Petites Fleurs

In early spring the landlord asked if we were going to do a garden in the raised bed behind the house. He said this while we were standing in the backyard, looking at the patch of naked earth. I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I picked up a dirt clod and let it fall from my hand. I told him we’d think about it.

The next day, after I’d forgotten all about it, he came over with a bundle of bamboo poles. “You can use these for the peas.” He said. “Sure,” I said, not quite sure what he was talking about. I left the bundle of bamboo poles leaning against the wall by the back door.

The poles stayed in their bundle for a few days until I crossed the small backyard one afternoon at midday and almost ran right into the landlord emerging from his garage, paint-spattered and in the rollicking good humor of someone who’s been getting things accomplished. I’d been inside trying to pull a composition class together on the computer all day.

“You want seeds to plant?” He asked after greeting my daughter who was also tottering around the backyard in equally good humor, despite her having accomplished nothing that day. “I’ve got plenty of seeds. I’ve decided I’m not going to mess with a garden this year, so I figured you guys could have my seeds…if you want ‘em.”

This was getting to be a bit much. So I worked myself up into a polite refusal, but my voice took on a discordant, complaining quality and I came off sounding like I was afraid of the work, rather than being too busy and just not interested—which, I guess is sort of the same thing. When the landlord tried to wear down my resistance—probably noting how easy it would be to do—so, I turned treacherous and told him to talk to my wife.

“Um, yeah, maybe,” I responded, edging toward the door. “Gina usually does the gardening. I’ve been pretty busy. I’m not sure when I’ll have time and she’s usually the one…I’ll ask her.”

All this awkward dithering really wasn’t my fault. It was the result of a communication problem that’s grown up between generations. My landlord’s generation seems to prefer the straightforward approach, where my generation seems to have developed a less-than-confrontational approach. It’s something you’d read in a sociology textbook. For example, how in some cultures, it’s considered rude to say ‘no’, how there are all these ways of ‘signaling’ a negative response without actually saying the word. Those familiar with the culture recognize the signs, while those who aren’t familiar with it will plow through until they get the word they’re looking for. I felt like I was being forced into a ‘no’ I didn’t want to say or couldn’t culturally, I mean.

Not that I cared about trying to do a garden. But the previous summer, the thing had been a hell of a flop. After we’d planted the seeds, I’d watered weeds for a few weeks before we pulled ‘em up and planted starters that reluctantly took off and then, overnight, went to seed and grew faster than the weeds had, hefty as they were with bitter herbs and greens and then we ended up eating these strange stews all winter trying to finish the stuff off.

I was also having a hard time working up an interest in a garden because I didn’t even know if we were going to stay. There was a good job in Ukraine that I’d been going back and forth on until I finally decided just to apply and then just to poke the right people for references and then just to do an interview and then just to answer some more essay questions and prepare for a second interview. I had been hoping, for my family’s sake, to sort of haphazardly stumble into this job and into a new life back overseas, but the process was getting so drawn out and all these doubts had begun to creep in and I’d had to keep talking about living in Kyiv, which was driving my wife crazy.

Every afternoon, when I’d finished administering life support to my online classes, I was taking marathon bike rides in attempt to clear my head and figure out if I should continue to pursue the job in Ukraine. I was becoming terrified of getting it and, at the same time terrified of refusing it for fear of turning down something so obviously ideal. I rode along the bay, out to Manila and past this wreck of a beach house that was for sale for an insanely low price. I’d get off my bike and go into the backyard and pretend I’d bought the place. I’d look out over the garden and imagine planting a garden my own way, with no landlord giving me bamboo poles. I saw myself building green houses to grow peppers and tomatoes and not having a plot bristling with nothing but tough and stringy dinosaur kale.

The beach house was dumpy enough, I could’ve afforded it. The roof sagged. The wall sockets all looked fried and it was in a tsunami zone that I think couldn’t be insured. Not that I was really planning on buying it, but thinking of buying it and all the work that would have to be done kept my mind off the Ukraine thing. It was nice to think of my daughter growing up close enough to the ocean to hear it when the tide was up.

