Time is Written in the Garden Weeds

It is finally springtime. In New England, that means, instantly and violently, all residents have forgotten the preceding miserable, cold months to rejoice in sun, bloom, and even welcome the allergy inducing pollen. For me, I’ve finally been compelled into action against the neglected mess of my backyard garden. It is time to prepare the garden beds and containers for the fertile and productive months ahead.

There’s five raised beds in disrepair. A strawberry patch is sort of marked off with a sloppy makeshift edging. The hops vines are ignoring their guide ropes and running amok in tangled dreadlocks across an overgrowing flowerbed. An unweildy patch of raspberries has permanently occupied the rhubarb territory, stunting the rhubarb’s growth. And the carefully pruned dogwood tree grew a straggly beard of young branches jutting out crazily from previously carefully trained trunks pruned bare and tidy.

It’s not the garden simply emerging from an annual winter thaw. It’sthat this year’s thaw revealed a slow erosion taking toll as a result of years of minimal upkeep. The mess represents my own brainfog of anxiety, depression and grief lifting and allowing my eyes to truly focus on what’s in front of me with clarity.

My writing group at GrubStreet teases me about numbers. I like numbers. They always appear in my writing. My writing group thinks my use of numbers is a symptom of my engineering past. I think using them is innate to me and how I function. Did my need to measure and quantify come before I went into engineering or did engineering turn me into a number cruncher?

The numbers are my way of mentally organizing the things that make me anxious. I don’t think of myself as a high anxiety person, but I have a need to organize things in measurable ways in order to make sense of the world and more importantly, in order to quantify what vexes me. Quantity provides me quality in a logical, orderly way.

So, as I started pruning the raspberry canes, I applied numbers of days, months and years to quantify the mess they’d become. Magically, it helped me qualify the why of the mess that they were and perhaps the mess that I was.

Raspberries should be pruned in the fall, before the winter. That was six months ago, I was fresh off the rode after a 5000 mile motorcycle ride from California to Massachusetts. I spent 26 days on the road after which I was still navigating re-entry into my previous life. Pruning wasn’t top of my ‘to do’ list. So, the canes that I did not prune stood tall and supple. All but the tips were greening. I pruned the deadened ends.

Twelve months ago, last spring, these lively canes were probably just emerging from the ground. Then, my life was a mess. I was depressed and about to leave for California. My marriage and the current status quo we’re in hold, in temporary suspension. At the time, whether it was temporary or permanent suspension what not yet known. I’d only just learned to ride a motorcycle. Trimming dead tips from the live, unpruned canes didn’t matter to me at all then.

Interspersed in the live canes were dead canes. Some, still rooted, got trimmed back to ground level. These probably fruited two summers ago. That was the summer my mom died. She loved raspberries. She could stand in a raspberry patch stuffing berries into her mouth until no ripe fruits remained. But that year, the fruit shriveled on the tips of the canes, neglected and uneaten.

The unrooted canes that came up easily were from three summers ago. That summer, I immersed myself in a job which I pinned all my hopes on as THE big post-career-change break into the food world. In the span of that summer, the job burned me out and broke my heart. I had no reserved time time to tend to raspberries.

That brings me to the last time I properly tended to this raspberry patch – the summer of 2014.  A year into my new studies, I enrolled in a full load of summer classes, mostly at night. The raspberries were young, trim and contained, not wild and sprawling. I planted and tended to a full and lush garden that summer. The fruit eagerly got eaten because she lived with me. This was six months after her stage 4 pancreatic cancer diagnosis. We gardened together.

I took measure of the pile of dead branches that had accumulated. Three years of neglect. Three years of memories. Three years spinning my wheels. Three years moving in fits and starts. Three years of furtile ground left untended to get weedy and a little insane while also being dormant all at once.

Three years measuring and quantifying what’s been vexing me.