Portulaca

The days begin in the garden.  The days begin in the garden whether I am there or not, which makes this an excellent place to be in the mornings when the sun gets over the back fence and hits the front spinach.  Just the idea of things growing and photosynthesizing and recycling last year's tomatoes into this year's onions...well, it's good.  Actually, it's more than that.  Call me crazy, but call Wendell Berry first, because the great American poet would see in my suburban raised vegetable beds everything that needs to be said about the lifecycle and its ways and its lessons.

The most recent lessons came from cutworms.  Cutthroats they are, lepidopteran in origin, hellish in intent, wormy, grubby things...they laid waste to the first brave spinach and broccoli seedlings I planted in February.  Where did I go wrong?  Or, an equally sensible question, what did I do to deserve this?  Actually, aside from the anthropomorphic and it's-all-about-me perspective here, I may have played a part.  First, there's the rush.  I proudly grow a cover crop, a density of tall grass and legumes that soldier on through the winter months until the suburban garden crew and I, following an awkward Spanish-English colloquy, move the stuff on to the next stage.  The gardener pitchforks the grassy stuff under and over, roots in the air, leaves underground...and everything composts into spring soil.  This process is normally fairly speedy, but this year's cold and wet weather slowed things down just enough for me to get impatient. 

I can see now that the wiser course would have been to leave the garden alone, to let things to compost for another week or two.  And then there are the chemicals.  Five pounds of not terribly organic fertilizer from the local garden store, envisioned as a fast way to make the cover crop decompose, well who knows?  The microorganisms may not have liked it.  The earthworms may have staged a work-to-rule action.  Hard to say.  It all went on underground.  Including the cutworms.  I only saw one of the latter, dug up by Marlou.  She found the cutworm right where the gardening book said it would be, near one of the lettuces it had just devoured, barely underground, soporific from overeating, and remarkably tough.  Level the pointed end of a trowel at one, and you'll discover that it's not so easy to cut a cutworm.

And so life and events brought me to the morning's Portulaca seeds.  They were sitting in a paper packet in front of the Romanian hardware store at 8:30 this very morning as I buzzed by, the buzzing being a function of wheelchair batteries and caffeine.  Nothing like a latte at the bookstore café in the center of town to get one going.  Nothing like going out of the house to get one going, particularly when staying at home isn't working.  My concentration has been off.  Dawdling has been on.

The first suburban commuter train blows its horn in a muted, hour-appropriate way, about 5:10 each morning.  Actually, it takes a German genetic heritage to conceive of "about 5:10," as though 5:09 would represent a significant difference...but never mind.  Minds awake at anything 5 a.m.-ish are awake, and unfortunately, they are awake for good.  I can tell that Marlou is awake too, but the fantasy persists that over the next hour or so sleep will return.  And when it doesn't, what is there to do but get up....  Just in time to see Marlou take a Kleenex to her morning nosebleed.  She already has the laptop computer up and going, typing with one hand, absently daubing with the other.  This fairly minor side effect of chemotherapy hardly fazes her, and the aplomb is natural, and the nose bleeding is trivial.  And I need to sit by the garden.

There seems no end to our physical decline.  Now it's Marlou's turn, but spinal cord injuries being what they are, soon it will be mine.  It's all merging together, chemotherapy hyping up Marlou's gastrointestinal system here, haute cuisine blasting mine out of control a couple of months ago in France.  It's depressing.  No it isn't, it's life, the passage of time, bodies living longer on a mass scale than at any time in human history.

Which is the sort of truth I can only discover outside, away from the marriage crucible, close to the spinach.  Close to the truth, that's what happens at the sunniest end of the raised bed where a single sunflower has flung itself out of the ground.  Actually, I've flung more vegetables out of the ground recently than I care to admit.  The green thing popping up where it shouldn't, by the lettuce...which is actually endive...needs to be plucked out, being an intruder.  And once the weed is gone, my memory returns, sparked by the close resemblance between weed and onion.  The week is an onion, not a weed.  But my memory is definitely weedy, having planted a bunch of spring onions in one row in one bed.  And having apparently forgotten the second row...planted by the four-year-old next-door...or maybe planted by me or Marlou...in the other bed.  Actually, things coming into focus, that endive may actually be another form of chicory.  I was lost in a sort of botanical haze when I bought the stuff from the open air Sunday market one rainy Sunday in February.  Now I am more than lost.  More to the point, things that were once being cut down by cutworm, are exploding with botanical life.  There's going to be a garden, not to mention a salad, plus a full refrigerator vegetable bin, plus a wife pointing out the foolishness of planting crossed cauliflower-broccoli, particularly eight plants in an area suited to five...not to mention the effects of cruciform vegetable fatigue.  It's all out of control.

Which is about half of what Wendell Berry is saying in his book.  That I don't make things grow.  A higher power is responsible for that.  My job is to shepherd, steward, guide and protect.  To stand by, to stand watch.  Above all, to keep standing.  I won't stand for it...not being an option.

Marlou and I have reached the point of talking about death at the dinner table.  Once a topic of heartbreaking proportions, it's become something else, the notion of an end.  Mine and hers, they're both on the table.  Even the dinner table.  We don't know what to say, either of us, about facing this, the prospect of our mutual nonexistence.  All we know is that, barring a precision-guided double lightning bolt, we are unlikely to die at precisely the same time. 

The conventional wisdom is that Marlou will go first.  But unconventional wisdom has always appealed to me.  I keep thinking that I'd like to be buried in my garden.  Composted, decomposed, consumed.  To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, send in the worms.  Send away the embalming fluid.  And, being a true liberal and having considered the carbon-footprint angle on all this, no burning.  Best to share the carbon with carrots, tomatoes and whatever else might make effective use of my bodily remains.  The skeleton?  Duh.  You want to spend good money on the local nursery's bags of bone meal?

It's easy, says Bill, our accountant.  He is speaking of his near-death experience.  A couple of years ago, during an early morning jog, Bill's aorta separated from his heart the way an old hose breaks free from the back of your washing machine.  He's here to tell about it.  And we are here to listen.  Where is our money going?  Why are we, or aren't we, withholding this, that and the other?  Spend, spend, he says, regarding our current pattern of vacations and furniture purchases, and God knows what else.  He's in sync.  As Marlou puts it, Bill offers an authoritative source on both death and taxes.

Still, I'm tired of waking up early.  But waking up, or awakening, happens when it happens.  I didn't explain the Portulaca seeds and their ultimate disposition.  There's a tiny space between the raised beds and the adjoining concrete footpath.  Plenty of room for Portulaca.  It's a succulent, after all, a sort of small, spreading, blooming cactus.  Portulaca likes drought and harshness and thrives under tough conditions.  My kind of plant.