When The Bee Stings

Meditations in January: Exit Summer

One of the most intense summers of my life– the summer of great expectations, sweat, tears, dehydration, many blisters and even more metaphors– ended months ago with our first real freeze, and has erstwhile been buried (off and on) by subsequent snow. We are halfway through January; last summer’s toil, heartbreak, and gifts have long since dwindled and dissolved to shadow– phantom omens (and promises) of what’s coming next summer. It’s been months since I’ve accepted that I can’t drive the truck full of compost over even the shortest muddy expanse of our little acre. Only the volunteer arugula in my graveyard garden persists, haggard but stubbornly green.

In this stark netherland of winter, my hibernating gardener’s heart might feel a bit chilled, a bit bleary, like a reluctantly falling last leaf: weightless, aflutter, completely blind in a frosty night breeze. 

Might, but doesn’t. Momentarily adrift, I am yet carried safely along. Glad spirits– Pollyanna and “The Sound of Music”– accompany me.

Who Goes There?

Glad spirits? This is an outrageous claim. And it won’t be the last. As my daughter Maurya points out, I make all the claims here with way too many metaphors. But last summer I lived so big! Worked so hard! Thirsted and hacked and dreamed and grieved, and now it’s winter, and the only proof that remains of all the former bigness are these ghosts, these whims, this assortment of jumbled metaphors.

So yes, Pollyanna.  Mary Pickford, one of America’s first silver screen sweethearts, played a cute, slapstick Pollyanna in 1920, blithely catching her auntie’s crocheting on her shoe and unraveling it all over the house, but it was the 1960 Disney/Hayley Mills confection — the wide-eyed, innocent, super glad, bow-bedecked, blond Pollyanna– that fused meaning to the name for the ages.

A Home For Pollyanna (At Seventeen)

Pollyanna was also once an ill-conceived nickname of my own– a moniker bestowed in the yeasty give-and-take of a tightly cloistered high school annual staff (I miss them now, wherever they are– those smart, derisive, light-hearted children). 

At the time, I resented the nickname. I couldn’t make sense of it, other than as an embarrassing exaggeration of my naivete and (relatively) good manners.   What did I have in common with the “all-in” Disney character– optimistic, kind, talkative,  “glad”?  While my seventeen-year-old self believed wistfully in optimism, it evaded her, paralyzed as she was by the sound and fury of her adolescent world (not yet aware that clamor usually signifies nothing– it’s the quiet things that matter most).  Literally and metaphorically near-sighted (I mean, seventeen! Who sees well at seventeen?), she was largely blind to the beauty and worth of the souls and experiences she lived amongst.  She wasn’t kind so often as she was nice (not yet knowing the difference)- she certainly wasn’t talkative, except sometimes at home with her sisters.  Rarely was she truly glad.

Let Sleeping Dragons Lie

And deep, deep inside that timid seventeen year old slept a secret dragon.  Keeper of all things snarky: rolling eyes, cat spit, tiny doubt pins with which to prick balloons of contentment.  A caustic, impotent cynic.  When the dragon awoke, her fretting and smoldering only alarmed my teenage self, who never let her out in public (because remember, I was at least nice, if not altogether kind). 

Pretty sure Disney’s Pollyanna didn’t harbor an interior dragon.  There were only two similarities between the glad and intrepid Disney Pollyanna and myself then.  Firstly, blondness.   Which blondness is said to lend certain nuances to the personality whose head is halo’d by it…but these are unproven, inflammatory theories, and should be studied further before we make reckless claims. (Said the blond.)

Secondly, I’m convinced any and all Pollyannas would have loved “The Sound of Music”, as I always have, and always will.