After a month of long bike rides and indecision, I asked to withdraw my application for the job in Ukraine. I think the deciding factor was the idea that I was going to have to either sell or store the damn washing machine and dryer. For some reason, that detail, more than anything, made the potential move this awfully insurmountable thing. It wasn’t the corona virus or the idea that we’d move only to be quarantined somewhere else, or, worse yet, that we’d clear our home out and be told we couldn’t move—those things were secondary. Mainly, it was the damn washing machine. Just thinking of touching that thing made me feel tired and apathetic.

Probably the day after I withdrew my application, I came home and found Gina had gone ahead and started the garden. The soil had been drawn into rows, the hose was out and the box of seeds the landlord had brought over was in the grass next to a small gardening shovel and a couple of earthen pots that, at various times had furnished us with basil for a month or two before the plants died. The lawn smelled like cold water warming in the sun and my daughter was running around naked, her mouth lip-sticked with dirt.

I could’ve stayed to help, but I needed to reconcile myself to the Ukraine decision and I went camping for the night instead. I hoped that I’d be able to come back after a night in the woods with a better understanding of my own mind.

Of course, when I came home, the next afternoon, I still had no idea what my mind was nor about what I wanted, but the garden was fully underway and since I felt bad for shirking it for so long, I decided I’d try to put some work into it. I turned the hose on and stood there, watching the wind catch the spray and blow it against the house.

In case you’re keeping score, this is a full six weeks after the landlord had approached me and dropped off the bamboo poles. I couldn’t help but to think he was watching me from his window thinking “that man is either the stubbornest or the laziest son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever met.”

Once I got started and avowed to make it a decent garden, there never seemed to be enough to do. Or maybe I never knew what to do. My friends who plant gardens talk of being in the garden all day. I imagined them on a Sunday, sun hat on, phone turned off, sun tea brewing in a glass decanter on the lawn, doubled over and grinning with the worthwhile exertion, ankle deep in dirt. But when I tried to emulate my friends’ assumed example, I’d roll up my sleeves only to pull up a few weed sprouts, spray the mess with a hose and look around and realize there was nothing left to do and I’d only been outside five minutes. I had to keep asking my wife “what now?” Until she finally just went out there with me, tired of being bothered.

When we were both looking at the pea sprouts and trying to figure out what the bamboo poles were for, my daughter ripped up all the mint we’d grown and ate the plants, stalks and all in great nervous gulps, the way a dog eats grass when it has a stomach ache. The mint was about the only thing that seemed to have been growing and now it was gone. We went back inside without determining what to do with the bamboo poles.

I can’t say I ever figured out what to do, but I began to appreciate the process of trying to figure it out. I’d go out, stare at the dirt, imagine things growing, wave the hose around, pull a few weeds and call it good. It gave me an excuse to stand around outside with my shoes off and lie down in the grass afterward, even if it didn’t look like much was happening.

That is, until this Mickey and the Beanstalk morning when I went out and found that the patch of dirt was turning into something resembling a garden. I half-considered going over to the landlord’s and asking him what he thought of my efforts, but then realized how obvious that would seem and decided to wait until we both happened to be in the backyard and then I’d very casually say something like “Yup, figured I might as well put those peas in the ground.”

Late May, it turns out, is a very fecund time. Only a day or two after the garden began to emerge, my wife decided to take a pregnancy test. Two blue lines, like filament, gradually bloomed over the paper in the plastic wand and, after that, I took my gardening duties more seriously. It was my only means of cultivating the spirit of things and preparing for the future.

Through May and into June, I weeded, unraveled the hose, and raveled it back up again; I even offered to mow the landlord’s lawn to extend the work that seemed to spill out of the garden right up to my door. I weeded areas in the yard that didn’t need weeding. I pulled up all the horsetails up by the driveway and I raked up the rhododendron blooms that had encrimsoned the yard. Some days, I just stood out there like a scarecrow, looking over everything, grasping the earth with my toes and sighing.

