Three Generations of Women in the Garden
Until I was watering the magick garden today, and felt water and mud under my feet, I had never thought about the gardens of my mother and grandmother. We lived in Winnipeg. Winnipeg’s climate is painfully cold; actually, the highest population for a city that cold in the world. Moscow has nothing on it. Nothing can be started from seed, so you have to buy “farmed flowers”, do a little digging and pay close attention to the plants as they must be transplanted and cared for. They are all annuals. Almost no flowering plants can survive in soil that is frozen solid for seven months of the year. Some very hardy rose bushes can, but that’s about it.
Therefore, not everyone chooses to have a flower garden. I even knew a family that paved their backyard. Yards in the suburbs contained very small trees that looked strategically placed, such that they could be watered by a sprinkler. Automatic yards.
But my mom and my grandma both loved their flower gardens, although they were small, and shared a similarly excited look on their faces and sound in their voices when the flowers had finally been planted, and there was colour outside for a brief time, in their own little ecosystems that they had created. My mom taught me about nature by showing me how bees crawled into snapdragon flowers to drink nectar. She was smart as hell, but came from a hell of a home. In the days of her youth, you could still skip grades in school, and she did, so she moved out when she was done high school at sixteen and married a man who she soon divorced. She told me he showed up at her doorstep with her name carved into his arm with a knife. We laughed in the garden. There was life in the garden that didn’t exist elsewhere, although as a small child, time seemed to be a great expanse that would never end or be conquered so I gleefully assumed that this space would always exist. We lived in the garden.
Grandma’s garden was different. She loved marigolds and my mom and I both hated them – I was only five or six and they made me want to puke; so tacky! She had a magick plant though, that she would show me every time I went to her house, which was across the city by about 45 minutes. They closed at night and opened when the sun came up. At dusk, we watched them close together. She looked like it was the first time she had seen them each time, but I didn’t think this at all strange – they were magick, and I would probably do the same if I had grown them. From that age until she died when I was 21, she repeated the same five or six stories, again and again. When I was old enough, I realized something was very wrong. How could this beautiful, passionate woman remember only a handful of life experiences, describing them the same way every time; how could she forget that she had told you yesterday; why did she have a blank look in her eyes when you told her you already knew about that – tell me something else, I want to know more about you. It scared me.
My grandma had electroshock therapy when she was in her early thirties. All my mom could explain to me, as a child, was that she had a “nervous breakdown” and was taken to the hospital and shocked by doctors. The image of the scene haunted my fantasies then, and still does. When Jack Nicholson is hooked up in One Flew’s Over the Cuckoo Nest, or when Ellen Burstyn comes to the climax of being wheeled into a room where the same torture takes place in Requiem for a Dream, I have to leave the room, or at least close my eyes and shut my ears, asking whoever I am in the company of to, “tell me when it’s over!” Grandma’s husband was an abusive alcoholic. From the time my mom went to first grade, she would hide in her closet when she got home so that her father would not realize she was in the house. Grandma worked the late shift as a waitress at a restaurant.
But she also tended to her plants, and when she moved in with my father, sister, and me, after my mom left the realm of “human life on Earth”, she spent almost every summer day weeding my dad’s lawn – he doesn’t grow flowers, nor does his new wife. He hired a landscape architect to design the yard and choose all trees and bushes and large granite rocks so that the whole thing – a much bigger yard – could be watered by a sprinkler, except for a few tulip bulbs that bloom every spring. The tulips are black.
It was not until today that I realized this connection. The common love of digging in the earth, and carefully watering the plants by hand, with a watering can, and watching them. I forgot about the magick in the gardens of the two women that gave birth to me until I felt the water and mud under my feet. These women saw the beauty in the world, despite tragedies in their lives. The felt the vibrations of the flowers. They saw the colours just as brightly as I did.
Then I was reminded of this song, and wondered why it never sparked the memory of their gardens before. No, I had to feel the memories against my skin.
Every summer I grow.
This weekend I will be exploring more of British Columbia for the first time – going behind the mountains that house the swanky “Whistler Resort”, and can be seen from the city of Vancouver, to a place called Mystery Valley. I will see the stars as people saw them for most of human history for the first time in ages. I will listen to the trees. I will walk barefoot through the forest.
I will return with stories and lessons and treasures.
scars xoxo
A little reseeding had to be done, but the situation is not as bad as I thought it may be. The plants are strong, and recovering well!
No, probably not, I’m quite busy as things stand, and I feel like I would be a bit of a hypocrite, as after having an account for about a year, facebook™®© already knows a whole lot of information about me, and I’m sure the corporate entity will be selling it to the government very soon, if they haven’t already. We’ll see what happens next time I try to cross the border (Canada -> USA). I hope rubber gloves are not involved.
And it worked like lucky charms – as soon as he told me he had lung cancer I decided to become close friends with him again, despite the 2000 mile distance between us. One day, he posted a picture of some cancer-infected lungs on facebook. When I commented on it, making some reference to his own condition, assuming he had “come out” about having cancer if he was posting photos like these to his public facebook account, he quickly told me not to say such things – he had only told me and “a few select people”, not including his family. He was going to face this alone, without a caregiver for the first time in his life. I was proud of him.
I said something about people changing over time, but he seemed quite…awed. I let him know that I had been feeling a little nuts myself, not able to sleep or concentrate very well – I exaggerated this a tad, trying to let him know – it’s normal to feel a little crazy sometimes, to not be able to sleep for a few days now and then. It allows you to see things from different perspectives. You have to try to concentrate on the light side instead of the darkness below.
Yet I didn’t know what else to write about this tonight, other than the fact that I did not have enough money for a plane ticket to Toronto, and am even more annoyed by money than I was yesterday.
was using similar language. “Cars set on fire” became “cars torched“; anarchists became “unruly vandals”.
would be prone not to vaccinating their children? Some kind of survey would have to be conducted to find out if not vaccinating children could be the root cause, and even then a direct correlation would not be able to be made – I suppose if doctors and nurses are saying that they’ve struggled with parents over this issue, it is fairly common, but still – by nature of their jobs they come from a slightly biased stance (ex/ the socialization that they undergo during med school, which promotes all things pharma, especially NEW things pharma, and belittles other approaches to an amazing degree – I’ve heard this from several med students, and seen it reflected in the behaviour of younger doctors).
) – I cringe every time a ridiculously spurious correlation is made, yet again! 
Damn, one of the first things I remember learning in first year university was that “CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION”. It is like saying that a “large crane population” in a particular area, and a “sudden surge of pregnant women” is connected.
