(Today's post is in celebration of National Gardening Exercise Day. Cheers! J)
I grew up in a small Michigan town surrounded by farm country. Big crops were wheat, beans, corn, and sugar beets. We didn’t have a garden. I think my mother, who grew up on a farm, was over it.
In middle school, we moved to a larger town. My new step-dad was an outdoorsman, and in his free time he loved to garden. We had a large plot in our yard with radishes and corn, tomatoes and herbs. My mother got back into the act then—in the kitchen. I remember her seasoning everything with our home-grown dill. Everything.
Later, when I became a newlywed and moved to Colorado, my husband decided that we should grow tomatoes. You know what we grew instead? Tomato horn worms, as thick as my thumb, and two to three times as long. I promise you, those suckers really do have horns. I was traumatized for years. (I’ll spare you a picture of the Colorado critters and instead share one of our Georgia garden, below, the first year we tried a mini patch of tomatoes out back.)
It actually wasn’t until moving to Georgia that I settled into a truce with gardening. My sister Lynne brought us two dogwood trees for a housewarming. When I didn’t kill those, she started bringing us transplants from her yard…perennials that grew back year after year. Some were not a hit—like dead man’s nettle, which spread like wildfire and smelled like the most heinous body odor ever. Most were beautiful, like the opulent green hostas that continue to grow richer and thicker each year (see below).
Lynne also brought me iris and day lily bulbs, and she taught me to reproduce azaleas, rhododendrons, and hydrangeas by stretching a branch over the ground and placing soil and rock over it. Over time, when the branch has rooted, it can be separated and planted as a new bush (like the hydrangea below, which was planted in such a fashion and has grown more purple with each year).
In my early stages of gardening, I fell in love with two things: (1) gardening can be cheap (and I confess, I do love cheap), (2) and gardening can be forgiving. (Irises not doing well here? Move them there.) Later, in the early 2000s, I fell in love with something else about gardening: It can be restorative; it can heal the heart.
I learned this when our oldest child, Alex, was sixteen. She was struggling with some typical adolescent angst along with some extra challenges of her own. She was rebelling, and the major target of that rebellion was me. She and I could barely be in the same room together—unless we brought in a mediator. Or we vowed not to talk to each other. Our relationship started to shift, though, when she got a job at Pike Nursery. She’d come home from work with half-dead plants, fuming about Pike’s “no-questions-asked refund-for-a-year policy”. And then her anger would subside, and she’d talk to me: “What should we do to bring this one back?” It was slow going and not without its glitches. But gardening—even this accidental gardening—helped us heal and move on.
These days I still love to garden. I like the surprises it holds. For instance, last year I tried planting from seed for the first time. My zinnias and radishes tanked, but I was able to produce some lovely green beans, coleus, marigolds, and basil. (Check out my seed-grown coleus, below.)
And now on this National Gardening Exercise Day, I can relish that gardening is good my body as well as my spirit!
What I love most about gardening, though, is the memories it invokes. When my hydrangea blooms—or the wind chimes twinkle, I’m reconnected in my heart with those who shared those gifts with me. When the cascading Japanese maple still changes its form with the seasons, I’m reminded of how planting that tree so many years ago also changed the relationship between a mom and her once-trouble teen daughter.
(Check out Alex’s garden design above, complete with a Japanese maple she brought home from Pike, a dogwood my sister Lynne bought us, and Christmas roses transplanted from my friend Yumi’s yard.)
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go tend to my garden. Seems I’ve been remiss, and the bird bath needs water. Cheers! J
Updated: Nov 24, 2022
(Musings on Mother’s Day - 2018)
“Children are the rainbow of life; grandchildren are the pot of gold.” – An Irish Blessing
Oh, yeah. Grandchildren are golden. Being a grandparent is sublimely fun. One of the enjoyable aspects of today’s grandparenthood is picking your “grand” name. Mine is JJ. Rice’s is Big Daddy, or BD for short. A couple of our friends are Pippa and Pops. One of my long-time friends with fourteen grandkids to date has been Grandma from the start. Her husband has been Grandpa. They don’t get the fuss over finding an alternate name.
Power to ‘em, but the alternate name game abounds. Grand moms can now be Bella or Lolly or Queenie. GiGi or Mia. To add to the fun, here are some celebrity grandparent names I came across while surfing the net. Susan Sarandon is Honey. Goldie Hawn, Glamma or GoGo, depending on which set of grandkids you ask. Kris Jenner is Lovey; Kaitlyn Jenner is Kaitlyn. Debbie Reynolds was Aba Daba, and Joan Rivers was Nana New Face. (Oy!) Martin Sheen is Peach. Sharon Osbourne is Shazza. Have no fear; traditionalism still exists among some of the famous. Jane Fonda is Grandma, Sally Field is Granny, and Nancy Pelosi is Grandma Mimi. Then there’s Martha Stewart, who is Martha. And Donald Trump? He’s Mr. Trump, so they say.
Yes, we grands today like to do things our own way. We grandmamas in particular like to act young and chic and fun. We prefer that to showing our fears. Fear that a pregnancy might get complicated. It might not go to term as expected. Even if it does, mom or baby might have health issues. Immediately. Or down the road. Modern medicine is a marvel. Most times health and wellness prevail. Not always, though. The grand life holds no guarantees. Except perhaps connection.
