What Did I Miss?

it's easy to miss

 

 Sometimes, I find myself asking, "What did I miss?" 

I look over my shoulder to see where I have been, then I look in front of me and wonder how I got there. I feel like I have missed something. Some part of the journey. Not quite like I have been asleep, but maybe asleep at the wheel. 

When I was married to my ex-wife, my music collection stopped growing. She had the smallest collection of music of anyone I have ever known. She had fewer than a dozen tapes. No CDs. She didnt even listen to the radio. It was either her version of folk music or nothing. When I say her version, she was adamant that the only musician on that list were people like Bill Staines, Fred Small, Peter Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger... a very limited set of folk musicians. I figured if she liked that, she was sure to like traditional Irish and Scottish tunes. Nope. I tried again with more modern American folk musicians. Strike two. Our marriage fell apart while I was in grad school. On the drive eastward from Utah back to New York, I found myself listening to the radio and realizing I hadn't heard a song on the radio in over five years. What did I miss? Turned out, quite a lot. Some station outside of Denver was playing 'Where is My Mind' from the Pixies. I had never heard the Pixies. Then Led Zeppelin came on... with 'Whole Lotta Love'. My heart raced! Then the radio station played the Clash. 'Should I Stay or Should I Go?' I knew the answer to that one. My heart was in high gear, pumping in ways it hadn't for nearly half a decade. When I looked down at the speedometer, I was driving a whole lot faster than my beat up Ford had ever gone. Luckily, I-80 eastbound was empty that day. Strike three and I was out. 

After moving into the house we live in now, about twenty four years ago, the garden began as most gardens do. A quick attempt at a small fenced in square, rototilled and made to look orderly and ready to plant. You know, garden shaped. Dirt and everything. Every year we fought off the weeds and grew tomatoes and a few flowers. At the time, I was convinced that flowers were an abject waste of space and effort. If you couldn't eat them, they weren't important. I think back then, I enjoyed composting more than the "gardening" because it helped me vent some of my frustrations from the day job. 

Years passed as our pottery studio was slowly growing which left me less time to garden. The plants were tended to on occasion. Gardening was mostly weeding and waiting. For the most part, it was still mostly veg with the occasional perennial that a friend would bring by. Usually with the assurance that we couldn't kill it if we tried. That was how we ended up with some of the thuggiest plants known to mankind. But it gave the garden some color and some seasonality. 

In September of 2009, I went to the hospital for surgery. Things went sideways after the surgery. When I woke up from the coma, it had snowed. When I went into the hospital over a month earlier, it wasn't even fall. Time slipped. What had I missed?

By the time I made it home from the hospital there was snow again. A few more weeks passed and Thanksgiving rolled around. I was grateful to be alive, celebrating a holiday free from the hospital... and trying to figure out what this new life was going to be like. Every day involved physical therapy. Usually 1-2 hours of intense PT, followed by a half hour walk down our road. Most of my body was damaged during the stay in the ICU and it took a lot of work to begin to fix it. 

Spring rolled around and I was told not to lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk, for fear that I would herniate (yep, that happened too) or that I would set the healing back. I remember seeing the iris reticulatas come up that spring. Bright blue almost purple, against the grass dead-grey from winter. The daffodils came up a little later that year. By the time it was lawn mowing time, I had to hire someone to do the mowing for me. Without a care in the world, the lawn guy promptly mowed over nearly every garden bed we had. At the time, I grieved a little, mostly because it felt like such a waste of money. But it was easier to maintain our large yards as grass while I couldn't begin to bend down to weed. 

Each winter, I would try to schedule whatever surgery the doctors recommended (to fix all the stuff the original surgeon had broken)... and usually by late spring I would be able to be outside walking and moving... carefully. It took more than six years to finish the eight surgeries that it took to get me where I am now. At the eight year point, post-coma, I looked at the garden and decided to try again.

iris reticulata

 

That spring, I watched the iris reticulatas come up. The few crocuses that had survived being swallowed by the grass poked their heads up. Some of the daffodils were actually overdue for dividing. It said naturalizing on the package, but I dont think they meant abandoned. Bit by bit, things were dug up. Moved the remaining surviving plants around. I even discovered a tulip that a squirrel had moved over twenty feet from where I had originally planted it. There was even a small patch of siberian irises that hadn't completely died off. Surprise!

With the lawn guy kicked out, I started over. Beds went from being at soil level to being raised metal horse watering troughs. Changes like that meant I could garden without bending. That summer, I planted a few poppy seeds amidst my tomatoes in the raised beds. The poppies grew much faster than the tomatoes and flowered rich red while the tomatoes started building up a head of steam. By the time the corn poppies had finished flowering, the tomatoes were covered in tiny yellow flowers. I pulled out the poppies, spilling seeds everywhere. Down the sides of the beds and all along the path to the compost pile. I was starting to notice what I had missed.

That winter, I watched the garden asleep. I imagined being back out there in the warmth of spring. I dreamt of warm sun and bright flowers. So many things suddenly made sense. Spring and summer came the next year and more flowers joined the raised beds. Instead of waiting until mid-May to plant our veggies, I started planting peas as soon as the snow melted. The same day I planted peas, I sprinkled coriander seeds on the same beds. When the peas climbed their trellis, the cilantro would shoot right up alongside the peas. Eventually the cilantro would bolt and I would leave the flowers to go to seed. The pollinators started zooming around, right at head-height. It was incredible! Tiny wasps flitting from the tiny umbels of flowers on the coriander... and eventually other predatory bugs showed up to go after the few pests on the other crops. I planted a fall crop that year of kale and beets. Imagine my thrilled surprise to have tiny shoots of cilantro coming up from seed that had dropped earlier in the summer. Cilantro and kale and beets grew wonderfully together and kept us in herbs and green into the early winter. It never occurred to me that you could get multiple crops from one bed in one year. What had I missed?

About five years ago, I cobbled together a little bluetooth speaker that I could hang from the handles of the wheelbarrow. Suddenly listening to music in the garden became an option. Within a few days I noticed the neighborhood ravens were flying over more frequently. Then I noticed they had a preference for certain types of music. They loved the Clash. They didn't like sad-bastard-folky types. I started testing this idea to see if it really was more than just happenstance. I'll share more of the raven stories another time. Suffice to say, we learned that ravens like punk and rock n roll. On days when I didn't have the music playing, they flew over and heckled me (or anyone else in the garden). I don't think I ever imagined getting to know corvids well enough to know their sounds and behaviors. I've since learned that the ravens tell each other that there's music and someone in the garden. I wonder if they've missed me.

One late afternoon, probably four or five years ago, I heard a flurry of noisy cackling and chirping coming from the woods behind our studio. At first I dismissed it as noisy blackbirds or maybe starlings, but then I heard bluejays jumping into the mix too. Pretty soon, I could hear any number of birds, all in a bother. I set down my tools in the garden, walked around the back of the studio and tried to find the interloper. I was expecting to find a cat or a loose dog. Nothing to be found at ground level, but then I heard a buzzing overhead, accompanied by high pitched chirping. Looking up into one of our dead ash trees, there was a young, immature bald eagle, sitting on one of the highest branches. And it was being mobbed by two hummingbirds who were taking turns dive bombing the eagle! Zigging and zagging, dipping and diving! And to think, I nearly missed it! 

(if you go back to the photo at the top of the post, and look in the bottom right, you can see one of the hummingbirds, while the eagle clearly has his attention focused on the one who is actively buzzing around it)