The winds over the ocean grew in constancy until the spring was being blown away by gusts in the afternoon and freshets all evening. Sometimes, at night, I could hear the ocean roaring even after the wind quieted down. It was hard not to think of those dark waves rolling out of the Pacific, swollen from the waters of the Yellow River, the Lop Nur, the Syr Darya, Volga and the Dnieper River running out of Ukraine, draining toward me. Something in that hollow booming of the tides resounded with the lives I had evaded to get to where I was.

I hadn’t been offered any work for the fall. The budget was being cut, classes were being reduced. The fall schedule came out without my name listed with a class. Had I given up a good opportunity to stay here with this billowing salt wind? This resting place of the world’s rivers and wind? As often happens in the summer, the landscape seemed to whither, the roads out of the area successfully closed off, blocked by wildfires and landslides. I stayed huddled near the garden in the daytime and went back to taking long bike rides in the evening. The derelict beach house had sold, or, more likely, had been repossessed by the bank. The ‘For Sale’ sign had been replaced with a ‘No Trespassing’ sign. I rode by without stopping, doing the whole circuit around the bay, just pedaling without trying to get anywhere.

One day, after a long bike ride, when my daughter was in bed, I went out to rake up the rhododendron blooms in the last hour of sunlight and found the bush was green and the blooms were gone. There were only a few left on the ground. Enough to pick up with my hand and throw over the fence and even that felt redundant.

I woke up the next morning and stared at the garden. There was nothing to do there, so, I took my daughter to the park. She likes the swing, so we hung out there. Every time I’d try to coax her into playing on something else, she’d shake her head and kick her feet until I thought “Why am I bothering her? She likes the swing. Let her stay on the swing.” I felt like such an adult, trying to coax her into my world of slides and jungle gyms, thinking there was something wrong with just staying on the swing. I didn’t want some communication problem to pile up between our generations.

While she swung, I let my mind wander around, out over the ocean, which was already starting to unravel a band of gauzy fog.

We walked home, stopping to pick and eat blackberries and wave to the cows lowing softly in the fields already covered in afternoon fog. I opened the door and heard my wife was sobbing. We came in the house and found her sitting on the border between the laundry room and the kitchen on the floor. My daughter ran up to hug her with blackberry-stained hands. I stood in the doorway with my head down, listening to the anguish in her tears, knowing and being unable to know what it felt like. I joined my daughter in hugging her, all of us sitting on the floor and holding each other. Above us, on top of the washing machine, there was a little packet of cloth, tied up like a package; a little bow.

It was dinner time, but we all just sat around the rickety table, prodding our food around like they do in TV shows after an emotional moment. I don’t remember the transition to bed time, it was like we all just lay down where we were and slept with the fog buffeting the windows like moths trying to get at the light.

That night, I lay awake listening to the ocean roaring and I imagined it overflowing with the waters of the rivers of the world, streaming over the beach on the other side of the dunes and coming up over the fields, like a second, darker horizon bearing dark alluvial soil from all the world.

In the morning, we took our coffee out to the garden and had a small burial in an empty patch behind the staked pea plants. We pushed a few stones into the soil as markers.

We took the morning off and went to the beach. My daughter pointed to the dogs and the starfish and made excited noises. My wife and I smiled sleepily. The wind was always easy in the morning and the tide was down.

I got an email a few days later. The college was going to offer me a class for the fall and maybe an opportunity to do some other work. I started getting things together and stopped thinking much about the garden. I felt good if I remembered to water it once a day. By now, everything looked like it could take care of itself.

A week or two went by and then, one morning, after watering, my wife came in and told me a cluster of flowers was breaking forth from where we’d pushed the stones into the soil behind the peas. I went to look and found them flowing out of the ground, defying the wind that swept the ground around them. Glowing with life.

While I stood there gazing at these small flower buds rapturously, with tears dangling from my eyelashes, the landlord came by and said “Hey, Jonny! The garden’s looking pretty good!”