"Grandchildren are the dots that connect the lines from generation to generation." ― Lois Wyse
My own mother has been gone since 2012. She wasn’t one to say “I love you” to her children as she believed that actions speak louder than words. (She did say it to her grandkids, pictured with her above.) I remember as a teen, running in to Mooney’s Ice Cream to get us a treat while Mom waited in the car. She’d asked for “something with chocolate,” and I brought her a tin roof sundae ice cream cone, one of my favorites, vanilla laced with chocolate swirls and peanuts. I could tell from the look on her face the minute I delivered it that she wasn’t pleased. “I said chocolate,” she told me as she tossed the whole thing out the car window onto the street. Did I mention she could be fierce?
Mom could be flaky, too. She one time put the coffee maker—cord and all—through the express cycle of the dishwasher. She plugged it in to use again, and she lived to tell us all about it. She could be ditzy with names, too, even those of her own grandchildren. When asked if she remembered the name of her first grandson shortly after his birth, she replied, “I want to say Melvin.” Whatever possessed her to say that, we’ll never know. She died three weeks later.
I can only wish she was still here to meet our newest little love, granddaughter Charli Rose (pictured with brother Britton, below). Certainly the name would’ve given Mom pause! I strongly suspect she would’ve tried to rename this little one, too. What can I say?
Despite my mother’s imperfections, she loved us all fiercely. How do I have faith that this is so? By connecting the lines from generation to generation. Whether our kiddos are breaking our flawed hearts…or filling them to the popping point, a mother’s love is fierce. A grandmother’s is as well. So cheers to us!
Photogenic Much?
(Dedicated to those who, uh, like me, are freakishly unphotogenic.) “Every picture tells a story.” Years ago Rod Stewart told us that, right? Now personally, I “buy” it, and that’s a lot coming from someone who loves to tell stories with words. The thing about pictures though? I prefer them when I’m taking them. Or looking at them. When I’m asked to pose for them, I’ve been known to run. You’d almost think I’m in the witness protection program. I am what you might call unfortunately unphotogenic. People yielding cameras try to assure me. They say I need to identify my good side and turn it toward the camera. (I’m still working on it.) Occasionally I’ll think I’ve nailed a winning smile. And then I see the resulting photo. (Yikes!) And then there’s my biggest fear in this age of social media—waking up to a Facebook notification that I’ve “been tagged”. But here’s the question. If every picture tells a story, then does every photo opp we dodge actually erase a bit of our story? Our personal story. The one we share with our friends and our family. This thought plagued me while putting together a picture book to give my family during the 2017 holidays. “This is Us – The Rices – 2016” starts out with a few scant photos from the cruise we took together in September 2016. On Day 3 of the cruise, we anticipated docking at St. Martin, where our daughter Quinn was to be married on Magen’s Bay. Something else happened though. Hurricane Matthew. Rerouting plans. Goodbye, St. Martin. Hello, Haiti. The younger Rices and guests managed to go with the flow. Bummer about the wedding, but the sun shone in Haiti, so no problem, mon. Rice and I? We were crushed. We’d driven eight hours to port, rather than flying one, to keep an eye on the dress. We’d spent a pretty penny so that all our kiddos and their partners could sail with us. We’d even insured every passage—before learning cruise insurance doesn’t cover cruise rerouting, which can occur at the captain’s discretion. The folks who say destination weddings are more economical may be right. Still, costs can add up quickly. For instance, there’s reserved round-trip guest transportation to and from the ceremony site. Let’s not forget tiki torches, a wedding arch with flowing fabric, and flowers. Add in a steel-drum musician, an officiant, catering, and professional photography. Then there’s the cost of a wedding license in the islands. That license, my friends, is not more economical than a stateside one. If I can be crude but accurate as I look back, Rice and I each tucked our respective head into a place where the sun never, ever shines. We went through the motions of that cruise, continuing to meet friends and family for dinner, take the grandson to the Boardwalk and the carousel, and watch our adult kiddos wipe out on the FlowRider. You know what, though? There are no pictures with the whole gang all together from that cruise. Sure, we have pics the kids took during their portside adventures. But Rice and I? We avoided the camera completely. There’s not one single photo to capture our disappointment. We knew our sadness and anger would’ve been front and center—in our eyes, our expressions, our posture. Believe it or not, I wish today that I did have such a picture.
In October 2016, Quinn and Patrick got married in Patrick’s parents’ back yard. We got hundreds of pictures. One captures their four-year-old son, slouched in a doorway, too overwhelmed for ring bearer duty. Another features Quinn, twerking for a crowd of friends gathered by the make-shift bar. A favorite features me, wet as a sewer rat in my mother -of-the-bride gown. Oh, yes. I fell in the pool. And I posed for a picture to prove it.
These days, I’m readying myself for the next flurry of photomania. Our second grandchild—a little girl—is due any day. Do I regret that I haven’t lost those mounds of pounds that always shine front and center in photos featuring me? Oh, hellz, yes. But will I avoid the camera? No, I won’t.
Whether photos flatter or frighten is really beside the point. Their purpose lies in capturing the story, visually and viscerally. Will “This is Us – The Rices – 2018” feature shots that are picture perfect? Not likely. Will I post them on-line? We’ll see. There will be pictures, though. Pictures that are us – the Rices. Our personal 2018 story. The one we share with those we love.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go work on identifying my good side.