Garden Club

A few months ago I joined a Master Gardeners class offered by my local extension office. It takes place in a building that used to be part of a camp I once attended. It was used as a mess hall and once a week a dance hall for the camping kids. During classes I sit in a seat where I first danced with a boy when I was ten years old.

The building sits behind a church and graveyard where members of my family are buried. This includes my grandmother, for whom my love of gardening and desire to learn more about it comes from. It seems fitting that the way I’ve found to remember her best was always gardening and now I see her tombstone every time I go to class.

In total I’ve spent less than $20 in order to be a part of it.

Since the class has begun we have shared few details about ourselves. Occupations, our education, and a little bit about our other interests. Most of this was done at a Christmas party hosted by one of the senior members.

The group agenda is pretty simple. We learn what we can over an educational course which lasts the span of a school year. Then we earn a certain amount of volunteer hours helping the extension office answer questions from the public regarding gardening issues.

Things like: “Why is my tomato plant dying?”

“Why does my tree look like this? “(insert grainy blurred tree photo)

We also work on public flower beds and have a compost pile that we hope can someday be used by the community.

We are a diverse group.

People from a variety of backgrounds and even cultures joined together for a simple common interest: gardening.

I have no idea what these peoples religious or political backgrounds are.

And I hope I never know.

Sitting in our discussions and our classes I have found a small bit of hope in this extremely polarizing cultural climate. Where everyone is angry and pissed off at everyone else in almost every other place of community exchange (social media, the grocery store, schools, and even sadly many places of religious worship), this place is a breath of fresh air.

We are not only joined in our love of plants and dirt and even bugs but in our desire to spread such knowledge with others. To use it to build and help our community and the place in which we live.

This class has reminded me that a person will always have more in common with their neighbor than they do with whoever is “in charge”.

It’s made me wonder if there is a way to fix our divided communities by creating these small interest based communities like this little garden club.

Master Gardeners is a program that isn’t just based in my local extension office but many offices across the state (as well as in other states across the country). In the area of Western Kentucky, a small conference was introduced to allow for information sharing, classes and networking between the different county Master Gardening groups.

During this conference I attended a lecture taught by someone of whom, I’m pretty sure, sits on the other side of the political and religious spectrum than me. I know this because we share friends on Facebook, and many of those friends have unfriended me on the platform or no longer speak to me in public based entirely on my religious and political views. I didn’t know if she was aware of who I was based on similar interactions.

Her class was fantastic.

She had great ideas on how to use the connections through the extension office and the gardening clubs to create community gardens as she had in her own community. Including one for a women’s shelter, in which she not only used assistance from a local boy scout group (giving them volunteer experience) to build the gardens but educated the women living there on how to produce food for themselves by teaching them how to garden a variety of things. This year she said she is going to set up a flower area of their garden so the women and children living there can sell cut flowers to help fund the shelter.

Her ideas and the ideas we bounced around in her class could be life changing for some members of the community. But had we never joined this group we could have never shared these ideas.

My husband enjoys the stories that I tell him about our meetings. About how different we all are and the places that we come from. He says he wishes there was a group for people to talk about mechanics or working on cars the same way. A place where politics and religion and personal chaos doesn’t get brought up because the purpose is simply to share knowledge.

I can’t help but feel that this is where the original idea of schools and places of educational growth began. Though, somewhere along the way it all became what it is today. (**Though I want it to be known that I still believe, strongly, in public education and that the majority of educators are desperately trying to create this environment again.)

People need to be reminded of basic humanity again. That the people we hate, or are just pissed off at, are human beings with needs exactly like our own. I truly believe that at our core we are all very much the same. That somewhere along the way we all forgot that and this why so many of us search for connections in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways.

Crazy to think that all it took for me to realize that there is a possiblity for all of us to coexist was a little gardening club.

Family Tree

They chopped it down.

