This summer morning my tomato plants are heavy with fruit — purple heirloom
Cherokees, neon orange Early Girls, and lime Granny Smiths. In the thirteen
years we’ve lived in this house, this is the first time we’ve really made
space for them. Strange to think that vegetables represent a watershed,
but this season seemed just right to grow something new: You see, at the
end of the summer my son Aaron is bound for college.
As I poke through a tangle of weeds, a dirty baseball surfaces, remnant of a
long-ago game. When we first moved here, our backyard was overrun with gangs
of little boys —wrestling, building forts, finding dead birds, hoarding stones
in jars. On summer nights, they’d yell at treed possums and catch fireflies.
By day, they’d savage the flower beds with their tennis shoes and bats. Play
trumped produce and plants, you might say.
I recall Aaron’s middle school years when tank-top-clad teenage girls clustered
on our deck and the garden served as a stage for parties. Rap music, souped-up
cars, and summer jobs soon became more alluring to my son than baseball or hide-and-seek.
Child’s play in the yard stopped, and it became a desolate place begging to be
filled with savory herbs and vegetables.
Now, I move alone through the rows, staking the Melrose peppers so that they
don’t tumble and snapping a few hot Thai chilies for dinner. Butterflies play
tag on the lemon balm, and I try not to brush them off because they aid an abundant
crop. My boots leave deep prints in the dark prairie soil, fertile with loads
of organic compost that I spread myself by hand. The air seems soft, and I feel
myself breathing deeply in three-quarter time. After eighteen years of being
on call as a mom-cook-barber-chauffeur, I now imagine the entire world that child
rearing had erased . . . a life of lazy brunches, midnight soirees, and solitary,
month-long trips to Africa or Europe to learn new languages or study culinary
history. My hazy future on the other side of motherhood beckons.
Surveying the tomatoes, I realize that they need tending even though they’re
nearly grown. Their creepers feel strong as limbs, and they threaten to overshadow
the other plants. As I tie back the unruly vines, I reflect that parenting is
the most difficult form of cultivation, requiring endurance and steadiness and
endless patience that vegetables with their brief seasons don’t demand. Then
my mind turns round and round, as it so often does when I’m gardening or meditating,
and releases the words of a favorite writer, Jalal Al-Din Rumi, medieval Persian
poet, mystic, and Sufi:
The garden of love is green without limit
and yields many fruits other than sorrow and joy.
Love is beyond either condition;
without spring, without autumn, it is always fresh.
Perhaps Rumi intended the perpetually green garden as a metaphor for paradise
or for a divine love that transcends pleasure and pain; but at this moment, it
seems to me that his verse so completely describes parenthood: Though our children
disappoint us, delight us, break our hearts, and leave home to find new affections,
our feelings for them are intransigent.
Now my wristwatch reads twelve o’clock, and the noonday light penetrates every
corner of the garden, striking the tomatoes and giving them a fluorescent glow.
From inside the house, my son’s yell interrupts my reverie: “Hey mom, let’s
have lunch.” “Sure,” I say, “I am almost free.” Almost.
Copyright 2009. Ann Joachim. All rights reserved.