I read Joyce Cary’s trilogy and though I cannot remember a single detail that would bring it back to mind, I do recall most particularly the title of the second volume, “To Be A Pilgrim.” The phrase captured my nascent ambition to “be somebody,” as the lingo of the 50’s would have it, despite being “just” a girl.
We had to attend church in Franklin — it was a requirement for social acceptability in the Midwest of that day– so I joined the choir. It made church go faster and besides it was more fun. I loved singing hymns. The title of Cary’s book sounded like the refrain from a hymn, but I knew of no hymn with that title. I had skipped Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in making my way through the B’ — it seemed unbearably dull — so I did not know the origins of the phrase, and, of course, I was neither English nor Anglican. Had I been I would have known the hymn “To Be a Pilgrim” and might even have sung it.
When I finally did read this classic text in preparation for my doctoral exam in English literature of the 17th century, I was once again inspired to “be somebody” in my profession. My ambition was still against the odds since no woman was part of the faculty preparing me for it.
However, I was lucky enough to enter the profession just as it opened up to women, just in time for me to enter it, and I loved my work. I knew I had to quit, however, when I was no longer willing to tell my students the year I graduated from high school. Class of ’56? In the fall of 2003, in the last undergraduate class I was to teach, I wasn’t about to give those students curious about my personal provenance that date.
But what did I want to do next? My dad had quit his job of 36 years to help a friend who owned the Ford franchise in our small Indiana town avoid bankruptcy, but no one had come forward to ask me to help them start a publishing company, or run their flower shop, or work in their hardware store. Nor could I, while doing my academic job, find time to imagine or explore a possible future. Despite the public view of academics as close cousins to welfare defrauders, sitting in our offices popping chocolates, gassing to our colleagues, and occasionally strolling down the hall to chat up the undergrads, I worked pretty much all day every day, except Sunday morning and afternoon, from September until the end of June, nose to the teaching and administrative grindstone. And in July and August I worked harder still, pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, writing to save the world.
So in the summer of 2004 I quit my academic job and began the search for work that would let me, like my dad, have a second career after retirement. I took my cat, Bowden, to a school that trained animals to be therapists. I thought that he would love being a helper and I would love being his handler, taking him on his healing rounds to hospitals and nursing homes. Bowden was not interested, and I learned that cats were hard to train. I explored a volunteer work program at Kripalu, the yoga center in the nearby Berkshires. It required on-site residence but provided access to programs in spiritual development. The spiritual development opportunity was appealing but six months away from home proved daunting. I contacted Earlham College, the Quaker school in Richmond, Indiana, to see what might be involved in getting a degree in Quaker theology. Apparently, summers and winters in residence in Richmond.
I had been taking an occasional course at the Institute for Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, a town just east of Poughkeepsie, while still working at the University. I had studied soil science and basic botany and insect pests and diseases. Then, in the fall of 2005, I took a course in garden design. The moment I read my first book on garden design and completed my first design assignment I knew what that second life, that new career, would involve: I would become a garden designer. I would design my own demonstration gardens and I would design gardens for others. In the spring of 2006 I opened Perennial Wisdom, my small perennial garden design business, and became what I called a semi-professional gardener.
If asked a month before I quit the University what I did for my living, I would have answered, “Sentences. I write them, I read them, I help students learn to make them. I play with words.” If asked a year after I completed Garden Design 101 what I did for my living, I would have answered, “Space. I arrange objects in space. I play with texture and color, with plant habit and leaf shape.”
I’m still ambitious. I am still looking for a way to “be somebody” in the world, perhaps now more than ever. But the somebody I want to be today is “a gardener.” This is my ambition now, this is my intent. This is the way I want to be in the world, and what it means to be this way in the world is what I want to understand.
Who would true valour see
Let him come hither.
One here will constant be
Come wind, come weather.
There’s no discouragement
Shall make her once relent
Her last avowed intent,
To be a gardener.
I’ve been out of touch for a while, quite a while. My constancy has been sorely tried by the discouragement of a serious drought. I have never seen my garden so dry. This season I chose to enhance my garden with several additional native shrubs and perennials. New plantings need water. Old plantings need water. Newly pruned trees and shrubs need water. Everything needs water. I have been watering. It trust it is “true valour” made visible.
This morning there is a drizzle. I am not turning off the hose, but I am taking it as a sign that I can write to you again. It is good to be in touch.
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