Moving through
That land between two rivers
In stampedes
Of angry growling machines
-Hell bent on profitable purpose

And a desire to burn
Those soft
Green
blanketed hills
Turning the dirt over,
Into the kind of green
-which burned inside their pockets

To them it was just a tree-
A 100 year old oak,
Firmly planted,
In a 20 acre spread
Bought and paid for
-by Progress and Improvement

Nothing but bark and limb
A simple seed
Which grew up
Watching the children of rootless immigrants
And exiled natives
Searching for solace and that unfamiliar territory:
Home

Simple branches stretching out
Over years
Offering peaceful shade to a community built
From the ground up
in that ground now deemed:
Eminent domain.

That oak watched as
New roads wove around it
Making way for
Very necessary government campgrounds
Filled with carbon copied concrete
Picnic tables, cold and hard
-So weatherproof it hurts.

And when the sad attempt
at a profitable preservation
Failed
The powers that be
Begrudging and blinded
Looked to the very ground
Which to them bled envy

And they ripped into it
Like starving scavengers
Unsatisfied with their leftovers
Now curious of the hunt,

so they chopped it down.
The whole damn thing.

Gobbled it up like a growing
Growling beast,
Who runs back to the corner
like a reprimanded dog
Just waiting
for the backsides of those
Who still stand for the things
no longer standing at all.

Does Tabitha’s Coffee Get Cold?

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve started to write and then found something to clean. 

Get my area ready, coffee poured and then I find that I need to clean the litter box or an animal needs feeding and their feeding area needs to be cleaned. The floor needs sweeping, the dishes are piled up and the floor needs to be vacuumed. 

Now my coffee is cold and I can’t remember what I wanted to write. 

The kids are up by now and they’re looking for food and while they’ve asked their father for help and he has finally gotten up to do it, he has no idea where it’s at. Also let’s face it, I’m too distracted to write at this point. 

I wanted to be the female Stephen King when I was young. That was my fantastical dream. But instead I find myself wondering about Tabitha. 

Tabitha King is the wife of Stephen. He speaks of her often and always thanks her in his books. Some of which she’s even inspired. She herself is an author. 

There are none of her books at my local library and I have never seen them in the bookstores. Though I’ll admit that I most frequent second hand stores where I can trade my books for other books. I find comfort in worn paperbacks. Oh sure, there’s nothing so spiritual as the smell of a new book, or the feel of untouched sheets of freshly printed paper but a worn novel feels as though there’s a bit of story wrapped around a story. 

A printed novel.

It is the religious experience that all writers hope to one day achieve. To put their own world together and hold it in their hands. How close to godlike one must feel.

Does Tabitha’s coffee get cold?

I grew up seeing the name Stephen King in the local library, online, in movies, and at home. My mother was a huge fan of horror and not at all restrictive of what I read or watched. I saw the tome of Needful Things on our shelf at home and when I read the list of the books he’d written on the inside pages, I could only hope to one day achieve that sort of success. 

I wrote every day as a child, and later on as a teen. 

I wrote poems and fiction. I kept daily journals. 

My grandma kept blank paper and pens and notebooks in a drawer at her house because of the number of times she’d caught me writing in her calendars notes sections or her address book. My scribbling eventually filling up the pages and leaving no space for their intended purposes. 

I’m 36 years old now. Married with three children and so sometimes I have to force myself to write. I burrow away in the bathroom closet to get away from the rest of the house where chores all silently beg for my attention and children openly ask for it constantly. 

I had hoped to write some great horror novel in the vein of Shirley Jackson by now. Some southern gothic dark tome that might sit next to that old copy of Needful Things. Next to the likes of John Saul and Dean Koontz. 

Most of my stories sit unfinished in half full journals that were eventually overtaken with to do lists and grocery needs. 

Others are just ideas with characters scribbled about in the margins. 

I write stories like a waitress taking meal orders, in quick notes with just enough not to forget later on when it matters. 

But so very often that moment never comes. 

I can’t help but think about the girl that I once was. Constantly writing and dreaming of the day when she would hold the published version of the world that she created in her hands. 

The day she could feel what it felt to be like Stephen King but instead I’m here. 

A sometimes blogger with a few readers desperately trying to go back into that place in my head. That place where I could create an entire world with nothing but pen and paper as a guide. 

