I have never, ever been particularly apt in the garden. I have tried. I'm not terrible. I've weeded and mowed and trimmed hedges. I even had a small vegetable garden when I was married that I was able to collect fresh carrots, lettuce, cucumbers, and onions from -- that is, until the local paper released the soil reports and I learned there was trace amounts of arsenic in it. Yuh hm. Yes sir, trace amounts of several elements "above recommended...guidelines for human health" (check this out) including arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury. Mmmmm, arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury salad! Yum!
But as for having flowers? Perennials, annuals? Trees, bushes, or house plants? No. I am one of those people who kills unkillable plants. I do not landscape (I can't now anyway), don't fertilize, I didn't even concertedly water my lawn back when I had one. (It helped that the neighbourhood had been built in a marsh, maybe.) I just couldn't be bothered and it never excited me. Sidetrack: now that I am older, I figure that when I'm even older it will and I will. But dead-heading and regular watering and attention to something OUTSIDE my otherwise distracted path? Mmno. Not for me. Yardwork? Mmno. Let's just say it's one of them make-your-weaknesses-your-strength areas of improvement that I've only moderately worked on.
With that in mind and understanding that it came from an I-dun-wannnnn-naa place in my childhood, you can imagine my disgruntled, objecting obligation to help my mom plant trees in the front yard one rather hot sunny day in my youth. Mom had purchased 5 or 6 little evergreen saplings and wanted to plant them at the crest of the half-acre of grass-only-bare yard. I don't remember much of preparation part of it. I just remember being on my hands and knees, in the grass, facing my mom, on her hands and knees, both of us bearing down for the task ahead of us. I remember the spade we shared, the root-bagged sapplings begging to be planted, the sweat pouring off our beet-red faces. We dug into the earth, ripping the grass at the circumferences we made for each tree, moving the black dirt with our spades, each claw or spadeful of dirt as satisfying as the next, and creating the crater where the roots of the sappling would nestle.
We worked into the mid-afternoon, perspiring and blackening our hands, setting the tiny little sapplings into their carved-out cradles, tucking them in with the dirt we had removed, patting the dirt down. We found our pace quickly and finished in good time. We did it. We got through a chore. Somewhere, at some point in the middle of the process I wanted to take the edge off of our tempers that I knew were secretly boiling and, knowing it would make my mom laugh (at least if for nothing because it would force an awkward ha-ha-ness) looked up at her with all the stupidness I could muster, and said, "We're bonding, aren't we!"
It worked. She chuckled whole-heartedly. I think, on a super side-ranging, emotion-be-true-to-Amy tangent, I had never quite clicked with my mother. Not in the emotionally-satisfying way a daughter like me needed, anyway. I commonly felt left hanging. As a child, especially teenager, I felt as though I needed something else, something more, not sure. Couldn't peg it then. And SURE the hell wouldn't have said anything about it then, had I even ventured to guess. But now I know it was a deep, personal connection I needed with her that I wasn't able to appropriate for myself. I got from my father, skewed as it was, because he was deeply emotioned and we could volley that back for each other. With mom, it was a little more difficult.
But she laughed. I got her to laugh. Totally worth the grunty, sweaty chore I had opposed in favor of sitting inside and doing, well, probably nothing. I didn't think we were truly bonding. Not the kind of bonding that is defined as basis for an ongoing mutual attachment or a close friendship that develops as a result of intense experiences, as those shared in military combat. But at least it wasn't nothing.
And for better or worse, the memory was forged.
A week later, my dad was mowing the lawn and, none the wiser to the teeny beebee trees my mother and I had planted, mowed them over.
Fast forward ten, twelve-ish years later. After the invention of Facebook. And FarmVille. I was married with kids. Mom had remarried. She was in the western states, I was in Canada. Life had settled down. She had built an amazing farm. It was expansive and self-operating. She had the latest, greatest, newest add-ons. Factories and rose gardens and crops galore. Trees of every kind ornamented all her sidewalks, paths, ponds. It was truly a site to behold, especially after having built up my own farm to start procuring FarmVille monies thinking I was really getting traction in the game. I was in truth impressed as hell. I think she was able to finally achieve the wealth she wanted in this alternate reality.
But it was something, even if incomplete, that we could share and spend side-by-side time doing from across the miles. And she could finally have the yard and landscaping she visualized. I followed suit, fishing and harvesting and buying and selling, acquiring things, too. The bigger house, the next acreage of land for planting, the farm truck, a tilapia pond, and finally, if not nothing, my own trees.
My daughters joined in on the building and expanding at random moments, too, using my account to play FarmVille when, one day, I sat down to harvest my crops and noticed all my trees were missing. I called my oldest over to investigate. She had gotten rid of them to do her own thing. My millisecond of frustration turned into wild, realized laughter. My mom and I could never catch a break. Whether virtual or real, we could not plant trees together without them going away some way somehow.
