I’m a Garden Person Now!
Oh, hey—great to see you! I’m a garden person now! I garden! I love it so much. I know what you’re thinking: What did she do before gardening? Have her zucchini blossoms popped yet? Does she know who took her watering can? Where does she keep her compost? The answer to that last one is: the freezer! Yes, I took my need to connect with the earth and planted it in my edge-of-sanity desperation for some form of control and watered that with what I hope will develop into an appetite for salads! I’m a garden person now.
I’ve been a lot of people, I’ll admit: an owl person, a graphic-novel person, a papier-mâché-jewelry person, an orange-wine person, a person who made rugs out of old T-shirts, and a third-wave swing-dance revivalist. But the thing about being a garden person is that I’m participating in history! Gardening is as old as humanity. Or at least as old as the part that got stepped on by a woolly mammoth and was, like, “I’m gonna make a tomato.”
My forearms are a golden red! I’ve broken in my baseball caps! “I love your novelty rain boots” has become “I love your novelty garden boots,” because they are the same boots! I’ve got a garden person’s healthy, persistent backache!
Being a garden person now has also made me a chef person. I invented a Moroccan-mint-and-green-pepper salad! It wasn’t great, but I supplemented it with two glasses of prosecco that had been in the fridge for a while and a family-sized bag of sour-cream-and-cheddar Ruffles. Nothing wasted!
Can I bring you anything from my garden? Anything! Cilantro? Five green beans? A basil flower? A garbage bag of lettuce? Would you like to eat the most delicious carrot you’ve ever had in your life? Remind me in three months.
I’ll tell you—the sun does most of the work! I do the rest and cover the sun’s expenses.
It’s not all sunshine and ladybugs, though. I planted my onions too close together and, four months later, they’re the size of Barbie shoes. Something’s punching holes in my spinach. My kale keeps growing. A mouse family gave me typhus.
But I’ve made so many friends in my community garden! Katherine, who knows flowers! Lorena, who knows herbs! That old guy, who knows everything and addresses all conversation to my husband. Everyone here is super dedicated and just loves gardening, except for the ones who hate it and quit immediately.
Anyway, I bought a hummingbird feeder, so this Saturday I’m going to sit in a chair and watch it for two hours. Come over! Enjoy food! Being outside! Fruitful procrastination! I’ll give you eight irregularly sized strawberries to take home. I’ll turn you into a garden person, too!