Upon This Rock

One of the funnest days I ever had with Mark was when I strong-armed him into going on a garden tour with me. It wasn’t his jam but we had free tickets and it seemed like a great way to spend a few hours on a beautiful Saturday afternoon even if he didn’t think so. House #1 with a huge vegetable garden and wandering chickens reeled Mark in, and I threw up my hands and said, “Do I have the best ideas or what?” We drove all over Kansas City to see the houses, talked to the owners, wandered the property, took a million photos, tried to figure out how we could make some of those ideas work in our yard (and how to win the lottery to pay for it), and filled our creative tanks to full.

We would go on the same garden tour again two years later. It was lovely and fun to look at so many great gardens but it did not compare to the magic of that first year. Maybe it was because our interests were so varied and did not often intersect, but on that day our gardening stars aligned, we were on the same page, and that kind of thing can’t be replicated.

This yard of ours is big and has been hard for me to manage on my own since Mark died. The spring days are labor intensive when everything is choked with weeds and leaves. Last week I spent hours cleaning out a bed in the backyard, then it rained and two days later it looked like I hadn’t done a thing. I think about hiring somebody to do some of this stuff but then change my mind. Isn’t this how you stay healthy? Isn’t this good for your physical and emotional well-being to be outside and moving? I get frustrated and think about dousing the weeds with chemicals because that would be so much easier but Mark was adamantly opposed to that because of runoff. Instead he would spend hours digging up weeds by hand. I don’t know how he did that year after year but I do know that I care about not poisoning what’s beneath my feet.

Last month I had the porch rescreened. The job cost double what I thought and took twice as long because so much rotting wood had to be replaced, but it was Mark’s favorite place to be on a Saturday afternoon so I took a deep breath and wrote the check. He would go out there and bring a paper that needed to be reviewed or tests to grade, and the combination of hot summer air and exhaustion from early morning biking and mowing the lawn would usually result in him falling asleep. I’d look at him and think, “Why do you work so hard all the time? Why do you only stop when you are so exhausted you cannot move another step?” Then he died and I found out you can’t outrun demons if you dare to slow down.

When the porch was getting a rehab and I would stand outside talking to the repair guy about another problem he found, we were always stepping around the mud that was behind the porch. Two downspouts dumped into that area, the sod that was laid wouldn’t grow and reseeding it a year later didn’t help either. Every night I’d go look at it and then walk around the yard to see what I could move or split to fill it in. Finally, I grabbed a shovel and edged out a bed. It was so easy it fooled me into thinking the rest would be a piece of cake. It wasn’t. Every time I dug I’d hit rock and then have to stop and try to pry it out of the mud. It was hard, it pissed me off, it made me want to cry, it made me want to give up. Some days I’d be out there for fifteen minutes and other days for hours. It was an ugly, futile mess that no longer became a bed but an example of my life which made me even more determined to turn it into something better.

After a lot of work I did end up doing that and since it’s been done I like to go out there and admire my work. Is this my rebirth, I wonder. Healing from Mark’s death has required digging so deep I think it will break me at best or kill me at worst, so that seems like a stretch for a small garden bed. Instead I say to myself, “You know what you are, Kathy Fisher? You are a badass,” and some days that seems like the best plan for moving forward.