Spring Ahead

As a Mother’s Day gift many years ago, I asked Mark to build me a space in the backyard for a small garden. He got railroad ties and plotted it out and hauled dirt home and shoveled and shoveled. It was my first attempt at gardening and I had more misses than hits, but I kept at it and learned along the way. Over many years and a lot of sweat equity, we landscaped the front of the house and the architect who drew our plans made space for a long garden along the front walk. “Don’t you want to see your garden whenever you go in and out of the house,” she asked. I didn’t really know what I wanted but we went along with her idea and it was perfect.

I would hang out in my garden all the time, digging, planting, weeding, and mulching. Often Mark would be right over my shoulder questioning what I was doing until I told him that maybe he needed to start his own garden and leave mine alone, and with that suggestion he was off to the races. He turned my first garden into a raspberry patch followed by one planting bed after another. At the first sign of spring he’d go to Lowe’s and get more wood and build more boxes and haul more dirt and he was in garden heaven. As ideas go, Mark had thousands. His garden became an offshoot of his science brain and everything he planted was a grand experiment. He grew pumpkins one year with a bumper crop that yielded over sixty, tomatoes, peppers, beans, onions, sweet potatoes, lettuce, rhubarb, kale. I asked him to plant some asparagus and he did and daily checked for those baby stalks to birth themselves through the dirt. We would later find out that it takes 2-3 years for asparagus to start producing, but in his Green Acres it never took. Undeterred, he kept digging and planting and would come in with bushel baskets of produce. His problem, though, was that he was terrible at maintenance. Over the last few years, all the grass in back was killed off, the beds were falling apart because the wood had started to rot, and it was more weeds than farm. I was on him all the time about making it look better and regardless of any argument we had I ended it by saying, “And that goddamn backyard….”

Last spring was the first time he couldn’t work in the yard at all because he was writing a grant with a June deadline and every weekend was devoted to that. Even the raspberry bushes felt the neglect and barely produced, and I sometimes wonder if that was a harbinger of things to come. Despite my critical eye on his garden, it was the place he decompressed and that spring he was on a hamster wheel of working, traveling, and trying to meet deadlines.

This spring I wanted to get the backyard under control and looking better for whenever I decide to sell the house. Many people offered to help but I decided to hire a landscaping friend to clean it out, cut the beds, and lay some sod. It has been a big and expensive job and is not even close to being done but, hopefully, by summer it will start coming together. Like the front yard, it will take years and sweat for it to grow and fill in.

When I told people what my plan was for the backyard the response was universally the same. “That’s such a great idea, now you can make it your own.” That is true, but if I could trade that for my husband and his jacked up version of farming I’d do it in a heartbeat. I couldn’t watch when things were getting cleared out, trees were getting cut down, and planter boxes emptied. This is what I told him I wanted all along and yet it was breaking my heart to see it go away. In the last few months my connections to all the people he knew seem to be withering on the tendrils of loss, and to me this felt like yet another place where he was being erased. I tried to prop myself up with garden plans and ideas but my hurting heart wasn’t finding much solace in looking at plants by myself.

I decided to focus on my garden in the front and so I dug up some things from the community garden and split some other things and between that and a lot of rain it’s looking lush and green. It’s always a guessing game of what’s going to break through and make a cameo appearance for another season, and so I was keeping an eye on a plant in the corner because I had no idea what it was and hadn’t marked it.

Every day I checked on its progress and it would be nearly two weeks before I realized what had rooted in my garden. I bent down and stared at these stalks in disbelief, wondering how it was even possible, while on the other side of the veil between here and there, my boyfriend winked and said, “I got you, girl.”

Update: It turns out that what I thought was asparagus is really false indigo. It’s a good thing I didn’t cook it :/ It has now been renamed false asparagus.