ouch

I had to wait a few days to blog about this. It's delicate, like when you've caught your sweater on a pricker bush, and if you move to extricate yourself, more prickers snag you. You have to move really, really carefully.

I don't want to make this worse. Laura and I have put in so much time trying to get unsnagged.

From May until October, Laura and I enjoy our vegetable garden. You know the drill: she does gross motor; I do fine motor. She plants; I tuck the tomato branches into the ladders as the plants grow. She waters; I weed. We both harvest and we both eat with the enthusiasm gardeners have for their own well-tended crops. Even if some years you only get twenty-seven peas, they are just the best peas you ever tasted. 

This year the pole beans Laura planted were especially enthusiastic, and the kale and arugula were growing like, well, like weeds. Beautiful, edible weeds. We had promising-looking tomatoes, basil, zucchini, peppers, lettuce, and several volunteer cucumbers and cantaloupe from the compost.

Aphids had found the young basil, which is fair enough. Every year as the garden begins we have to make a gentle but firm statement to the aphids. You can't blame them, but you can wash them down with organic soap and send them on their soggy way.

In the garage, next to the spray bottle of organic soap, is a spray bottle of poison ivy killer. It is anything but organic, but I will not mess around with that sorry excuse for a plant. Raised in the woods of Connecticut, I learned "poison ivy" when other kids learned "ball" or "doll." Huh. That just explained a couple of things to me.

Anyway, when a tiny blip of poison ivy appears on our property, I see it before it sees me. Oh, hell no, I say to it, usually aloud, and I walk to the garage. I am back in a moment with a spray bottle and my "make my day, p.i." face on.

On Sunday morning, in a multi-tasking rush to protect the basil, Laura grabbed the poison ivy killer instead of the soap. Just in case the aphids on the basil were feeling nomadic, she sprayed every plant in the garden. Once you've sprayed poison, you've got about five minutes to save a plant. But you could never eat its leaves or its fruit. And even if you washed off the plants in that tiny window of time, the soil is gone. You can't grow anything in it for a year.

The feelings we each have about this are layered like an onion, the one thing we kind of wished we had planted, but hadn't yet. Laura felt awful. Terrible. Even now, she is sighing in the background as I write because we both agree that it is time to blog about it, but there are the prickers, and they hurt.

She was angry at herself, and angry at me for being angry. I was puzzled that she could detect my anger, since I tried to be kind through my tight jaw. I guess it's hard to convey kindness, no matter the words you choose, through a tight jaw. I was angry. I knew how badly she felt, and I felt bad for her...but I still felt angry.

So we did what we are both willing to do when we need to. We talked (and cried) for hours and hours, then brushed and flossed (I could still floss for myself on Sunday), then talked for more hours. We talked about how underneath we both knew we were just going to miss the garden, but first we had to peel away all the other thick layers of feeling. We talked about the difference between a mistake and being careless, and which evokes what feelings in both of us. We talked about my fear of becoming intolerant of error like my dad, who was sometimes impatient with my more forgetful mom. We talked about our different ways of moving through the world, one with an eye on the beautiful forest, one noticing all the invasive species that are crowding out the native flora. We talked about how when she was young, having someone angry meant the end of conversation and connection, and for me being able to carefully express anger means the beginning of repair. We talked about how it scares me that she can get lost in impulse, and how it scares her that I can get lost in judgment. We talked about how great it is when our differences work, when our strengths complement each other. How great it often is that she favors the gas pedal and I favor the brake. How much fuel it sometimes takes, too.

It took us awhile, but we finally got to the shared, core feeling of sadness. The garden was trying so hard, doing so well. Each plant was happy to have been so carefully planted by Laura, right in the full sun and in the rich earth. It was to be my project when Laura moves to New York. I would tend it during the week and then harvest when she came home on weekends. The garden would link us when we were apart. I could report out in our nightly phone calls. "You should see the pretty peppers I'm going to pick when you get here!"

Laura and I work hard to keep our connection clean. Even with all that effort, relational gunk accumulates. When there is a crisis, even a little crisis like this, every speck of gunk absorbs three times its weight in difficult feelings, and you have to do a full, deep, steam cleaning. That she and I can do. We are still talking about the whole complicated process of losing our garden, whenever one of us needs to.

But the sweater is freed from the pricker bush, and though there will be other such hazards on our path, we are walking together in a beautiful forest. Even I can see that.