A Few of My Favorite Things

Even watching “The Sound of Music” today, I’m still smitten by the gradual love story happening between Captain Von Trapp and ex-nun Maria: eye twinkles and glances askance. Also delightful to me are the costumes (Maria and Scarlett O’Hara could collaborate on the curtains-to-outfits thing), the songs and dances and clever lines and bits of wisdom (how do you solve a problem like Maria? Just…don’t! And how does one find her dreams? Climb Every Mountain, y’all!). All set against a backdrop of haunting realities:  Nazi suppression– a sentient cancer, morphing into blatant aggression; sixteen-year-old Liesl’s blithe acceptance of seventeen-year-old Rolph’s proclaimed authority.  (Notice that he proclaims his authority rather than actual love before he kisses her… perhaps a subtle comment on Nazi immorality, or at any rate on Idealized Romance: a kiss is never really enough).  

The movie now is as germane, wise, and lovely as ever, with its shadows and burrs lending depth and perspective.  Painful things do this for us, I think.  They provide breathtaking context and contrast to what we might otherwise not notice as beautiful and sweet.

“My Favorite Things”, one of the songs from the musical, is particularly iconic. Nun-turned-governess Maria (who gamely endures first-day-on-the-job initiations such as pocket frogs and pine cone seats) sings it in a gutsy attempt to rally the Von Trapp children during a thunderstorm. “When the dog bites! When the bee stings! When I’m feeling sad.”  Instead of considering the bee’s sting or the dog’s teeth, Maria “simply remembers”  her “favorite things”: girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, snowflakes that cling to her nose and eyelashes. 

 “And then I don’t feel so bad!” she belts, her night-gowned arms flung wide.

The Glad Game

Such a simple answer to life’s problems: focus on gifts and goodness  rather than becoming overwhelmed by the adverse.  And plucky, given the skulking enemy presence in the musical’s plot, and what we know now about the outcomes of  the real-life skulker’s  policies and campaigns.  (Not to mention high school, murmurs the interior dragon.)  Some, including my hidden smoky cynic,  might see “My Favorite Things” as an idealist pipe dream, simplistic platitudes running roughshod over complexity, an escapist’s unwillingness to face and address life’s harsh realities (could be, we’ll see… might be fun, though).  

One way or another, “My Favorite Things”  is essentially a super-glad Pollyanna anthem.  Who (according to her original 1913 author, Eleanor Porter) was born 40 years too early to be a member of  the Von Trapp Pillow-Fight Club, and therefore is really the only missing child in the whole thunderstorm-favorite-things bed-bouncing scene (Liesl can just stay out in the rain, for all I care… consorting with that perfidious masochist Rolph).

Aside: Since after all these decades my inner cynic-dragon seems to be with me to stay, I’m assisting in her rehabilitation– hoping a day job will tame her.  She’s finessing her baking skills, anticipating that one day she will make it onto the Great British Baking Show, where she will… no, no, not tell off Paul Hollywood. No telling off, little dragon. Rather she will attempt to persuade Paul that after a certain point, interpreting the doneness of a bake becomes a dogmatic pursuit, and that he would do well to lighten up a bit, as it were.

So… does that work?  Could Pollyanna and Maria have reckoned well with The Really Tough Things, like plagues and genocide, depression and D-Day?  

And how would my interior dragon fare?  

Reality Has Teeth Too

This summer, my hills were not alive with the sound of music.  My heart was too heavy to sing like a lark that is learning to pray; it had dropped instead like a lead zeppelin at my first real horticultural encounter with our newly claimed dirt.  

In a world beset by incomprehensible tragedy, this comparably minor sort of heart wreck is impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t been dazzled by the potentiality of paradise, who isn’t called by the Good Earth to Till and Sow and Reap in it.  It would be, perhaps, akin to George Ezra actually having to give up his golden grand piano for one made of papier mache, or Mary Cassatt trading precise brush marks in oil for wilder–even frantic– strokes with pastels as she gradually goes blind.  Beethoven with his ear to the floor, his masterpieces thrumming soundlessly against his head.

