Untying knots, scheduling tests and appointments and check-ups and check-ins and servicing all the parts that need to be serviced in home, heart, and body. The stretchy pants are back. Cozy socks, beanie over unwashed hair, no makeup, hairy legs and pits, hot tea and soup game is solid, and when my brain can't handle another task that involves numbers and emails, I find a break in the rain to be with the garden, a garden that Penelope likes to call "a work in progress", and it is. The old house we have come to call home has our smell now, holds our laughter and tears and the loving energy of some of our most treasured people. There's a spot in the way back that was so overgrown and gnarly that nobody would've known there was anything there worth uncovering.
One of my favorite childhood books, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, taught me what life has since confirmed: that what we're seeking cannot be created, invented, forced or found outside of us, but uncovered and resurrected within. I went to work digging, pruning, scraping, uprooting, wrestling and freeing something yet unknown from the invasive, suffocating ivy and thorny blackberry vines which put up an exhausting fight. The more I worked, the more dead branches I found, skeletons of former life that needed to be put in the compost pile, some fully dead trees. I found rusty bed frames, trash, broken pots, an entire set of weights, shards of glass, and an old fur hat- evidence of life that came before and has since passed along, leaving behind their junk for the next generation of inhabitants to unknowingly inherit. Still, digging deep into the dark wet underworld of composting leaves and plant debris, revealed rich black soil teeming with life.
There's still more work for me to do to uncover and liberate my overgrown place, but I'm already beginning to see the outline of my own secret garden. I witnessed its first relieved breaths of cool winter's air yesterday. I imagined the satisfaction it felt having access to nutrients and hydration from the ground again, stretching its legs into the spaces where invasive species and trash no longer dominated. There are quite a few spots left now ready for seed, and more will follow as I finish clearing. I have some beautiful heirloom seeds that I've been saving, seeds I'd intended to plant at a former home, a former beloved garden, but which have found their way here, patiently waiting for the right soil, safeguarded for the right time, the right conditions. And I'm dreaming of what seeds I'll seek out in the next few months while the soil is soft and wet. Weeds and returning vines are inevitable but can be fought back with diligence and an experienced eye that knows what’s what and acts swiftly. A hard baked crust comes eventually with the stress of rising temperatures, and I don't know how much watering I'll be able to do in drought conditions like we’ve been enduring for years. Resources like water, light, air, love, energy, time, space, are all precious, and I am learning to appreciate, nurture, conserve and protect these resources as such.
As I untie the knots, adjusting my daughter's mask from how I'd first tweaked it for my three-year-old, to now fit her five-year-old face, I bless the death, the leaving behind, the turning away, the no thank you's and goodbyes and never agains. I bless the adjustments and renegotiations, the hard conversations, even with oneself, and especially with oneself. I bless and thank what came before now, and I welcome all that is now with my loving attention, more ready than ever to tend the garden of today and witness it with wonder, acceptance, and gratitude, all the while my daughter's voice ringing in my ears, "we’re doing a lot of progress!".
Jaclyn Edds Konczal | January 2022