Since we bought this house, I have been learning to garden. I call my gardening style “Clumsy but Enthusiastic.” I am also cheap. No, I aspire to be cheap. Really I’m just poor.
The husband (a saint) watches the kids so I can go to a free gardening class. His saintliness lies in the fact that our baby always begins screaming five minutes after I leave the room, and continues screaming until I return. The husband is a solid, patient man who deals with this far better than most people would, including me.
The class was packed, and I was surprised to find that I was the only woman there under 50, and even in my current post-baby figure, I was one of the slenderer ladies. The chairs were set very close together, and every now and then a rustle would pass through the audience as each person shifted away from the stranger’s hip on her left, and then shifted back to avoid the neighbor on her right. Ripples of more than one kind passed through the crowd. Sort of a large soft meadow of wildflowers, moving in the breeze. So apparently gardening as exercise is not working for us.
Spring is springing and I am itching to get my hands in the dirt (where they will be safe from those Mint Milanos).
This is a bookless post! So I will add a poem from one of my favorites, Carl Sandburg:
Poppies
She loves blood-red poppies for a garden to walk in.
In a loose white gown she walks
and a new child tugs at cords in her body.
Her head to the west at evening when the dew is creeping,
A shudder of gladness runs in her bones and torsal fiber:
She loves the blood-red poppies for a garden to walk in.
(Now when’s the last time you heard a poet use “torsal fiber?”)
