August 26, 2025
Missing “Out”
I had no idea, when I agreed to be out of the garden for a season, how difficult my exile would prove. I have found no compensations. I have experienced only absence and missing.
Early on, I dutifully made a list of practices designed to pilot me through absence and missing. I jotted down the following:
Express gratitude for what I still can do
Learn to accept help gracefully
Focus on healing
Enjoy the beauty of the garden as an observer
These are all worthy aims, and I have made some progress in activating them. They keep me sane, but they do not compensate for what I am missing.
From my rollator I watch Laura work with her knife and Kevin work with his hori hori. My hand aches for the heft of my asparagus weeder, for the feel of wood upon palm, for the plunge of steel prongs into dirt.
I miss pulling out the weeds those steel prongs release and for the feel of my fingers in dirt. My nails are clean now, no need for the neat little nail brush, part of a high school graduation beauty kit gift from my mother’s best friend. My clothes are clean too, no need for the daily ritual of ripping them off and throwing them in the washer. I am clean too, no need for the post-gardening shower.
Brought up in a culture that did not allow girls to get dirty, I miss the defiance of wiping dirt encrusted hands on pants and shirt, a particularly pleasant event if the shirt happens to be the white V-necked one I got for winning a Toro lawnmower at the races one year. Sitting in my rollator I feel way too proper.
For so many reasons, I am happiest when my hands are in the dirt. I am tending to my plants, doing meaningful work, and defying patriarchal norms at the same time. But there is more. Gardeners have talked about dirt and happiness for years. Now science backs up intuition for there is a microbe in the soil that when inhaled or absorbed has the same effect on the brain as anti-depressants like Prozac. I miss my daily dose of mycobacterium vaccae.
I miss the early 6 a.m. morning, the coolness, the dew, the getting up early to beat the heat. I miss being one of the first ones out starting the new day. I miss the easy conversation with neighbors taking their early morning walk, sometimes with a dog. I miss the dogs. I miss the rhythm of a life organized around a daily activity, especially one that begins the day. I miss as well the sense of accomplishment that comes three or four hours later as I put away my tools and come in for breakfast.
Above all, I miss my plants. Until unable to provide daily care, I did not realize how much being up close and personal is not just a way of knowing what is happening to them. It is a form of friendship. I am not always weeding or pruning when I am out in the garden and down on the ground. I am often just sitting and enjoying the company of my plants. I talk to them. I tell them how marvelous they are, how beautiful, how much I appreciate their foliage and flower, how much we humans depend upon them for translating the energy of the sun into food that keeps us alive. Some plants I have not visited this season even from the safety of the rollator. I wonder if they miss me.
I thought that surely I could find compensation in simply observing the beauty of my plants, but I have found that for me beauty is a product of labor and suddenness. I miss the beauty I find in a well-weeded garden when I have done the weeding. I miss the beauty I discover in the sudden release of, say, a columbine from under a mountain of clear weed, thus exposing its delicacy of bloom and structure.
I miss the sense of purpose that daily garden work provides. I miss my fellow Master Gardeners and the even greater sense of purpose that comes from working in the demonstration gardens at the Cornell Co-operative Extension. I miss the social life that accompanies the work at the Cornell gardens.
I find myself waiting for next spring, when I believe I can be out in the garden again. But at my age and in this time of escalating tyranny wishing for time to pass quickly is a mistake. Every day that I live free and happy and relatively healthy is a gift to be cherished.
I return then to the one fact that gives me peace: staying out of the garden I protect my back and preserve the good work done by surgery and my own efforts at recovery. I keep myself from the danger of injuring my back by a sudden twist or turn to grab a tool or a weed. I protect myself from the unavoidable impulse to bend over the wrong way to grab a plant in the wrong place. I protect myself from the dangers of watering, either by buckets far exceeding my five-pound limit or by the hose. Of all the tools in the garden the hose is the most dangerous. It is designed to trip even the wariest gardener as she struggles to uncoil it; it is given to sudden bursts that can unsettle the unsteady; in the attempt to recoil it feet can be ensnared. Perhaps we gardeners do not talk enough about the fact that the garden is a dangerous place.
I channel my brother’s voice and achieve calm. I focus on the fact of having such wonderful help in Laura and Kevin and achieve joy. I seek purpose elsewhere and achieve meaning. But underneath it all, like a baroque basso continuo, from my rollator, from my rocker, outside the house and inside the house, I murmur to my plants, I’ll be back.