I imagined myself as Matt Damon in “The Martian”, a marooned astronaut/horticulturist recuperating from interstellar wounds, attempting to grow a crop of potatoes, alone, on Mars.  

Life Is a Chair of Bowlies, Princess

Because: Alkali clay.  This is what I’m dealing with (not to mention an erratic growing season, grasshoppers, and massively entrenched morning glory, which I promise I will mention a million times, for the rest of my life). Our clay is the exact kind one receives– cubed and cool and dense– wrapped in damp canvas in high school art class at the beginning of the sculpture unit.  To be made into bowls and vases and death masks  (our grasshoppers and morning glory would give each sculpture a nice fossil finish).  This may not sound dire to some folk– after all, pottery is nice.  (Mary Engelbreit once said, on a greeting card, that “Life is A Chair of Bowlies”).  Some grasses will grow in clay soil (Matt Damon did coax life from those potatoes on Mars, for awhile anyway). 

But I lack a kiln; besides, I want bowls of cherries, not chairs of bowlies.  And so much more than a mere patch of struggling greensward.  

The Grave Digger

If my last summer were a movie, it would be named, “The Gravedigger”, for all the graves I dug in the clay– so that I could replace it with rich compost that I fetched truckload by truckload from the dump (another Martian strategy: free “compost”).  Large, shallow graves (two feet deep, four feet wide, twelve to fifteen feet long) for my vegetable gardens.  Innumerable deeper pot-graves for shrubs, fruit trees, and perennials.  All the graves filled with compost before I planted them.  

My neighbors thought I was a lunatic, because I was.  One was kind about my lunacy, saying that while he’d never wasted his own time on fruit trees in such clayey alkali soil, he had heard rumors of other’s success (maybe Pollyanna and Matt Damon are growing peach trees down the road). “You’ll just have to baby them, and then replace them every five or ten years”, he said, his eyes sympathetic but not at all encouraging.  

Another neighbor kept telling Frank that she was worried I’d kill myself with all the hard labor.   “Tell her she doesn’t have to get the whole yard in during the first year!” our new friend exclaimed.

And the Rock Picker (Gathers No Moss)

A couple other friends let me pick unwanted rocks out of their fields.  One said, “Yes, please, take as many as you want, but remember– no returns.”  Most everyone around here deeply resents the presence of native rock in their fields, but I– not having much of my own– eagerly collect them.  I use them to edge graveyard gardens, want them to line raised parterres, raised borders.  

Neighbors Clive and Michelle* (*names changed to protect the innocent) even helped me fill my truck with their rocks (they don’t want any back, either).  Clive, a bee-keeper and as manic a DIY-er as myself, deflected potential slings and arrows that yet another alarmed neighbor (we’ll call him Pete) had aimed at my folly. 

 “Who is that woman, picking up rocks at the Smiths?” Pete asked Clive.  

“Does she drive a red Tacoma?” Clive returned Pete’s question with one of his own.  

“Yes, she does!  You know her?  Does she have any idea what she’s doing?  Is she crazy?”  

Here Clive calmly kept the peace.  “It’s ok; she’s all right,” he said.  “Don’t  worry; she’s just using the rock for landscaping.  She’s ok.”  

People do landscape with rocks around here, but everyone favors the really big ones that you pay for a track- or backhoe to put in place.  I’m after the freebies, the ones I can carry by myself.

Mountains To Climb

My best strategy all summer was compost.   I brought home mountains and mountains of compost. But the compost had hot spots in it, I eventually discovered.  Through late spring and early summer, random seedlings and starts in my compost-filled grave-gardens would inexplicably shrivel and die. 

Late frost prevented timely planting; early grasshoppers devoured survivors of the chill and hot spots.  Morning glory erupted everywhere, its network of underground roots unstoppable. I planted many things twice, even thrice and times four.  Out of several packets of nasturtium seed, only one resultant plant was alive and well by the end of summer (nasturtiums are supposed to be so easy to grow).  Any and all darling buds were shaken by the rough winds of May and also June, July, and August.  Which wind twisted and toppled straggling pumpkin and cantaloupe vines upside down, tangling them and tattering their pretty leaves.  It flattened tomato plants and rudely disregarded the deaths of apple and pear and plum trees. My treasured refugee hazelnut bushes gave up the ghost.  Twice. 