So I wonder about Tabitha King. I’ve found a few articles in which her relationship with Stephen is discussed. Her husband sure to point out that she is a fantastic writer herself and that many of the charities and goodwill they do is because of her but still the topic always returns to the man himself.

I grew up loving King’s books and dreaming about what it would be like to turn out these incredible stories with intimate characters living in such detailed worlds. But now I find myself searching for Tabitha’s stories. I want to know if she found herself hiding in closets or forgoing sleep for the ability to write and then discovering that she could only stare at the blank page.

Does Tabitha’s coffee get cold?

***Since writing this I have purchased two of Tabitha’s novels and am currently in search of her poetry book Grimoire.

Grandma’s School of Decorating

It’s late and I’m writing. I wish I knew why I can’t seem to write during the day while the kids are at school and my husband is at work. No, the words can’t start flowing until after 10pm. When I’m teetering on the edge of sleep happiness.

I feel as though I’m preparing for the inevitable development of seasonal depression that seems to hit around winter. Everything has been going well. I’ve been writing (even though it’s late and it’s throwing off my sleep schedule), and working on a few things here and there to stay active.

I’ve also been putting the plans together to start remodeling the house and then documenting the changes (how I did it/before and after etc.) on the blog. You know the things I’ve been talking about doing for a few years.

So why do I feel like I might soon be “down in it”?

Because that’s how anxiety/depression/being crazy works. 

Sometimes when I get this way I remember my grandmother. My mothers mother.

Grandma Sue.

 She struggled with depression her entire life, like me. We talked about it some when I was older and was living with her for a little while, during college.  

I’m starting to notice that the things I do when I’m feeling down are things that she did. The darkened rooms, sleeping late, avoiding everyone, nervous ticks, and obsessive cleaning.

I remember her good days too. 

I remember those more than I do the bad, because her good days were so contagiously good. 

Grandma Sue was a character. Ask anyone who knew her. She was pretty, and daring. Really funny. Not in that “oh my grandma’s a real hoot” kinda way but truly side splitting, unflinchingly funny. 

She said things that men thought they were only allowed to say. She was southern but not delicate at all. Even in the old pictures, before she was a wife or a mother. When she was just (Don’t call me Mary!) Sue. 

Of course even then she was also a daughter and a sister. That’s the way of it when you’re born female, and the oldest. You’re born with a job and responsibility . At least that’s the way the world worked for the oldest daughters in my family. 

Sue took care of her 3 younger sisters while her mother and father worked the farm almost entirely alone. One might say that she ran away to get married because she was so desperate to escape her situation. Those people never saw the pictures of my grandad. The two of them together look like the beginning of a really good romance movie. She was all of 100 pounds, 10 of it hair, and the thing that you can see right off the bat is that she knows she’s beautiful. 

It makes her even more beautiful. She dares the camera to make her look bad. 

The fact that in many of these pictures the person on the other side is my grandad and the love of her life, doesn’t hurt at all. There aren’t many things in the world more beautiful than a confident, happy woman in love.

In later pictures she is tired. Sometimes she is happy and you can still see a little of that glow but there’s always something missing. I notice it a lot in the pictures of the women in my family. 

My grandma was still a beautiful woman. She lived a life full of struggles and heartbreak. She spent years worried about her weight and how she wished she looked the way she did when she was 18 and in love.She tried hard to find the right medications and the right way to live her life and be happy.  I wonder if she had any idea that she was like a sun we all orbited around, and that when she died we all collapsed into the black hole sized emptiness she left behind. 

She could make anything grow and she was like a magnet for animals. Feeding stray cats who seemed to run out into the neighborhood to tell all the other stray cats that this lady was cool. At times she would be feeding twenty or thirty stray cats only calling the shelter or asking for help when she couldn’t afford to feed them. 

She cleaned houses for a living. I went with her once, on the way to meet her with my mom for some reason or another. The homes were usually upper middle class homes. Nothing too large or gaudy. The insides were always nice, like something from a magazine, but I remember that they always felt cold. There were always extra rooms where the furniture was obviously unused like some antique store and not a real home.

