Mulched Dreams

A Saturday evening quite some time ago, when I was new to gardening in Florida and my house was new (to us):

We were "just looking". But our passenger's daddy was a real estate agent. Now I swear I've paid tens of thousands of dollars for dreams that WILL NOT QUIT. You see crappy lawn. I see garden walks through fragrant fields. I flipped over the lovely handmade swing on the front porch. The seller took that with her. The house (which incidentally I do love) came with a row of neatly trimmed generic shrubs, standing at attention in a straight line out front. I moved my potted herbs into the ground between the no-frills soldiers even before the kids and I moved in. I've added the first curve to the row and will plant some low-growing single roses there tomorrow. The miniature rose I packed and mailed to myself during our move five years ago, dug from my New Jersey garden and grown in a pot since then is now silently exclaiming in delight at the other end of the platoon, shaking it up and whispering to the neighborhood, "Wait 'til you get aload of US!!!"

I'm mulching out the entire "lawn" with visions of a garden blooming where weeds/grass and fire ants now thrive. My tactful, loving, 11-year-old babe, says, "Are you going to try to keep it neat, Mom?" My eldest, teenage-type daughter moans: "You can't mulch the whole front of the house!" My mother chimes in in support: "Don't cock it up" They'll like it when it's done. Or not.

The dream is for the garden just outside my window to carry me up UP and Away! beyond the sad medical stories I type for a living, to uplift and delight eyes, nose, and mind. It must keep me some company and divert me from the little hells a poppin' on my computer screen. To Eden. No snake. Just me, some flowers and my mulch.

And now:

As it turns out, we still live in the "new' house. Or at least I do. The girls are up and out for the most part. My mother's gone. (I've totally stopped dusting - except when I can't see the TV screen…) Adam never showed. All of my dreams for the garden - okay, all of my dreams in general - have skipped down paths I couldn't have imagined back then.

I've replaced the swing and now loll whenever my schedule will allow (and often when not allowed…) I stare at laden beds, bananas are dangling, roses fight their way through the passion vines. Eyes, nose and mind really ARE delighted.

The mulch has killed off the grass. There are curvy organized mulched beds now where there was once crappy lawn. (I know its organized, but friends regularly describe it as a jungle - I think they're thinking lush - as in a lot of growth - or maybe as in - "What HAVE you been DRINKING???)

I suppose my mother would think it was relatively cocked up, although, when I was able to grow a recognizable fruit or flower, she was greedy and, I suppose, in her way proud (might be reading more into her than was there.) I HAVE eaten a couple of oh-my-god juicy Georgia-0'Keefe-wudda-loved-these figs this year. And I have blue-blooming plumbago and self-sowing sunflowers and anything else that can tolerate my half-assed watering habits.

The only plants surviving from my original New Jersey garden are the garlic chives that haven't bloomed since their long-ago Garden State. I do have some of my father's cactus and succulents, and a Shefflera that was his - and he's been gone way longer than my ma. I still think of them daily. And that New Jersey garden. It's my damn LIFE - and my stupid screensaver that cycles through ALL of my pictures for goodness sake! I think of EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE on a daily basis. (As my mother chanted so long ago: Why don't you ever call???) (yes - YOU!)

I open the front door in the morning, and I'm Dorothy, newly landed in Oz. It's technicolor from the early-morning inside gray. There's a dead witch (and the occasional lizard) twitching below - but that's that other story. There IS the occasional snake scaring the bejeezus out of me, but Eve had that to deal with too, in that other story. And nobody's throwing me out of THIS garden - as long as I can keep making the payments