Aside: They died.  But then they miraculously lived.  And then they died again.  But still, weeks later, I found them to be not “mostly dead”, but partially–sort of–alive.  Even now, I’m not sure what my moral/ethical response should be, as steward of these fragile, tenuous lives… I read on a Colorado gardening blog that hazels are “never happy” in alkali soil.  Well, neither am I, though  I wholeheartedly yearn for all of us to be happy, wherever we are.  Isn’t it wise, I asked the hazels, to root where we’re planted, to be glad where we stand? This is what Pollyanna did, at least until the moment she fell from her upper story window.

…And Climb…

And so the wind blew, and late frosts pivoted swiftly to searing summer temperatures, but rain it did not, month after month, though we all, suffering from severe drought,  watched and wished and prayed earnestly for rain.  My nephew sent my parents pictures of a nearby wheat field crawling with grasshoppers (my mother was sure they’d eat me). Local feed stores ran out of all forms of grasshopper “control” but the most insidious, which I could not bring myself to use.  Nothing I did, shy of intense and perpetual digging, could stop the morning glory– I eradicated mere square feet of it in the course of one week, only to see it grow back within the next. The irrigation was turned off over a month early away south of us, and smoke from fires in California and further northwest blotted the sky and stung our throats.  My wrists and hands and lower back ached from mountainous shoveling and wheelbarrowing.  

Frank got heat exhaustion, installing a drip irrigation system.  Nora got congested, pulling coccia.  

Both Meisha and Nora, after watching “The Biggest Little Farm” with me, kept reminding me that I, like the biblical Jacob and the untried keepers of the Little Farm, had seven years of this travail yet to endure. (“If only!” my secret smokestack snorted.)

When the Bee Stings

There was an actual bee sting.  It happened in a way Matt the Martian would appreciate: I was alone.  At the dump, shoveling compost into the back of the truck, sweat trickling down every part of me in the still, hot sunlight.  Both alone and indignant–even hurt– that the municipal system kept ghosting me. There was a way, I’d heard, that I could pay the city seven dollars to mechanically scoop compost into my truck.  I just needed to know where to pay, which day and hour  to be there– but no one ever answered my calls, no one was ever in the only office I was aware of, and so I went again and again to shovel compost  into my own truck.  Yes, for free… but at what cost!  Sometimes other customers would show up, and receive instant, convenient scoops from the skidster while I shoveled solitarily.  

But that day I was, as I said, alone.  Alone except for a single hornet, who arrived noticeably upset by my presence.  I have no idea where he came from, or what about me upset him.  He buzzed my head; I swatted him away.  He returned, belligerent, again and again.  In the face of his rising anger, I fled.  Which flight required leaping out of the bed of the truck into the mountain of compost, running through scattered compost into the empty parking lot– all the while swatting at my own head, where the hornet had focused the magnitude of  his buzzing rage– and finally flinging myself into the deserted municipal office just beyond.  

The office was luckily open, but dismal as a scene from the Twilight Zone (or Mars).  I could only hear my own labored breathing and the slight tick of a clock– the front desk chairs were empty; a big screen TV loitered lifeless and dark behind the silent counter.  Sweating and afraid and close to tears, I waited. Minutes crawled to a stop; the universe stood still.  I hoped, as I waited, that if I hid inside long enough, the hornet outside would forget his wrath and move on to other skies. 

Of course he didn’t; I was no sooner back in the truck bed with my shovel than he noiselessly– and from nowhere– descended on my bare head and stung my scalp.  I felt his soft hornet body dissemble when I swept him away.  

