spark properly. New, such a part might cost a thousand dollars. The used part I found cost a hundred ninety and change, a bargain. But I didn’t have a hundred ninety dollars. Someone gave me a giant tip in the tip jar that very evening, and I should have just ordered it, but Michael pointed out that rent was due on the fifteenth and a car wouldn’t be much fun without a house Now we will make rent early, to make up for our blunder last month. We have a house to live in, the most important monthly expense, which is an enormous relief, but we don’t have a wiring harness. And the next amount of money that comes in will have to go to paying utility bills instead of for a wiring harness. We’ll have to pay our small amount of taxes this weekend or pay penalties if they’re late. It’s always something.

We still have the borrowed car our friends are letting us keep for another week or so. It’s a squat little elderly car, in good enough shape to putter from the house to the library and the soccer field, but it is not in good enough shape from the freeway. This means I’m freer than before. For all of this miserable winter, I was trapped in Labelle, and now I can get to Walmart and the library and the local parks. I can sit in a coffee shop and sip a cold brew while people-watching. That’s an enormous relief. But I can’t get further. I can’t get to Pittsburgh to look at beautiful things. I can’t get to the lake or the waterfall or home to Columbus to see dear friends. I’ve felt like a captive elephant stuffed into a tiny inhumane circus train car, and now I feel like a captive elephant let out of the train car into a small enclosure. But I want to be really free.

This morning it was hot and humid, and we don’t have our hodgepodge of air conditioners in the windows yet, so the house felt miserable.

I had errands to run, in the borrowed car, with air conditioning that doesn’t work well. I rolled down the windows and puttered to the library to get Adrienne a book on the Renaissance, but they didn’t have any good books for children on the Renaissance that she hasn’t read. I went to the thrift store to see if they had any dollar t-shirts in my colors, but they didn’t have any t-shirts that weren’t ugly. I went to Walmart to get salad for the guinea pig, and at least they had that.

Then I went to Rural King to see if they had seed potatoes.

You can’t put plants in the ground outdoors until after the beginning of May in Ohio because we have late frosts. But it’s good to start potatoes indoors, in a window, so by the time you put them outside they have nice long sprouts growing from their eyes. Potatoes are about the most fun plant to grow. Last year I had quite a crop.

They already had some of their garden seedlings on display at Rural King, for people with greenhouses, or the foolish amateur gardeners who don’t know to watch out for that last frost. I admired the strawberry plants and the lettuces, daydreaming of summer. And then I went inside– and, sure enough, there were the potatoes in a big wooden bin.

Seed potatoes are ugly, dented little lumps, still smeared with dirt, the eyes already sprouting a bit. I could hardly tell which was a red potato and which was a Yukon gold. I filled a bag with a pound and a half– six tubers. It came to a dollar fifty.

I went home and fed the guinea pig. Then I arranged my seed potatoes on the bureau near the sunniest window.

Just looking at them made me feel better.

Just thinking about gardens always makes me feel better.

Gardening is the best thing in the world.

In another moment I was outside, on my way to the community garden. The place has barely been touched since last fall. The front gate is locked but there’s a nice big gap in the back fence, which is where I came in.

The tall, brown sticks that are all that are left of my sunflowers were still there, leaning a little.

I grabbed one and yanked.

It ripped out of the ground with a click like machinery; the soil underneath was cool and darker than chocolate.

I pulled the other sunflowers, and stacked the dead sticks on the ground. They can all go into the compost hoppers the committee has already ordered for the garden.

I yanked a well-established dandelion and there it was in my hand, a taproot thicker than the thickest carrots in the grocery store.

If there’s anything in the world more cathartic than uprooting an entire dandelion, I’ve never found it.

There were dandelions all over the community garden, plenty of outlets for my frustration.

I yanked weeds out of the raised beds until I was exhausted. I’ll be back to do it again tomorrow.

I felt completely free just then.

Nothing makes me feel freer than tiring myself out in a garden. Gardening makes life feel worth living, even in the worst times.

It’s going to be all right.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.