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| Still Creek Community Garden 2015 |
I lurched home, dress drenched and
sticking to my calves, groceries bundled protectively in my arms, garden
paraphenalia and leftover seeds stored soaking in my pack. Stripping at the
door, I emptied my pack on the floor, left the food where I dropped it, pegged
the pack up on my
Get Kist Here! corner-grocery
door-push, hung my coat and hat to dry, and climbed into the shower to rub down
my chilled torso and my beet pink legs. When I could bear the torment of my
attentions no more (that skin is sensitive when parboiled by rain and
friction), I rubbed down, put on two long dresses, thick-knit wrist warmers, a
shawl, a cable knit sweater, and a pair of thermal socks. I couldn’t stick my
socked feet into my wooly slippers, or I would have done that, too. Two
prophylactic vitamin C tablets later, I put on the stove the last of my
homemade black bean and barley soup (featuring hunks of my winter parsnip,
still delicious and hearty despite their months under snow), and started
peeling open seed packets to dry—soaked through, most of them, despite being
kept in a ziploc bag and under an umbrella at the community garden through the
four hours I worked there today, because the hands that kept going into them
were undryable.
That done, I planted the
accidentally remaining scarlet runner beans (two) in one of my balcony pots,
threw my dress in a soapy sinkful of water to soak, washed my garden tools, set
my muddy gardening gloves and sleeve protectors aside for later attention
(triage!), cleaned the mud off my boots and left them to dry for later
application of mink oil. Peeled apart the leaves of my notebook so they
wouldn’t dry glued together, redid my sketch of the new plantings on a fresh
piece of paper, divided my groceries into that-which-is-coming-with-me-to-Bowen-Island-tomorrow
and that-which-stays-in-Vancouver-to-get-the-homefires-burning-when-I-return,
boxed, bagged and put away, and at last sat down with my bowl of hot, wonderful
soup.
I have not had so much fun in a
coon’s age.
My limbs are trembling. I keep
mistyping because my fingers are ungovernable. My back swears vengeance. My
skin threatens to peel off, dessicated from the continuous rain and being
plunged repeatedly into the earth. (There’s only so much you can do with your hands
protected. Sooner or later, if you will pardon the expression, the gloves have
got to come off.)
What did I do today to cause such
heartiness in the face of apparent discomfort?
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| 2015 |
I tended my gardens. I tended our garden. I met new community garden members
and talked with old, learning more about them and loving them all.
This morning I finally got the
home garden sprinkled with organic fertilizer before dashing with Mary to
StillCreek Community Garden for our first work party of the year. I got about an
hour’s work in my own beds done before the “party” started: string strung to
demarcate sections, seeds swapped with Mary, lupines inspected (I fear losses),
potatos and garlic babies planted, and I forget what-all-else before my
maintenance crew-boss Lucia arrived and we got chatting, then Clélie, bless
her, and a big hug and introductions to new folk (whose names I won’t venture
at the moment), and then the gathering up of fallen cottonwood limbs, the
weeding of communal beds, (the chatting, the chatting), the back groaning, the
back groaning, whispered love-words to horsetail and buttercup and dandelions
as I dug them up, apologies to cursing earthworms, to sadly hacked back
blackberries (though I defended them, I did, against complete removal: the
birds need them more than we don’t), and hot Tim’s coffee and Timbits (
ahhh...), till at last I declared myself
done with the work party and returned to my beds.
Then it was figuring, plotting,
planting, covering, and praying. Have you ever tried to plant a garden when you
are dripping wet and the deluge continues all around you? I thanked India for
those nice big nasturtium seeds (heirloom Indian, apparently), and mourned the
frail tiny mixed lettuces, who glued to my hands in the sprinkling and were,
like the rest, unceremoniously brushed off of me and onto the earth, roughly
and lightly covered over with numb fingertips, watched by crossing eyes that
were barely able to make them out through my bifocals, and left to fend for
themselves with only a single defunct Adobe Acrobat CD turning wistfully from a
string over the kale, the leeks, the spinach, and the chard.
Those words! Delicious. My tongue
tastes them as I speak; my teeth feel their texture and their crunch.
I went nuts this year, perhaps
with increasing confidence, as I manage to harvest
something every
Gardener’s Question Time while unable to do more but watch my hardy
kale die mouldering in the snow and my hardier Gladiator parsnips unmoveable in
the frozen ground. (Next year, my pretties, there will be burlap around you, or
at least a little cardboard, so I can wiggle out a root or two in the Dark
Times.)
 |
Katherine Laflamme, 2017.
Still Creek Community Garden Facebook page |
season, perhaps with increasing recklessness as I
recall the many unviable or at least violated plants that never made the light,
perhaps with the sap-lust of many months listening to
Back to the words:
Chard.
Kale.
Parsnip.
Tomato.
Lettuce.
Leek.
Nasturtium.
Garlic.
Potato.
Spinach.
Beans.
Have you ever heard such beautiful
words in your life?
I know, then I forget, then I
remember again, that I am never happier than when I am tending a wee plant or
animal, or indeed a massive plant or animal. I don’t care what kind. There is
no weed, no pest to me, although I do sometimes have to negotiate, if you get
my drift, and urge other pastures on my associates. But I truly love them all,
and when I am able to spend time with them, joy runs through me like sap
through leaves.
A few years ago my neighbour
Darnelle urged me to join a community garden, which she had done and which was
bringing her such happiness. I thought I didn’t feel like doing that. Too much
work, too many rules, and besides, I don’t know a thing about gardening. Then
Darnelle died and I kept looking at her neglected plot and I kept thinking, I wonder.
The next year I faced cancer. I
spent a while dealing with that and where it was not a mortal blow, gras a Dye, it scared the pants off me.
After a few months of dealing with that I had the thought that I would like to
grow something more life-giving than cancer cells, so I asked for and
miraculously got a place in a community garden. I was very cautious at first,
shy of the people and shy in my planting, because I knew so little, and worried
so much.
Is it five years later now?
Something like that. And that plot, now two plots, has sustained me in many
more ways than gustatorially in that time, growing in importance every year,
roots growing out from it, through me, into the community that welcomed me, so
that the food I get from it is not only for my body, but for my soul, not only
for me as an individual, but as part of a world.
One of the first things I planted
was a purple tulip given me by my friend Kathy, who died of her own cancer
three years ago. I see today their leaves strong and their buds on the verge of
opening. (That one tulip is now two.) And they link me back to her and all we
went through, all she went through, all the people who helped, who tended our
garden of the heart along the way.
Parsnips, tulips. Marigolds, “weeds”.
The earthworms I had to dig up from other places and slowly introduce. The rain.
The cottonwoods. The peace.
It really is a community garden. And I am so grateful I have a place in it.
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| 2015 |
Images: Casey Wolf and Katherine Laflamme.
