I like to consider myself a gardener.
Now
Mars and I are moving to the inhospitable growing climate of northern New Mexico. I deeply enjoy working my shovel and my hands
in the cool spring soil, placing plants into the earth, watering them into
life, trimming them when they impinge upon each other, cutting them back when
their growth season has ended, and raking off the leaves and discovering the
first green buds of spring. Things that I'm almost certain are not going to happen in our new southwest home. But I think
what I will miss more than anything is the most mundane of all gardening activities – mowing
the lawn. Grass grows in Santa Fe – but
not in the quantity that merits the term “lawn”. And even those small green areas are few and
far between.
The
yard that I now have takes about an hour and a quarter to cut. My parents always rented and neither one had
any interst interest in things horticultural.
So, other than some work I did one summer as a teenager for my
hometown’s Parks Department, my yard is the only “lawn” that I have ever
manicured. And I have come to really
enjoy the work.
But
such was not always the case. Mars and I
took occupancy of our house in early spring of 1977 – just in time for
everything floral, arboreal and vegetative on the property to begin their annual
growing cycle. And there were a lot of
things – most of them unknown to me – but the one that even I could recognize was
the lawn.
A
newly acquired mortgage, and a single, less-than-affluent income told me that
paying someone else to do the job was not an option. So after a quick trip to
Sears for a red Craftsman mower, I began what quickly became my Saturday
morning mowing drudgery. Inexperience,
plus too many years of physical inactivity and forty-plus hours a week of demanding
computer work left me ill-prepared me for this Sisyphean project. Like the rock-pushing Greek King condemned by
the Gods to an eternity of laborious and futile labor, I was doomed.
And
then…
As
I have described in more detail elsewhere I was soon rescued from this fescue
funk by the hired lawn-slinger who maintained the property of the older-couple
diagonally across the street – and who had, at least in my semi-literate mind,
a great physical resemblance to the American novelist Ernest Hemingway. Inspired by “Ernest’s” energy (he was easily
as old as, if not older than, his employers) – but mostly by his technique,
flair, and fashion (when he was done the lawn was uniformly short and clean,
like his hair and beard) – I began what
has become a life-long fusing of the literary and the down-to-earth.
The
mowing became less tedious and I realized more about how the work affected me,
and the effect that I had on the lawn – as well as the effect that other
gardening work could have on the rest of our yard, and myself.
And
I began writing about it.
The
Men’s Garden Club that I joined a year or two after acquiring our house was kind
enough to let me share my floricultural musings with its membership on a
monthly basis. Our local town newspaper occasionally
published some of my other essays. When
I retired from my day job, our son and daughter-in-law presented me with an
online blog into which I can pour any other such writings. And concurrently my
interest in things horticultural continued to grow as I found that my labors in
the loam provided more food for thoughts.
Mars
likes to say – more in reference to my horticultural skills than to my
artistic adroitness – that I am a writer who happens to garden, rather than the
opposite. That’s probably more true than
not. I’m not great at either – but I certainly
wouldn’t be either without the other. Fortunately
one of the two pastimes is transferable to New Mexico where I will hopefully find
plenty of new fodder on which to chew.
As
the real Ernest once said, “I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather
chose me.”
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