MindSpinner

The garden doesn’t say that the tiny rosettes of sedum spreading like a green carpet come from my great great grandmother’s homeplace, now just pasture, still graced by cows, beside the motorcycle campground.

My garden doesn’t whisper that the bearded iris were my grandmother’s, growing on her hill beside the lake where I slip out onto water in the canoe come summer.

My garden doesn’t tell that the bushiest thyme now in the garden was a housewarming gift of seeds and a little pot (the only housewarming gift I got among all the letters intended to bring me back into line, from the only person who then understood) when I divorced the minister of the big Baptist church and moved to live quietly in a rented house beside a bean field, still in this small town. That year I heard Martina McBride’s “When God-fearin’ Women Get the Blues” on the car radio on a stretch of road where there was nothing to listen to but country music, and laughed and laughed until I could breathe again.

The garden doesn’t intimate what friend’s back yard the slender purple iris in the kitchen garden came from, or that I asked permission to dig up one or two, and wrapped them in moist paper towels and then foil to bring them home. It doesn’t tell how lemon yellow daylilies make gifts of themselves to friends who have gardens, too.

The garden can’t explain, either, that the Memorial Day Rose is planted in memory of my father, who is buried far away at Arlington, where I have not yet visited him after the horses and Taps and the rifles to say, though he cannot hear now, that I’m sorry, that I was mistaken not to tell him before he died, of my divorce, thinking his health too, too frail for the shock.

The garden doesn’t say that I’ll plant those heirloom yellow beans and a few stalks of corn this May to carry on the ritual of growing food as my mother and grandmother taught it to me when I was a girl, or that the eating of a little pot of beans or an ear of freshly pulled corn with butter and salt will actually be a communion that transcends time and place and even death.

The garden does not reveal that I love the purple rhododendron for all the rhododendrons that grow in the woods back home, and the dwarf peach trees for all the Georga peaches we peeled and ate, dripping with the sweetness of childhood in summer, at my grandmother’s house.

The garden does not tell why the stone path finally has to curve in a spiral to the center of the shade garden, and indeed I am only beginning to discern why. Do not ask me yet what will be at the center of the spiral. Sometimes, I think, a pool. Maybe that, but time will make it clearer. The garden will design itself. I listen for what it wants to be.

The garden is not expository; it will decline to explicate the metaphor that will become when this clematis, with its blue bells like soundless chimes, twines together this year with this fragrant rose.

It turns out that the garden isn’t just a garden, and it would not do for a landscape designer to design it for me and bring pots of plants on trucks to install on my behalf, not here or anywhere; it is an unfolding of poems with leaves for its pages and no words at all. I started to use the word “book” in the last sentence instead of unfolding, but “book” jars. This becoming garden is not linear from beginning to end, with numbers and a table of contents; it is more like a flower, petals around a center, and at the center, the secrets of the living seed and all the blooms that will be. To me, it speaks memory and metaphor and finally, perhaps, meaning; out of what was a bare half acre, I make spirit’s home.

“Would you like for me to fix you some breakfast?” I ask my daughter.

“Yes.”

“What would you like?”

“I don’t know.”

That’s the trouble with “I don’t know.” Stick with that answer long enough, and you go hungry ;->.

If my great grandfather had not been a generous man and an avid conservationist, one of my family might have built a house right here. Or a campground. Or whatever.

But my great grandfather loved the land of North Georgia (tales abound), and he wanted it restored and preserved as part of this nation’s birthright. During the course of his career, the Forest Service acquired much of the land that is now the Chatahoochee and Cherokee National Forests. Some of the land he gave himself, like Woody Gap (pictured above, photo by Jack Anthony), near the beginning of the Appalachian Trail in Georgia. Every time I walk there, every time I look to the valley or climb the closed road to the abandoned fire tower on Black Mountain, I am moved and grateful that this beauty belongs to all of us. I’ve never felt as if my birthright had been given away. There is a part of me - maybe that iota of Cherokee - that doesn’t much believe that land belongs to us so much as that we are stewards of it and that we share it with other creatures - in my case rabbits, the groundhog, birds and the occasional deer trying to maneuver through land now infiltrated by subdivisions.

The Bush Administration wants to sell 300,000 acres of National Forest in the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests in North Carolina. That’s more land than my great grandfather managed to acquire on behalf of the Forest Service in his entire energetic and visionary career. The ostensible purpose of the sale, according to Wampum, is to fund rural schools. Bull. If we restored a sensible tax structure and didn’t march off irrationally to fight unwinnable wars, we’d have enough money to fund rural schools. Funding rural schools is simply the most politically apt excuse available, intended to tamp down opposition.

The damage this administration wreaks on this country is every day deeper and more far-reaching. (Land sales and deaths in Iraq are irreversible.) I don’t feel that my birthright was sold because I can’t build a house at scenic Woody Gap someday, not as long as that land is safe for everyone. I’m misty-eyed happy to see people hiking or taking pictures or picnicking there. But I do feel that my birthright - our birthright as a nation - is being sold when our government parcels off and sells tracts of land in the middle of our National Forests to the tune of 300,000 acres in a single state.

The comment period regarding the sale of the land ends tomorrow. You can email SRS_Land_Sales@fs.fed.us. I hope you do.

My lunch is not usually something to blog about. Over the weekend, I grab an assortment of Lean Cuisines at the grocery store and maybe some Michaelina’s Sante Fe Rice and Beans. Some of the South Beach Diet stuff is OK or better - actual veggie portions are involved. If I run out of these, sometimes I pop across the street for a Gordita at Taco Bell. I have that down pat:

Lunch bell rings. Photocopy stuff for afternoon classes. Leave papers in office mailbox downstairs. Zip to Taco Bell and order Gordita. Pay. Use restroom while Gordita is being prepared. Grab Gordita from counter, zip back across street, swing by office to pick up copies and head upstair to classroom. Eat fast, wipe mouth, toss bag, and greet students at door. Elapsed time: 25 minutes.

But today I have a recommendation in the zappable food department: Stouffer’s Corner Bistro Panini (including Lean Cuisine versions). Taking the time to read the cooking directions pays off: you get a tasty sandwich with crunchy toasted bread right out of your microwave. Really. I know - how can you trust the recommendation of a woman who bolts Lean Quisine and Taco Bell Gorditas for lunch? But I can find corroborators, food writer Gwen Shoen at the Sacramento Bee among them.

This post confirms what we’ve always suspected: three men should not live alone together unsupervised ;->.