Making Things Grow

It is possible that some of you are actually relaxing during quarantine. The time at home has freed you up to learn a new skill, or a language, or work through that stack of books you've been putting off. According to your Instagrams, all of you have learned to bake sourdough bread for some reason. This, I imagine, is because none of you are married to Liz Lidgett. Don't get me wrong, if I were banished to a desert island and could only take one person it would be Liz, not because she would help us get rescued any faster, but because I know that very quickly, it would be the best decorated, finest appointed island in the ocean.

As such, our shelter in place has been spent improving our shelter. I use the words "shelter" because, were it up to me, that's what it would be—the bare minimum of four walls and a roof, distinguished only by plumbing from a hole in the ground a mole may live in. When we were looking at the house I told Liz, "We can't live here, all the walls are pink!" Which was true, the entire first floor were varying shades of magenta, hot pink and salmon. She looked at me with that look wives get that says "I'm a great catch and I took myself off the market for this six-foot esophagus?" It had never occurred to me that we could paint the walls. It occurred to Liz and, seeing as we painted last week, it still does.

I don't know why I thought quarantine, which has interrupted so many other things, would also offer a break from house projects but the fact that my wife is home all the time, seeing the inadequacies and areas for improvement (to say nothing of nesting for our forthcoming daughter), has seen a marked increase in home-bound activity. And some out-of-home activity. Every spring, Liz goes through the charade that we are going to become gardeners, resulting in a lawn that is the envy of the neighborhood. We were once at a dinner party in which the host took a bite of the meal he prepared, said "excuse me," stood up and left the house. In a few minutes he came back with a handful of basil he picked from his back yard and spread it across his plate. "Thought it needed something," he said nonchalantly. I don't blame Liz for treating this story like a shining house on a hill she will forever be striving for. For a white woman, garnishing a meal with your own herbs in front of your guests is the ultimate flex. The problem is that a) we were at the house of the editor of Better Homes & Gardens, who didn't get to that position by hobbying with this stuff and b) we have never shown any aptitude for keeping green things alive. The only thing we are good at growing is weeds and evidence that we are bad gardeners.

I must admit, that however committed Liz is to yard work, she has a saboteur on her team. My father is an agronomist and a serious amateur grower of home produce. It is not rare, especially during a time when baseball is suspended for COVID reasons, for conversations with him to center around the growth of his persimmon trees. He is specifically proud of his banana plants, which he painstakingly keeps alive in Missouri, several lines of latitude north of their preferred habitat. I'm sure he would like me to tell you that a banana is a berry which grows on an herb, not a tree (trees must contain wooded parts which a banana plant does not). Many children must help their parents set up their social media accounts, I have helped mine reply to a thread in a persimmon message board. 

In semi-retirement, Dad has been able to plant and garden to his heart's delight but as a working person he took the available labor to which he had access to with designs to, as Voltaire said, cultiver son jardin. That meant me and my brother. The unbearable truth about parenting is that from the day they are born they begin the process of getting further away from you and passing along your interests is a game of delicate balance. Push too lightly, as Dad did with jazz, say, and the kids ignore it, push too hard, as he did with gardening, they reject it outright. As I've recently discovered tennis, one of Dad's preferred past times that he never got us to appreciate as kids, it's possible that I'll come around to gardening (or jazz, for that matter) but for now, days of toiling in strawberry and rhubarb patches, endless trips to garden shops and hours of edging, digging, planting, potting, weeding, pruning, dead-heading and trimming has rooted out any joy I might get from working the land. My father may be proud of the banana plants he's fostered over the years but I am only interested in Bananas Foster. 

I can hear my dad scoffing at this. He grew up on a farm, where the work was inevitably more difficult than anything he had my brother and I do and he retained a love of agriculture. My tongue is firmly in my cheek, gardening was among our least favorite chores but it's not like we were toiling for endless hours, fighting the sunset like the Joads. Just the same, he has a son who is, shall we say, unmotivated when his wife asks for help with the yard work. Liz's interest in gardening during quarantine connects her to her British roots (second subtle "root" pun in as many paragraphs, by the way), where gardening has become a coronavirus phenomena. 45% of Britons are gardening, more than they are cooking and reading (which makes me question the sanity of their priorities). About 85% of the British population has a private garden and before I attribute Liz's greed for a green thumb to her Englishness, it should be noted that the Polish are not far behind that (perhaps it skips a generation). It is even easier to garden in Northern Ireland, where there are no moles. Those creatures, the bane of gardens everywhere and whose holes I would gladly live in if it meant I didn't have to plant anything, migrated north during the last ice age, getting as far as Albion (the island of England and Scotland) but not quite making it to Ireland before sea levels rose too high.  

I mentioned Voltaire earlier, who finished his great work Candide by extolling the masses to cultivate their gardens. I brought up to Liz that this was a metaphor and it meant that people should grow their minds through learning and self-reflections—things I would rather be doing than mulching. Still, Voltaire was a literal gardener as well and loved spending time amongst the weeds. Candide's , subtitle is Optimism, a satirical reference to how the characters, believing in the goodness of the world, are slapped down by fate every time until they decide to look inward, take care of themselves and let the world sort itself out (thus, cultivating their own garden). You need look no further for evidence of blind optimism than our front step, which now includes two planters full of peonies, meadow sage and Jacob's ladders, among other things, in a beautiful arrangement. History suggests that these plants aren't long for the world but Liz believes. 

And if not, we'll try again next year, in an act that has less to do with Voltaire's quote about gardens and more to do with Einstein's about the definition of insanity.