My September Chaos Garden
It's chaotic, but like, in a good way.
Hi, it’s me.
Right on schedule, Seattle has cooled off to temperatures in the more manageable low 70s during the day (low 20s in Celsius) and in the 50s at night. Also right on schedule is my son Thomas turning the heat on in the morning, and me yelling at him that it’s only September, and him yelling back what does September have to do with me being cold right now?
This is the second most common argument we have after the one where I say I want to get an artificial Christmas tree and he says fine then I’m going to get an artificial mother.
The garden is in full chaos mode, and my dining room table is loaded with baskets of tomatoes, green beans, apples, basil, and buckets of flowers. Thomas loves it when the bountiful fruits of my labor fills the table! Just kidding, he complains about having nowhere to sit and eat his breakfast. Call social services, I say, and see if they’ll have me arrested for feeding you too much produce! He’s not amused and scolds me to clean up my mess. You’re not the boss of me! I say.
Over the weekend I set out to pull the spent lettuce plants in one bed so I could prep it for fall carrots, but I didn’t get very far in that task. The lettuce had gone to flower weeks ago, making the bees happy, but now the flowers were dried into seed pods. I pulled at them and stuffed the seeds into my pocket, then thought better of it and retrieved a ramekin from the kitchen to hold my collected seeds. I didn’t have this variety in seed form, and now I have about 25 years worth of red lettuce seeds.
Anyway, I never got around to prepping my soil for carrot seeds, which is fine, since my New Year’s theme word this year is Fuck It. Maybe I’ll get to it this weekend.
One area of my life where I never feel as if I’m pretending is in the garden. Not because I know everything there is to know about gardening. To the contrary, most of the time I’m winging it and/or being sloppy about it. Like when I sow eight rows of seeds without marking what they are and the next day a squirrel digs up two of the rows and I don’t remember what I put there and have to wait until the other seeds sprout before I can know what to re-sow what was missing. I also recognize that I’m at the mercy of forces outside of my control, like heat waves, temperature fluctuations, wind, squirrels, rabbits, disease, and bugs.
In the garden, I don’t fear mistakes or failures. I don’t struggle with insecurity, get frustrated, or lose my temper at the weather (though I do have a Caddyshack-like relationship with the squirrels). I don’t lose sleep over what I might have done differently or have stress dreams about my inability to keep up with the harvest. I simply do my best, pivot when I need to, and make adjustments for next time.
I’m fascinated by this and have been thinking deeply about it all summer.
Almost nothing has gone as planned this year – cancer, surgery, chemo, blood clots, canceled trips, hospital stays, my stalled book draft, work stress, general malaise, and marshmallow brain. My grief over this life disruption is justified, sure. But these extreme circumstances are leading me to reflect on why my disaster garden is still a source of peace and comfort for me, no matter how wrong it goes.
I wish I could face all of life with the same sense of… contentment? Is that what it is? Confidence? A sense of self?… that I feel when I’m in the garden. Throughout twenty years of parenting and owning a business and developing a career, I have rarely felt the freedom I feel in sowing my seeds and responding to all the challenges I face trying to keep them alive. In all other areas of my life, I get decision paralysis because I can’t see what the outcome will be. What if I do the wrong thing? What if my plan gets disrupted? What if I screw up a job interview or choose the wrong school for the kids? What if my business isn’t successful and I have to shut it down? What if I never actually finish this book and just keep talking about it?
What if I’m not as good at it as I thought I was?
All summer as I’ve put my hands in the soil, I’ve been looking for a way to transfer my gardening mindset over to my Eeyore brain so I can stop carrying around so much fear and just laugh at the abundance that life’s chaos brings to my table.
Thanks for joining me in these deep thoughts today.
Until next time,
Jen
News + Notes 🌼
Related posts you may have missed:
The Garden Is Full of Life Lessons (March 2023) - I wrote about sowing the seed and not knowing what will come of it.
Simply the Best (May 2023) - Did I ruin the seedlings I forgot about?
A Little of This and a Little of That (June 2023) - I wrote about hairy carrots.
A Dream About My Mom and Alien Robots (May 2023) - Lilacs & the spring garden.
"My New Year's theme word this year is Fuck it," wins best line of the day award.
So beautifully put. And lol an artificial mother. My friend told me today that when she told her young daughter recently “you could work on your attitude” her daughter replied “and you could work on your yelling.” Lol what kids say. Thank you for sharing!