III. There's a Metaphor Lurking in my Garden.

I went by the house the other day to pick up a few things. I'm moving in degrees, sorting and sifting seventeen years of stuff into neat little parcels for packing or purging. I've cut the emotional ties to my Grandmother's hutch, lace table clothes and re-read paperbacks and am ready to simplify my life.


The Husband watches the packing while lobbing volleyball sized insults and instructions; some of them spiked, most of them underhanded. In an attempt to sit this game out, I take the dogs outside for a good brushing. A winter's worth of fur goes flying and they don't even complain. They're so happy to have me home they'd let me brush them bald.


So I'm on the deck and I notice my window boxes have sprouted some leftover seeds from last year and my herbs are growing. In the chaos that was 2009, my garden was abandoned by me but not by Mother Nature. I'd let crops die on the vine, weeds run wild and the beds spend the winter unturned. But she had stayed her course and was ready for spring. I wandered down the steps into the yard and started clawing wet clumps of rotting leaves out of my raised beds.


Strawberry plants two inches tall. A little hill of kale. Oregano growing out of the compost pile. Spring onions. Asparagus ready to be picked. Enough Rainbow Chard to make with pasta for dinner. I hate it when God uses his Grandeur to show me how ridiculous I am.

I mention this because I spent all of January and February and most of March wanting to die. Planning my death. Taking steps to end my life. However you say it, I wasn't anticipating any kind of spring. But in the naivete of her youth She said just enough right things to keep me alive. Probably by accident, empathy not being her thing, as I'm sure she'll agree.

When you're nearing fifty, and a lot of things start coming to an end, reinventing your life is beyond surreal. When you're twenty five, it's just speed bumps. I don't know what she said to me. I just know that the Husband had pulled a shot gun on us both and that as I sat on my stone wall surrounded by seven police cars I watched Her crying on the phone to the Boy and I knew I loved them both way too much to leave.

And now it seems I have a garden to tend to again. ~Dazzledgirl