Seeing the nice houses seemed to make my grandma try so much harder to make her home appear nicer. She’d save for months and wait for special china collections to go on sale. Then she’d order a whole matching set of pretty plates and cups that she used to decorate her kitchen table. We weren’t allowed to use those dishes until she’d saved to buy a new set and then the old set would go into the cupboard or if they were particularly nice, into a box and gently placed in the attic. To me though, her decorating skills were better, and much more homey, than the women who paid her to clean the things they were too busy to. 

This is why I’m thinking of her at midnight on a Saturday night. I’m going through the paint colors for the laundry room and the kitchen, the first two rooms on my list of home makeovers. I’ve decided to redo the house in ways that are as up-cycled as possible. Affordably eco-friendly.

It was rare that my grandmother bought something new. Not because she didn’t want to but because she couldn’t afford it. She thrifted yard sales and consignment shops, sometimes driving past Paris Tennessee to find the right deal. She was picky and knew what she wanted and how to make a good deal of it. Everything she had had a purpose and a value to her. That is what I remember most about her decorating and hope to recreate in my own home.

I don’t want cold rooms with things I never touch to sit and collect dust. I want things that are meant to be used and admired and well loved. It doesn’t matter if it’s something that someone else doesn’t want or if it’s a little broken. 

That’s the bulk lesson of everything my grandmother taught me, how to love the broken and unwanted and love them well. 

Seed Starter

(A poem I wrote while starting seeds with my toddler)

I love the feeling of seed starter dirt. All loamy and grit.

Pulling apart tiny seeds so small they fit inside my fingernail tip, this might be a meal come late summer.

I tell my boy, Dig into the dirt. Feel it on your tiny fingertips. This is the mother.

I show him how to put roots down into the ground for Tomorrows supper, that warmth in your belly, all starts with dirt under the nails.

Consumption

It did not creep
slowly,
like a spider
after her struggling prey.
More like a fifteen pound bowling ball,
Thundering towards
lazy fat pins
unable to move.

The disease flowed
through shiny silver cans
Dripping with cold sweat

It poured
out of beautifully crafted glass bottles

Liquids of gold,
Burning amber,
And fizzy bubbling blush

Liquid courage,
it shredded our family tree,
into paper confetti.
Scrapbooks full of memories,
no one could remember anyway,
And those who could?

We stayed behind
licking our wounds,
like angry hangovers
on regretful mornings later.

Preparing for Crap-mas

It’s coming.

That most wonderful time of the year.

And like every year I’m doing everything I can to make it through…and it’s really pissing me off.

Every year I request less crap and every year my requests fall on deaf ears. Every one truly believes that they are going to get me the one thing that I didn’t know I needed, and every Christmas they are wrong.

“What are the kids into this year?”

They are into gift cards and movie tickets. They are into cash and experiences.

The older they get the more likely I am to get what I am requesting (teens aren’t as much fun as littles evidently) but this year I have a toddler. Despite the fact that I have clearly already raised two children through this phase of life, I have seemingly not realized all the crap that I need to do so again.

The poking and prodding for ideas for gifts began in early October and despite the fact that I have said at least twenty five thousand times that my toddler doesn’t play with toys much (like most early walkers he prefers cardboard boxes and large couch cushions) I’m told there are at least five presents tagged with his name in closets already.

“Diapers and books are not as much fun to buy as toys.”

I’m fully aware of this, but over the years the knowledge of how much crap I will be bringing home from other Christmas gatherings makes buying gifts for my own children much more challenging, and frankly that’s some bullshit.

Nothing has ever made the Christmas season more obviously headed in a terrible direction as the year I overheard my kids discussing that Santa didn’t matter because one of their grandparents would get whatever he didn’t and that they knew they would get more “stuff” at the other family get togethers anyway.

I hated that my kids were becoming so seemingly “spoiled”, but my hopes of stopping this process was quickly dashed when I realized that everyone was going to agree with me face to face then buy all the stuff anyway. It was as if Christmas became a competition as to who could get the “gift of the year” award and they all had 30 or more chances to get it right.

