Every year as long as we gardened, Tom and I would start at least some vegetables by seed in February. Late winter was always a time to look forward to spring, to gardening together. Now I have been gardening alone for six years, and I realize that though time passes, grief doesn't. Oh, it morphs into something less visceral, less heart-searing, but it's always there, ready for a memory, a scent, a thought, to resurrect it fully. How does one get over losing a companion who had been a friend since we were fifteen years old? Today we would have celebrated our 47th wedding anniversary. Instead, today I will go into my garden and try to be thankful for the 41 years together, and the years before that of our teenage love. The heart always wants more.
This year, I didn't sprout seeds in February. Instead, I bought a few vegetable plants from a local nursery and then sowed seeds in my raised beds and front-yard flower beds when the weather warmed up enough for zinnias, sunflowers, moonflowers, scarlet runner beans, hyacinth beans, yellow squash, Armenian cucumbers, birdhouse gourds, okra, and basil. The seed potatoes I planted 3 weeks later than advised because cold weather in Montana delayed shipping have grown into such large and green plants that I fear all the energy is going into flowering plants and not the tubers. I am curious to see if I will get any potatoes from that crop.
Gardening is all about hope, and we need a lot of that these days as our country turns to cruelty, vindictiveness, and authoritarianism. Gardening also requires action, and we need that, too, to make this world a better place, to turn cruelty into kindness, vindictiveness into forgiveness, authoritarianism into egalitarianism.
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| Flowering potatoes--hope the tubers are growing as well below! |
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| These lovely amaryllises multiplied from one bulb that was cultivated by a friend who was a professor of horticulture in Florida. |