That was the final straw.  My heart hurt as much as my throbbing head.  I was completely alone in my pain and dismay and heartbreak– over alkali clay and morning glory and drought and smoke, over grasshoppers and hot spot graveyards and the sting and death of a hornet. 

Over the clean, rational, orderly life I’d left behind– every beautiful, vanished garden that had once been my own, the birthrights I’d traded for chairs of bowlies.

I stood in the back of the truck in the empty parking lot and wept.  For a minute.  But because crying doesn’t fill a truck with compost, and there was that mountain to climb, I began shoveling again, blinking the tears back.  

Mustard and Other Glad Tidings

Just as I was finishing, a van arrived towing a trailer full of green waste.  I noticed the load was almost entirely wild mustard– an annual weed, beautiful in its blooming yellow chartreuseness. Handfuls of smiling young folk spilled out of the van and began unloading the piled weeds.  Two young men noticed me and rushed over to offer their help.  They had name tags; I realized that the wild mustard was probably a missionary service project.  I felt embarrassed; surely they hadn’t seen from a distance that I’d been crying?  Surely I didn’t look so helpless as to warrant service projecting?  Nevertheless  I let them finish loading compost into my truck– about two shovelfuls each.  They smiled and small-talked and glanced at me with both gladness, and concern. 

My invisible cynic dragon labored with steam and smoke– “too little, too late,” she growled, discerning little volcano that she is.  

But  later, almost home,  my entire head on fire from the hornet sting, I was struck by the timing of my rescuing Pollyannas, their offering of help (and company) when I felt most bereft, most isolated.  I was struck by their kindness, their “gladness”, the irony and sweetness of their seemingly too-late rescue.   

Like my hazelnuts, I had died, but  nevertheless lived.

Girls in White Dresses (With Blue Satin Sashes)

A couple weeks later, I was back at the dump, shoveling compost into my truck.  Again I was alone.  Again, it was a hot day.  Again, suddenly, almost out of nowhere, an appearance— this time, a municipal waste employee.  He said, “You shouldn’t be working out here in this heat!”  My heart sank, fearing further reproof and possible dismissal, but then he said, “How much do you want?  A full load?”  He disappeared, returning moments later in a skidster. The magical skidster! With which he scooped two huge buckets of compost into my truck, filling the bed to overflowing in all of thirty seconds.  For free.  

Looking back, I realize that one doesn’t always recognize Pollyanna when she appears out of thin air. 

One day the neighbor’s goat began escaping her tethers and stake-outs.  These escapes became a pattern; she is, after all, a goat, and knows her business.  With every jail-break, she eagerly cleared two ditches and a little road to reach my graveyard gardens.  Miraculously, either Frank or I were always eye-witness to her illicit approaches; we managed each time to catch her just as her lips met a cucumber vine, a cluster of kohlrabi.  

(She quickly developed a crush on Frank, who was always gentle when he re-tethered her, or untangled her from her quagmire of rope and halter.)

This is where I recall finally awaking to the girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, the brown paper packages tied up with strings, the beauty of glad feet on the mountaintops.  Not just in the earlier Pollyanna-esque interventions, but also… Why did the goat cross the road?  Because she wanted my gardens! The vulnerability of my gardens had shifted from alkali clay, wind, shriveled starts, and grasshoppers, to the longings of a goat.

Paradise Found

And why did she want my gardens?  Weren’t they hopeless, a wasteland, a loserly, heat blasted failure?  I was surprised to acknowledge that in fact, they weren’t.  The goat desired my drip-irrigated compost-in-the-clay gardens because despite all odds, the gardens were growing— becoming lush, even.  Somehow in my hustle-bustle wheelbarrowing and mountainous digging, I hadn’t really taken note of the transformation.

