Gardening is much like jazz. You go out to prepare a potato bed and end up moving your compost pile to the other side of the yard. Looks good, much better than before, but that took awhile. OK, let’s clear big stuff out of the nearby alley — but wait. The strawberries need mulching, the asparagus staking, the grape trellises straightened. How did grass and dandelions creep back into the raspberries and the blackberries?
When I finally get to that alley, it’s more jungle-choked than I’d foreseen. Head-high burdock, meadowsweet, wild grape, bull thistle, and more stretch along the entire cement block wall. Take a deep breath, pull on gloves, go for it. Is that Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass I hear playing loudly in my head? Those sun-bright brasses give courage for tackling all this green. (This is pure mental music: no headphones, no Spotify, just memory.) Yo! Rip, yank, pull. Such a full riff of fractious green notes. Soon I’ve pulled out a massive heap of green nearly as high as the car. I raise both arms in triumph. This green manure would overwhelm our little compost pile, though, so I heave it into the hatchback of the ole Matrix, and deliver it to some nearby goats with whom we’re on good terms.
By the time I’m back, the sun is high. The kind of sweat that makes your hippocampus grow rivulets down from the edge of my cap. I blink my stinging eyes.
Now it is important to let you know that neither the alley nor the place where the asparagus and strawberry grow, nor the bed where my treasured native rattlesnake readies to bloom, are on our property. We currently live in a very small town yet we’re highly urban with six boundary neighbors, half of whom have big, bounding dogs (Otis, Scooby, Eddie). Three kinds of fences and a white cement wall form the “mine/yours” lines. What a reminder that we’re all in this life together! We all play to different tunes depending on where time catches us just now: one family of neighbors (with a trampoline for a boundary) has newborn triplets (and a toddler, a pre-school, and a middle schooler); another household with an amateur painter manages a blended family and late life romance.
One backyard neighbor (when I dared to ask) allows us ground behind his shed for a vegetable garden. That neighbor feeds squirrels; he and his wife drive all over Michigan to fish. That sunny June garden features a rambunctious mixture of spring cover crop, squash and potato plants just now stretching out their first leaves, and sweet/sour rhubarb right at its peak. This weird mix somehow catches the beat just right. We miss neighbor Bob who just moved from a rental apartment in the big, blue house. He gave us tips for everything from tree trimmers to hair salons to handymen. Bob is a porch sitter, a world watcher, and a neighbor greeter. He’s seen a lot of life. He’s a veteran. He likes cats.
Such neighborhoods are everywhere and always. Robert Frost reminded us that good fences make good neighbors. And, in the here and now, they keep Otis and Scooby at home. (Eddie pulls his family around on a leash.) Each and every one of us, you know, lives in a neighborhood whether it’s bounded by 80 acres of land you own or by a thin wall of your neighbor’s refugee tent. In the Republic of Congo, Gaza, or Green Bay, neighbors everywhere make a life together under the same sun, on nodding terms with the same plants, birds, and weather. Do you know your neighbors? It sure doesn’t matter on the daily whether you share a love of karaoke or dominos — or not. On the daily, what matters are the chuckles you share, the glasses of sun tea, the chats when you run into each other at the PO.
So get out there on these longest days of the year and lose yourself to high summer. It doesn’t matter whether you garden or not, the faithful sun will be there encouraging both working and dreaming. Let your mind drift toward something wild or least off-beat: it’s your turn to solo. Be loud and surprising …. I saw at least five kinds of mushrooms this morning. Maybe I’ll become a late life mycologist. I’ll start by rereading Merlin Sheldrake’s “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures.”
All day every day each of us heads out with our “lead sheet,” a plan for our daily music; sometimes we end up going way off score, drawn deeper into the day itself. Maybe you’ll end up slumped on a patio chair, so dazzled by the sun that your eyes glaze, and the world fuzzes, colors, and deepens. The slightest breeze matters. This is the place where the best jazz solos form. Doing all this first thing in the morning is highly recommended whether you’re 8 or 88. (I will admit that those between the ages of 18 and 68 may be harder to convince that dawntime is worth participating in.)
At the far end of the alley, I sniffed out what I yet couldn’t see. Some catnip was growing there in profusion. I pulled off lots of long sprigs for the cats. Guaranteed it will hop them up on summer too — they’ll soon be rolling around on the nip, high on green fumes.
A naturalist friend is coming to dinner. I’m not sure what’s on the menu but it will involve notes of dill and basil, rhubarb and parsley, all currently trumpeting away out there under the sun in the little borrowed garden space.
Open the door, head outside, come alive. The sun is waiting, the music is contagious. If it’s Saturday morning in C’ville, hustle right on down to the Farmers’ Market. Start your jazzy, Amariachi day with your neighbors who grow real food and make real things with their hands. See you there.
Dr. Helen Hudson, a former Crawfordsville resident who now resides in Michigan, continues to contribute her column Real Food.
