We have lived in our house for 23 years. Every day of those years, except for the dead of winter or torrential rains, there has been one constant.
We watch our neighbor, Dick Creager, work in his garden.
Dick’s garden is not a hobby. I write blogs for a hobby, which is why you get one every six months. Dick’s garden is his companion, his lifeblood, his muse. Now 86, recently widowed, and a retired (before we even knew him) professional botanist, Dick’s identity is his garden. Every single day he takes the slow walk from his kitchen door to the back of the property, Wearing the same white shirt, pants and hat, he opens the vent in the greenhouse, unlocks the shed, lets loose the irrigation, massages the dirt, turns the compost, and then returns before dark to reverse it all. Day after day, week after week, year after year–literally every non-winter day for the past 23 years and by all accounts 35 more before that—Dick has massaged and manicured his garden with a routine that makes the sun’s journey across the sky seem a giddy act of spontaneity.
When I say garden, I don’t mean a few rows of beans or a raised box of basil and parsley. I mean an elaborate colony covering the back third of his backyard–a cornucopia of crops ranging from corn to cucumbers, peppers to pumpkins, tomatoes to tiramisu (wait, can you grow that?). It’s an amazing maze of maize and more, an ecosystem so elaborate, so deeply embedded and so lovingly managed that it’s due for its own zip code. I’m pretty sure that if Dick were abandoned on Mars, he could grow more than potatoes.
Dick and I haven’t always had the warmest relationship. In his eyes, our family was a bit of a nuisance. (For a short time, we had a dog who barked at Dick. It was understandably upsetting for him, and probably for his plants as well. He would know. He memorably told us, “I’m not a dog person; I’m a plant person.”) In my eyes, he was a man so stuck in his routine, with a world so small and a schedule so sparse that he seemed to be missing out on life itself. I confess I held his gardening in a small amount of dismissiveness while I carried on with the things that mattered.
We raised our kids. Dick raised his crops. I planted spiritual seeds. He planted actual seeds. My work mattered. His was a waste of time. At least that’s what I told myself.
I’m writing this today because for the past week, I’ve been home with covid. There are things I should do, but I don’t feel like doing anything, I can’t go anywhere, and I feel an underlying sense of guilt that I’m producing nothing. I feel like my summer (my precious summer!) is slipping away. I’m antsy, but I don’t have enough energy to do anything about it.
The fact that this comes after a school year in which Karen and I were running on fumes makes it quite a shock to the system. It’s like we hit the parking brake in the passing lane, our headache caused not by hitting the windshield or the onset of the covid virus but by the sudden jolt of inactivity. It’s disorienting. I confess I don’t like it, and I’m not sure what to do with it. It’s messing with my self-worth and self-esteem.
All I can do is sit on my patio and watch Dick make his slow mulching march back and forth between home and garden, which to him are one and the same. He’s content, unhurried, grounded.
Maybe I’m the one whose garden needs attention.