In The Garden, My Garden

Rain for two days, blessed rain, and I move among the glistening green and feel the drops stripped off the grass and the weeds and clinging to my trouser legs, melding with the fabric, absorbed into cotton and cooling me as I make my way.

Flowers of frail beauty, their color-flames calling to the butterflies who await the cessation of the rain, beckoning the hummingbirds who perch hidden in the honeysuckle, watching me as they bob their heads side to side in time with their own secret music.

The fence is slick beneath my hand, the weathered posts with their dots of lichens and the tiny divots where wasps and hornets have scooped out bits of wood fiber to take back to their nests and transform them with their winged alchemy into gray paper, spheres of fearsome shape, hanging above the canopy of woods, hiding from me as I step with care and search with wary eyes. The fence is crooked and sagging, the very imperfections that lend it beauty in my eyes, in the eyes of him who built the thing. It marches across the back yard, separating the butterfly and hummingbird flowers from the more utilitarian parts of the property. Martin houses with their intricately engineered nests inside loom above the expanse, the elegant occupants perched atop them, watching me, familiar with my habits and patterns and movements. Feeders packed with seeds stand sentry along its length, hosting the flitting finches and jays and titmice and chickadees and orioles and cardinals and wrens at their meals, and morning glories begin their sly invasive reach upwards, the choking caress, the intrusive reward of daily color, and a place for more bees to gather and gossip, as bees do, as bees have always done.

It is spring and I am mindful on such a day that my boot’s toe may find a black snake hiding in the taller grass, and I remind myself not to jump too much if this happens. If it does, I will take the hoe and lift the narrow fellow and carry him to the woods and toss him into the tall garlic mustard and lilacs so that he can be about his business away from my skittish dogs and my skittish wife and my own skittish — but appreciative –self. The breeze is so cool it shocks me, and it reminds me that this is the last gasp, what we call blackberry winter, and that the heat will settle in after this week, and the days will drone with the bee-music, and they will last oh so long, and I will have to bide my time until the killing sun — so golden and tonally distinct from the icy white fire of the other suns far up in the coming night’s ceiling — until the sun goes down in the west and I can cut the grass without being brought low by his power.

I am in the garden, and in such a garden all of it began, beneath that sun, with the creeping forth of greenery and waving leaves and skyward-reaching stalks and heavy fruits and bragging birds, in the days before fig leaves were plucked and utilized to cover something I still don’t quite understand, back when a certain voice was pleasant and persuasive, before it was a loathsome hiss, if in fact it all happened that way, and perhaps it did. I am in the garden, and in such a garden all of it changed, when a son alone knelt and watered the grass with hemoglobin and platelets, when his friends slept, when a mob, legally badged and authorized, approached and apprehended the man they apprehended not, and took him away, and he ended up stretched and marred upon a tree that perhaps began in someone else’s garden, and perhaps it all happened this way, and I hope every minute of every day that it did, and that I can make sense of it, and that another garden waits for me somewhere.

Not many hours from now, I will have to leave this setting and go to the place where I earn the resources that let me keep this little patch of stopgap paradise, and try as I might, the peaceful green mist of today’s thoughts will give way to the scrambling, competitive fever-thoughts of the workaday world. But the balm that will soothe me in those hours away, the food that will nourish me in that dry, barren stretch will be the knowledge that the garden is here, that it exists, that it is a place of life and activity and sound and sense and order and brutal beauty. And when I can, and when I think of it, and when I am free to do so, I will walk again in the garden, among these things that delight me, and I so often believe they are looking right back at me, watching me, and perhaps appreciating my presence among them.

~ S.K. Orr