Gardening Is Unnatural

Yes, gardening is unnatural ... for me at least ... I believe I was standing behind the greenhouse door when the gardening gene was handed out to so many others.  As far as I can tell, both sides of the family have not only green thumbs, but green hands. My father at 82 still maintains an immaculately manicured lawn and yard worthy of a golf green. He gets very zen when on his riding lawnmower (he used a push mower until just a few years ago when his arthritis got bad), and loves it when people stop and tell him his yard is gorgeous.  My mother was a whiz with roses and gardens in general.  My parents partnered on lots of gardening projects, including large vegetable gardens, building a rock garden, creating from scratch a patio made of bricks, and many more.  And, natch, both sets of grandparents where gardening wizards.

It's not that I hate flowers or vegetables or even gardens in general, I don't want to work in them.  It started with what my dad called "garden parties." Ahh, you say, kindly ladies and Queen Elizabeth in floral dresses and big hats, drinking tea and eating petit fours, and having a lovely time chatting with like ladies. No, garden parties were my parents' euphemism for going out rain or shine and gardening all day long. They loved it. I hated it. It involved dirt and worms and hot and cold and rain. Not my cup of tea at all (and believe me there there were no petit fours involved).  I was very much fonder of reading or riding my bicycle.  My dad was simply trying to pass along some excellent life skills and a hobby that gave he and my mom long hours of pleasure, but they didn't account for children not liking gardening (or any activity) from morning to night.  Gardening gave them great pleasure, but bored my brother and I permanently to the point I've deliberately chosen to live in apartments or condos and my brother employs a yard service just so we don't have to deal with "garden parties." 

Yet, with the explosion of a quite early springtime here in Portland, and even with all my protestations of hating gardening, I've felt a familiar and familial pull toward the store gardening sections where I've spent some time looking at flowers and organizing them into plots in my mind.  I think it has little to do with a true love of gardening and more to do with the some of the pleasure and beauty I must have gained by osmosis while attending my parents' "garden parties."  And even though I'm not a master gardener like my parents, with time and understanding my parents love of gardening, I'm finally free to just enjoy the container gardens I've had on my decks over the years and finally grateful to my parents for the garden parties.  So, even though gardening is unnatural to me, flowers and beauty are not unnatural to me as you can see by this photo of my latest deck garden still under revision.

True Spring, True Love

One week ago, the real spring arrived in Portland, Oregon ...

Oh, I know it's not March 21, the actual "real spring" on the calendar, but believe me Portlanders do not pay attention to calendars when it comes to seasons.  Most seasons are more a feeling here in gradations, with a few of the obvious changes in nature and weather.  For instance, usually about mid-August, I can sometimes sniff autumn in the air, and then the next day I'll see my first leaf turning color, and winter is often just a different shade of grey in the sky, and summer arrives with rain and roses and just a touch of warmth after the 4th of July.  However, spring usually is never that subtle; it usually arrives any time between February and May with a bang.  And that's how it arrived on Tuesday, February 9.

It started out promising almost immediately.  The morning sunrise was a photographer's fantasy in pinks and purples and roses, the kind that makes you stand at your windows, coffee cup in hand, wishing you didn't have to go to work.  Usually a sky like that can dissolve into rain and grey in just a couple of hours, but not this day.  By 10 a.m., it was obvious that at the very least it was going to be a nice day, by noon everyone had jumped into the day with abandon, reveling in the steady sun and 60-degree temperature.  I wonder how many "mental health days" were phoned into work last Tuesday?  I don't know, but it seemed like everybody in Portland was out and about when I took a nice long walk.  And dogs!  Portlanders love their pups, but I also thought it seemed like every dog in Portland was out with their owner. 

There were smiles upon smiles everywhere I looked, even on the dogs.  If it weren't a truly sunny day, I almost would have thought it was Christmas day due to all the high spirits and just general goofiness.  Bump into someone at the store, not a problem, and the bumper and bumpee just laugh, throw their hands up, and remark "what a beautiful day."  Nothing more needs to be said to explain the buoyancy of spirit.  Being Portland, there were lots of bicyclists zipping around, and now "sophisticated" high schoolers were laughing and yelling and leaping on the way out of school.  Nobody mentioned any embarassment about white legs or arms sticking out of shorts and sleeveless tops; they were just too busy enjoying the sun and happiness all around them and soaking up energy from the sun. 

The very next day, our mercurical spring start returned to our long grey rainy winter, but people brought their first spring day memories out and dusted them off and talked about them for several days.  Spring will return, we'll love it unreservedly, but there's nothing else quite like our first true love, that first true day of spring in Portland.

The Good Mother

This is a picture of my mom when she was perhaps 3 or 4 years old, circa 1933-1934.  She hated having her picture taken, so she refused to smile, which is why she might not have placed high in the Sears-Roebuck Beautiful Child contest for which this picture was taken.  I'm glad to say that even though she might not have smiled for pictures, she was otherwise a funny and smart little character and imp.  She once wanted a vanilla bottle to play with during a baking session with her mother.  When refused permission (and when her mom turned her back and answered the phone), my mom dumped the whole bottle of vanilla into the cake batter, stirred it up, and scampered with the vanilla bottle in hand.  Her crime was not discovered until the cake was eaten after dinner.  I think she went to bed without her dessert, but she'd also had time to play with the much-coveted vanilla bottle.

I'm pleased to have this picture of her (and a few others) because she continued to dislike intensely to have her picture taken.  Lots of people snuck up on her over time and tried to snap candid photos, but I swear she had eyes in the back of her head and could disappear in a flash when that happened.  I often wished she hadn't hated it so or that she could have seen herself as others did.  She had wonderful sparkly brown-black eyes that glittered with life; that was the thing people always commented about.  They remembered her also for her laugh, style, parenting, open-mindedness, smarts, and great cooking (amongst so many other things).

Even without a lot of pictures, memories of my mom are so wonderfully vivid, it was a surprise to me to realize recently it's been 25 years this week since she died.  I really hadn't thought a lot about it because the truly sad part of actually losing her had been replaced by gratitude and happy memories.  There's so much more I could write about her, but instead of a whole flood of memories taking up a lot of blog space, I just wanted to leave you with an impression of her, my good mother.