Graduation will fall on June 1. So little time until another school year is over. So much to do before it can be declared finished. For a senior sponsor, the to-do list looms in May like an avalanche about to come tumbling down. But beyond it, a measure of freedom. I’ve never needed a job to fill my days and afford me a sense of purpose.
The cold snap, which lasted nearly a week, proved a marked setback in the garden. There will be no peaches this year. My little Pawnee pecan tree, newly planted, shows no signs of leafing out a second time. Two roses are dead - the only hybrid teas - Memorial Day and Lasting Love. Standing over last year’s crimson rose, now a thorny gray fork, I promise the green-leaved clematis I planted to twine among its branches a more reliable support. The three-year-old variegated dogwood seems to have succumbed, along with the “hardy” rosemary I bought a couple of years ago. Other plants struggle to recover. The Weeping Japanese Katsura’s arcing branches have one or two living leaves here and there, as do the red twig dogwoods. Others are in a similar state. I’m going to give the “dead” things a few more weeks before I pull them out, just in case they are still mustering the wherewithal to try again, somewhere deep inside themselves.
I am struck by the lessons the garden offers about timing. Plants gradually hardened by coming winter endure much deeper cold than plants leafing out in spring, kissed back to life by lengthening days and warming sun. Spring’s new growth makes them vulnerable to sudden killing cold. Life, too, can work like this.
My neighbors covered a number of their plants with plastic on the eve before the frost - those would be the neighbors who put out rubber snakes to scare the birds away, as if we had a shortage of real snakes, or as if the rubber ones could terrorize the goldfinch and the robin when real ones obviously do not. I have so many plants, I would not have known to cover the pecan tree but not the new apple trees or the new currants and gooseberries. Instead I watched what lived and what died, and learned what the frost had to teach.
It is the wild things that handle nature best. The stonecrop is about to unfurl sprays of white along the garden path while the native phlox paints blue stars among the last of the daffodils. I think I’ll give the garden over seasons to the wilder things that have resilience scripted into their nature. Cold snaps have always nipped buds and threatened crops. There’s really nothing new about a killing frost in spring. What evolves is my sense of myself in the garden. I am less the artist, less the designer, than the bumbling apprentice, and my teachers are the frost and sun and soil, the yellow leaf and the green one, the rain and the dry spell, the forest’s edge, the birds, the insects, and the cottontails that cavort at dusk, promising to share my lettuces.
I’m postponing my spring wildflower walk until next weekend.
The weather’s not quite right. First there was the storm that brought the cold.
Today there is the snow.
I had something a little different in mind 
.
“We need a picture of you when you were a cheerleader,” my student told me, sharing the idea for the feature article. We’re getting pictures of Mrs. M and Ms. S, too. Then we want to take pictures of all of you in our cheerleading uniforms - then and now.” She was all enthusiasm.
I tried to envision me in a cheerleading uniform now, with a little shudder reserved especially for my thighs.
I wasn’t a real cheerleader. I was never a ribbons and bows girl, a doer of back flips, or a death-defying flyer atop a tower of girls. We were a simple lot, we cheerleaders at a tiny school in the mountains. Our mothers made our uniforms, or we did - I made mine - and we jumped and whooped and hollered and performed maybe a dozen simple cheers. I was a cheerleader because cheerleaders got to go to all the basketball games, home and away, and I could jump and yell “Umph! Ungawah! Falcons got the soul power!” better than I could shoot a basketball in a game.
At one time, there was a picture of me in a cheerleading uniform, back in 1974. I can almost remember it. My hair is long and straight, a bronze-streaked blond I will never see again except from a bottle. The uniform is a simple, solid maroon jumper over a gold shirt. I look as if I might have crawled right out from under a collard leaf, so unsophisticated am I in this picture, at thirteen years old.
Dutifully, I looked through two albums tonight, though I haven’t seen this picture in years. Sure enough, it is not there. It may be in one of my mother’s albums, back in the mountains, in her house not a mile from the smallest school in the entire state of Georgia, where I was, for one whole basketball season, a cheerleader.
I noticed, as I scanned photograph upon photograph, that the old Polaroids - the ones we children loved to see pop out from the camera, the images emerging from the smelly film like ghosts to become bright familiar faces - are growing dark now. We are all receding, as if someone is slowly dimming the lights around birthday party tables and some lasting night is falling over the lake, the mountain, the pasture, and the horse I used to ride in midafternoon.
