Despite the nightmarish news and our crushing fears about Covid-19, the freesias on my porch are blooming more gloriously than ever.
Nature cares nothing about our viruses.
This last week has brought some much-needed rain to our little patch of land in California’s Wine Country. Bud-break is happening in our vineyards. Asparagus spears are pushing up into the light from their secret hiding places underground. In the planting beds where I grow vegetables that live through the winter, I’ve been gratefully gathering broccoli, kale, beets and various bitter greens.
Self-isolating now with my husband, I get sustenance from my garden beyond the vegetables and herbs I go looking for every day. Every day holds a question about what to make for our breakfast, lunch and dinner.
My love of gardening has attained a new respect in our household, where, these past ten years, I’ve been a stay-at-home writer and my husband has earned our bread. When the news crested and he headed to the grocery store to stock up on supplies, I headed to the nursery for vegetable starts and seeds.
Growing food and flowers has always fed my soul. I feel a sense of reciprocity as I pull weeds and water the plants I want to nurture. I give to them and they give back to me. I can allow myself to believe that they, in this place where rain is scarce, are just as vested in my survival as I am in theirs. As a human being who lives above an aquifer connected to a well, I’m uniquely well equipped to give these plants what they need to fulfill their botanical destiny.
My life-long dedication to organic gardening has made me a friend to the bees, butterflies and worms. When sometimes I take off my gardening gloves, just for the feel of earth on my fingers, it’s like a premonition of some kind of idealized, Platonic homecoming.
It’s March 20th as I write this—and I’m trying to school myself to face each day’s cascade of horrible news with curiosity rather than raw, debilitating fear.
Maybe I’m not too scared now because I know we all get recycled and resurrected into new forms of life. We’re all as interconnected as the mycelial system of the mushrooms that thrive, proliferate and silently communicate underground—connected to each other and to every other living thing. We’re all part of this interdependent organism called Earth, even after we’re turned to ashes or compost, or six feet under in our graves.
The big question for me, today and every day, is how can I make the best use of this phase of my life-and-death, while this spark leaps from neuron to neuron inside me, animating the body that has been giving me a ride for sixty-five years?
Last year, a dead pine tree on our property was cut down and made into wood chips, which we spread over all the areas of our land we’re cultivating as gardens. In its afterlife as mulch, the tree is doing a brilliant job of taming the weeds. With something akin to the dedication and glory I felt while a nursing mother, those pine chips are harboring and delivering moisture for the fruit trees, flowers, berry bushes and vegetables that bring us nourishment and joy.
From my writing chair, I’m looking out at the shimmering, gray-green leaves of the olive trees we planted eight years ago, and the Santa Rosa plum whose branches are clothed now in lacy white sleeves of blossoms that will turn into luscious, deep-red fruit a few months from now. Would that I could ever perform such a miracle of transformation!
The other night, when the moon was full and all the news was filling me with fear, I allowed myself to be sleepless and let the moonlight wash over me. I hoped that quicksilver light might awaken the seeds inside me of books and poems still unwritten, and feelings of love and gratitude not yet expressed.
Every full moon harbors the potential to be our last, because death is always at our side, faithful and attentive, watching and waiting for us.
This is the way for all living things. We’re not alone in our mortality. In fact, we’re not alone at all. I’ve never heard the freesias once complain about the brevity of their glorious season.
Copyright © 2020 by Barbara Quick