“Oh, yes,” I replied. “Remember the drought we had last summer? For three weeks I lifted heavy buckets of water two to three hours a day to keep my own gardens and gardens I care for as a Master Gardener alive. I felt something give on the last day, when rains were predicted and I was able to stop.”
“Do you have large gardens, then?” the assistant asked. “And have you been a Master Gardener for a long time?”
And so I began to tell both doctor and assistant about my gardens at home, about the gardens at the Cornell Cooperative Extension, and about the community of Master Gardeners. As the camera went on about its business, I went on about how much I loved gardening and gardeners. I urged them to come out to the CCE and visit us Master Gardeners some Thursday morning.
The procedure was over before I knew it, my urine pronounced “innocent,” and my bladder relatively healthy for my age. When I asked the doctor why I was subject to such frequent infections, she answered, “We used to die at 40.”
“Well, bring back the good old days,” I immediately quipped, feet now firmly on the floor, but she proceeded to prescribe estrogen cream and other remedies, the question of “why” being displaced by the instruction of “do this and this and this.”
I have been pondering the question of “and,” of conjunction and connection, a great deal lately. Kathryn Schulz devotes an entire section of her recent book, Lost & Found, to “and” and writes, “One description of hell holds that it is a place where ‘nothing connects with nothing,’ suggesting that the absence of attachment to the rest of the world is both an abdication of goodness and a form of suffering.”
I have been aching to get out in the garden lately, eagerly anticipating a day warm enough to allow for the seasonal pruning that begs to be done, looking for a day in the high forties. Beneath the thrum of “must do,” however, I have discerned something deeper. What I crave in being out in the garden is connection. Examining a viburnum disfigured by water shoots that must be pruned before the plant leafs out, I realize I have been examining this shrub for over 20 winters and pruning it for over 20 springs. Its name is written down in my “list of plants purchased.” I know when I got it, where I got it, and how much it cost. I have watched it grow. I have watched part of it die. I have a history of relating to this plant.
The connection I have to my plants, the intricate web of connection I have with each tree, each shrub, each mass of perennials, a connection characterized by time and care and knowledge and joy, is what I crave to experience again. As Schulz remarks, “the more deeply connected we feel, the more fulfilling we typically find our lives.” If I find my life rich, it is in part because of the myriad connections I experience when I am out in the garden.
Out in the garden, I am also, of course, outside and I am missing the connection I have with weather and sky and ground. I was a child of that generation of mothers instructed to put the baby out in the pram a certain number of hours a day, no matter what. A November baby, I suspect I began life with snow on my face. Later hockey and igloos would keep me outside, skating on the rink my dad made in our back yard on the spot where in the summer he tried to grow carrots, admiring the ice structure my brother and I built off to one side of the rink.
Having dinner with friends the other night, the subject of fish came up and I was delighted to find that one of my companions had the same distaste for fish that I have. He asked me if I knew the source of my repulsion.
“Oh, yes,” I replied, “my brother and I used to fish in the summers at our cottage on lake Huron, but sometimes we did not have a bucket in which to put the fish we caught and they would lie on the bottom of the boat, twitching and wriggling and then dying and smelling. Not often, but enough to finish off fish for me forever.”
When I step outside into my garden I connect as well with what outside means to me– that child who loved hockey and hated fish and the adult who started to garden in this corner of the world some twenty-five years ago and the sky and the ground and my plants.
I have tried so many times to explain to interested listeners, like the doctor and her assistant, why being out in the garden and being in a state of joy so often come together. But yesterday, I could have explained it, had there been time and space. I could have told the good doctor and her assistant of how I walked the other day past the corner garden that holds the dwarf white spruce that Ben and I transplanted long after it was too large to reasonably suspect it would survive such a move, and how I looked at the spruce and how it hit me that I missed being with it. I could have told them that of course the garden is a place of joy because it is a place of connection. Is it any wonder that the Hebrew text describes the end of joy as a separation from the garden?
Today is the first day of February. Long January has ended and short February, with its magical light, has begun. Though February is often colder than January here in the Capital District, I know there will come a lovely warmish day when I will be able to get out and do the needed pruning of my shrubs. Since March will then be just a short month away, it won’t be too hard for me to go inside again because I know that soon I will be back out. Besides, there is a great deal of my winter’s work still left to be done. I had best see to it.