There was that cucumber vine the goat kept trying to lip, loaded with yellow blossoms.  And the kohlrabi… I had planted a purple variety from an old seed packet and it was beautiful, the leaves a hazy cool blue edged with lavender.  The kohlrabi swam in swaths of bright-lit chard and red peppers and purple basil. There was miracle and wonder in big-leaved pumpkin and squash vines, finding their way again after being tempest-tossed and wind-swept.  While I lost half my tomatoes early on, still ground cherries crawled, and cherry tomatoes sprawled, all of them loaded with ripening fruit.  Beans that I had planted in desperation (nitrogen fixers that they are) were hung with plump pods, like little curled green bananas.  There were sweet, succulent peas, even in July.  Radishes happened overnight (as they will, but still!).  Surviving strawberries multiplied, and the zucchini outdid its own abundant cliches.  I might have lost most of my nasturtiums, but beets, arugula, sunflowers, and zinnias prevailed.   

I discovered the glory of rose orach leaves, backlit by a bright July morning.  

I had at least as much to celebrate as Matt the Martian, eating a potato on Mars.  

Deflecting the glad goat from their sanctuary,  I saw how all these survivors arrayed my graveyard gardens in the hues, forms, and textures of paradise.  It was magical.  A Favorite Thing, reincarnate.

And oh the tenacity of an apricot tree!  Mine is called a Mormon Apricot (another nickname) after those tough pioneers (also nicknamed, the grittiest of Pollyannas).  I see these trees everywhere in abandoned rock and clay fields, hanging on and even bearing fruit for just one more year, decade, century, despite inevitable drought.

And the wondrous persistence of penstemon, sage, sedge, currants, aronias, sedum, daylilies, catmint, lavender.  I cannot name them all– but like one’s friends, like anyone’s favorite things, I hate to leave any out. 

Windows of Heaven

In August, just as Nora and I piled into the Cooper to visit my parents and their Northwest promise of blueberries, a record deluge began to fall, as if from its own upper story windows.  It was a miracle; my dad in Oregon kept watching the same weather pattern in Utah on the internet as it circled around and around from Logan to St. George, flash flooding communities in the south and settling into sloughs, reservoirs, and rivers in the north.  During the week we were gone, four inches of rain accumulated; our little weather station’s cup flowed over.   

In the month afterward, everything rejoiced, including the weeds, which sprang up everywhere.  Heartened by the surge of even more garden abundance, I redoubled my compost collecting efforts, scratched out weeds,  gathered more unwanted rocks, dug more graves, planted more things (rhubarb, for instance).  Conceded a little to the alkali clay, and installed swaths of tall ornamental grass to guard my borders.  

Beauty in The Eye (Let Sleeping Dragons Bake Tarts)

Still crazy, I didn’t leave myself enough time (or energy)  to adequately harvest or preserve all of the abundance that had so miraculously appeared out of nowhere.  Nor did I leave enough time to read, write, paint, cook, dust shelves, arrange pillows, wrap an easy arm around Nora.  Like my farmer’s tan, I was terribly unbalanced,  always sweaty, always dirty, a mess, a wreck… and yet, I dug and wheelbarrowed daily in paradise, tasted the mellow honeyed funkiness of warm ground cherries with constant surprise, saw pink stained light through rose orach leaves.

When I watched “The Sound of Music” with the girls, I cried, despite the internal dragon (she was making tarts).   Oh, Rolph, so sad you were assimilated.  Oh singing children in the trees, harmonizing voices in the breeze… yes, yes, be glad.  Be super glad, why not.  You’ll need that later.  

Oh gentle nun of the stolen Nazi distributor cap (“Mother, I have sinned”)… how kind your car heisting. 

And when the Von Trapp family set out for freedom over the Alps at last, Climbing Every Mountain with a resilience and moxie that typified an entire generation of stoic Pollyannas, I think of snowflakes and killing frosts, of wool coats and lined boots, and wish I could lend the Von Trapps my favorite shovel and only wheelbarrow and a bowl of ground cherries, to help with the mountain.   Just a couple more Favorite Things for their journey.