It Happens

Our cool spring has been such a gentle one for the little green growy things. The clematis is climbing the mailbox in exactly the cliched fashion that I had hoped for, the new lilac is settling in nicely, and the petunias are happily oblivious to the scorching they'll be in for in a few months. That must be the nice thing about annuals - if they had personalities, they'd likely be optimists, because they just simply don't know any better. Hostas are gradually spreading out in the back beds, and they make me wish I were a mouse or even a spider (*shudder*), so that I could crawl under those seamless verdant leaves and look out at the world through green light. The simple sturdy nature of hostas suggests that as perennials, they take the long view of things. Time passes, rain falls, autumn comes, and so it goes.

Gardening is a gradual process here, and while it's a result of small bank accounts, I like to feel slightly superior about it. We only have so much to spend on improvements each year, and so we buy smaller versions of plants for less money. The big payoff is not this season or even next season for us, but maybe a couple years down the road yet. A person would think we were annuals, with this kind of optimism.

Progress is slow, especially this year with the peonies. I say "peonies," but in reality, there's really only one: a scrubby, weedy thing that most people would take out with a weedeater without a second thought. But, I continue to insist that there is potential. Maybe next year. Gardening seems to be good for me in this respect. I have to take the long view, to wait, to trust, to expect the positive as well as the negative. As with life, all of the factors aren't in my control, but the evenhandedness of nature lets me believe that I have better odds than most gamblers. Bad things (aphids, droughts, nibbly rabbits) will happen, but nature will also offer good things (sun, rain, compost). Maybe this is why there is an unopened bag of 7 dust in the barn - introducing chemicals into the situation seems unsportsmanlike, cheating, putting your thumb on the scales.

Gardening seems to promote a balanced view of the good and ill in the world, and either way, the situation is reduced to "It happens." Bugs happen. So does sunshine. Perhaps that perspective is only one of the things the move away from land has cost us. Gardening reduces the frustrations of life to a microcosm. We do our best, sometimes things fail; we do less than our best, sometimes there's no harm done. The world doesn't always pause to reward our best efforts, but our lack of effort doesn't exactly throw the globe off its axis either. The future is not predictable, and we can worry and plan and be anxious, but it will remain inscrutable.

You watch and worry over a garden, and you begin to gain a sense of your place in the pecking order of things. We only control so much, we do what we can or what we will, and then things happen: seedlings or crows, beans or blight. Either way, we'll have to deal with the outcome. Sometimes, we get what we want, sometimes we don't. It happens.