I Planted a Garden Over My Worst Year
Where the year had buried me, I buried seeds instead.
The lawn never did anything to me, but on the first warm Saturday in March I took a spade to it like it owed me money.
My mother had been dead for nine weeks by then, and I had discovered the thing they leave out of the sympathy cards: grief needs somewhere to put its hands. Mine had been putting them in dishwater, in paperwork, in my coat pockets on long pointless walks.
That Saturday they found the spade in the shed, and by noon the back lawn of her house, my house now, a sentence I still could not say without flinching, looked like a battlefield, and my palms had blistered and torn, and I felt better than I had since January.
Not good... Better.
There is a difference, and that year I learned to respect it.
Let me give you the year, quickly, the way you rip off a bandage. February: the diagnosis, delivered by a doctor so young I kept waiting for his supervisor. Summer: the treatments, the parking garage of the oncology ward where I paid four dollars an hour to learn what fear does to time. October: the hospital bed arriving at the house like terrible furniture, set up in the back bedroom where she was born eighty-one years earlier, because she insisted on the symmetry. And then the long gray weeks when the world shrank to that room, and I sat in the chair beside her watching the rain run down the window glass, both of us pretending to watch the garden, which was dormant... which was the polite word we used.
She died in January, at four in the morning, while it rained.
Death, it turns out, is mostly paperwork. Nobody warns you. There were forms and certificates and phone calls where I said the words to strangers so many times they stopped meaning anything, which was almost a mercy. There were casseroles. There was a February I honestly cannot account for. I know I was in the house because the dishes kept getting dirty.
And then March, and the spade, and the lawn.
I want to be clear that I did not set out to discover gardening as therapy. I set out to destroy a lawn. The therapy snuck up on me the way it does, disguised as blisters and seed catalogs and a woman at the garden center who sold me six tomato seedlings in April with the straight face of a professional, knowing full well the frost would take them. It did. I bought six more. She sold me those too, and this time a paper bag of advice for free.
Here is what I planted that first spring: tomatoes, beans, zucchini, sunflowers along the fence because she had loved them, and several things that never came up at all, which I took personally.
Here is what I buried: her hospital bracelet, under the tomato row. The parking stubs from the oncology garage, all forty-one of them, under the beans. The card from the funeral home, under the sunflowers. I would kneel there in the cold dirt with these small paper griefs, digging holes and putting them in, and I understood that what I was doing was either gardening or a eulogy, depending on the day, and I decided it did not matter which.
The kneeling was the medicine.
I know that now.
Grief kept asking me to hold still, to sit in the chair by the window, to stay in the gray. The garden asked me to kneel, which looks similar but is not, because kneeling in dirt is a position you get up from with somewhere to carry the watering can. Indoors, my mind ran its terrible loops. Outdoors, there was aphid patrol. You cannot ruminate and thin carrot seedlings at the same time. I have tried.
Then came the third week of April, and the turn I did not see coming.
Daffodils.
In the side bed along the east fence, a bed I had never touched, never planted, barely looked at. First two, which I assumed were weeds with ambition. Then a dozen. Then a whole deliberate row of them, yellow as interruption, coming up through ground I knew for a fact I had left alone.
I stood there holding the hose like a fool, doing the math, and the math kept saying... someone planted these in the fall. And the fall was October, and October was the hospital bed, and none of it made sense until Mrs. Okafor appeared at the fence the way she does, as if assembled on the spot from cardigans.
“She did that,” she said. “Your mother. October. Between the treatments, out here on her knees with a paper bag of bulbs. Made me swear not to tell you.”
I could not say anything... Mrs. Okafor could, and did.
She said, by spring that girl is going to be angry at everything, and she is going to need something that comes up out of the ground that isn't sad.
I sat down in the dirt of my ruined lawn, in front of a neighbor, and cried in the way I had been unable to cry since January, the kind that actually drains something instead of just rehearsing it. My mother had knelt here, dying, planting a message she knew I would not receive until she was gone.
It was the last thing she ever grew, and it was me she was growing it for.
For months I had been writing around her in a notebook, circling, the way you avoid a room. That night I finally wrote about the grief straight on, and the poem arrived almost whole, which the good ones do only when you have paid for them in advance. It was about the daffodils, and about memory being a thing that can be planted on purpose by someone who loves you. I posted it on a community wall for poets at two in the morning, and by the weekend there were strangers underneath it writing about their own mothers' gardens, their fathers' tool sheds, a rosemary bush someone drove across three states in a hatchback. Grief is a big garden. Everyone is kneeling in some corner of it.
The first summer was absurd, by the way. Nobody warns you about zucchini. I gave it away like propaganda, left it on porches, pressed it on the mail carrier. The tomatoes over the buried bracelet came in heavy and sweet, and I ate the first one standing in the yard with juice running down my wrist, and I said out loud, to nobody, “Okay, Mum. Okay.”
It has been three autumns now. Every October, when the air goes cold and blue, I take a paper bag of bulbs out to some corner of the yard and get down on my knees, and I bury small promises for a woman I have not met yet: me, in April. It is the most honest praying I know how to do.
And when the winter rain runs down the window glass in January, the same window, the same chair, I watch it differently now.
Good, I think. Something under the ground is drinking.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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