My children are close enough to grown up for me to begin thinking of what kind of house I’d like to live in after they are grown and gone. For now I live in a 1640 square-foot, story-and-a-half house at the back of a subdivision on the outskirts of a small town. The lot is a half acre - big enough for a bit of gardening, but not big enough, given zoning laws, for a couple of pygmy goats. But it’s also all I can take care of by myself and somewhat more, at least while there are still teenagers at home who make more messes than they clean and only sporadically help with mowing.
When the children are at their father’s house, much of the house is unused. I occupy my bedroom or the eat-in kitchen. The living room is a vaulted space I walk through to get from here to there. It would be attractive if I had the means to make it so. I might like it better if I had been able to afford an area rug to anchor the furniture and visually warm the room, or if the furniture weren’t the wrong pieces for the space, or if the cat had not shredded the corners of the couch and loveseat, but right now, with the shared family computer in one corner serving as a magnet for teen detritus, the space just doesn’t make me happy, and when I’m here alone, I zip through it, scarfing up the latest soda can or glass of juice on the way to the kitchen.
Even a year ago, I still hoped that I might not spend the rest of my life solo, but there’s now a feeling settling into my bones that solo I will likely be. So when I think of 1640 square feet in five years or seven, 800 or 900 of them seem superfluous, a burden to carry in the form of a mortgage. I’ve thought of downsizing to a different sort of house, a house that fits one person like a glove, an indoor/outdoor house that takes advantage of solar design and otherwise minimizes energy dependence. There would be a small sun room and a screened sleeping porch and a basement with an old-fashioned root cellar. The heart of the house would be a downstairs kitchen and living area in one open space and an upstairs devoted to a single bedroom, closet, laundry and bath.
On the other hand, in five or seven years, all the planting I’ve done here will be taking shape, and there really will be a little Eden flowering in the back yard (no doubt complete with generation upon generation of resident snakes and Japanese beetles in June). Currants, gooseberries, grapes, blackberries, blueberries, peaches and apples will grow there for the picking. A raised bed vegetable garden will supply a bounty of fresh food I don’t have to buy at the grocery store or the local co-op. Stonecrop and creeping thyme will have filled the spaces between the path stones in the kitchen garden, and I will be loath to leave this little world I’ve made, over-sized house aside. I’ve never lived any place long enough to plant a garden and see it grow. All I have to do to keep it is manage to meet the mortgage payments, whatever else I have to forgo. After all, I liked the house enough to buy it in the first place.
I’ve thought of house sharing as an expedient option, but can’t envision whom I’d like to share a house with by way of renters picked up out of newspaper ads. Practicality would dictate sharing it with somebody who is handy around the house, who shares an interest in gardening but not in telling me how to do it, likes to mow the grass, and cleans up after himself or herself in the kitchen.
Practicality, in and of itself, makes me shudder, and so does the idea of living with any someone who can pay rent. It might be different if my work did not involve navigating hundreds of human interactions daily, but, as is, I need sanctuary at the end of a day.
Living arrangements for the second half of life intrigue me. When you’ve been on your own for a while, you balance loneliness with an appreciation for your own autonomy. You like doing things to please yourself, and you know you couldn’t do, anymore, without a room of your own and time to yourself. At the same time, friendship, conversation, and intimacy are a goodness so deep you feel them in the marrow of your bones, and living without them makes life comparatively hollow. So what would a good arrangement for living be, if you could move heaven and earth to make it so and populate your life with the people you really like? Are friends or lovers or partners best as nearest neighbors, just a stone’s throw apart? Is my best proposition actually, won’t you be my neighbor?
This is entirely fantasy and speculation - a mapping of the psychological tension between independence and intimacy in the psyche of a middle-aged woman, not something that I have any real view toward achieving. But it seems to me now, at a few days short of 46, that life could be optimal if it could be partly shared and partly independently lived and that either one extreme or another is a diminishing of life’s potentialities. The first extreme is the psychological isolation I’m weathering now as a single parent of beloved but sometimes taxing teenagers who care mostly, at this stage, for the company of other teenagers. That isolation is complicated by the fact that I live far from those few adult souls with whom I find real resonance. The other extreme is that theoretical possibility I opted out of once - the tethering of the self I am independently becoming to accommodate a three-legged journey of togetherness in some direction I may or may not want to go. Deal is, the people I’ve found interesting and dear over the past few years are the sorts who, at midlife, can’t envision a three-legged journey of togetherness either. In truth, there’s lots of room between these extremes for people to work out happiness.
The flat-footed fact of the matter is that I cannot move heaven and earth, not by myself anyway, and so, for now, I think about whether to try to stay in this house or to resituate myself a few years from now in a much smaller one better suited to my means and ends. I’d just have to start that garden over again one more time.