Then I got to look the Grinch for being mad about loading it all up.

“It gives them stuff to do while it’s cold!”

Not if they can’t move around the boxes or the piles of toys that broke while trying to get them out of the packaging that was constructed by a Swiss engineer.

I’m tired of having boxes full of crap and trash so interchangeable they sit by the door for a week, because there might be something important still in there. (Like money that someone gave my kid one year without telling me)

I’m tired of my kids getting so much stuff that there is no where for it to go at home and therefore room has to be made.

Clutter both exhausts and depresses me and this is the season of my seasonal depression so the gift of not getting me something useless is a gift in itself.

“I Can’t just get them NOTHING!”

If you enjoy purchasing “things” there are countless charities looking for donations. There are kids everywhere in need of a Santa gift on Christmas morning, but my children are not those kids. There are also parents everywhere struggling to make this happen for their kids but this year that isn’t me.

HELP THESE PEOPLE WITH YOUR OBVIOUSLY EXPENDABLE INCOME!!!

If the idea of buying something and not getting credit for it or getting to see the “Oh-my-gosh” facial reaction feels wrong then maybe do a little soul searching and see why that is, because that’s not a me problem, that’s a you problem.

“It’s the thought that counts!”

Yes. I agree. I’m not a rich person by any means and a lot of the gifts I’ve given in the past have been handmade. Thoughtful gifts are always appreciated. But if that gift is a “grab it at the last minute just because it was on sale” gift then please don’t.

I’m not going to be hurt or offended if you don’t get me or my children a gift. If you can’t afford to, didn’t know what to get, didn’t have time, etc. You don’t have to even explain yourself.

The part of Christmas I’m done with is the idea that we have to and are expected to get random cheaply made crap for everyone in our lives rather than thoughtful and meaningful gifts to those we care for and those who we feel need it the most.

I want a Christmas full of memories. Of making ornaments and seeing lights. Playing games with family and watching cozy happy movies that me feel all toasty inside.

I want all the things that make this season “merry and bright”. I want to love Christmas again and I want everyone to please stop making it Crap-mas.

My Life Isn’t Pretty All The Time And That’s Okay

When I first started this blog it was to help me keep writing. To exercise that muscle of creativity.

It was also because I had just graduated college with a journalism degree and I really didn’t know what to do with it in a small town where no one was hiring.

I’m still not sure where this little page is going or what I will do with it.

I do however feel like writing about what’s going on in my life is helping me pull through this last stage of post baby blues. I don’t know if it’s the start of some mid life crisis or what but I know this: The older I get the less I care about what people are thinking.

So I don’t feel like my life has to be “pretty” anymore to be worth writing about.

It’s something isn’t it?

This desire to make our lives look “pretty”. I know some would say that it’s all this social media stuff but I remember every woman in my life trying hard to make their lives “pretty”.

My mother sent us outside every chance she got and if we weren’t outside we were usually in our rooms. Our living room needed to not look lived in.

My grandmother cleaned richer folks’ homes and I can still remember meeting her there, for one reason or another, and seeing rooms with furniture that no one ever sat on. She herself would save up to buy table settings from the Home Shopping Network that would be set out, usually matching the holiday or season, and were not for eating on.

Of course all this was before it was commonplace to share photos of our dinners and our homes as if it were a spread in Better Homes and Gardens.

My Better-Home (which needs gutter work) and Garden (surprise chicken poop pumpkins and canna’s which need to be thinned)

I often find myself, still out here in this single wide tiny home, not sharing photos because the floor is messy or I still haven’t got around to fixing that spot. More often now though, I question why not?

I’ve been to other peoples houses before. I don’t live on Mars.

Most homes are closer to mine in real life than they are to what gets shared online. That’s just what your house looks like ten seconds before your kids realize you cleaned.

Or maybe you really enjoy cleaning and if that’s the case,

Would like to hang out in real life sometime?

Baby Brain is real.

I have forgotten what it’s like to have such a small baby.

My third child. A surprise son when I thought I was done. Cool, a rhyme. Like the baby books I now read all the time.

I sit here trying to remember how to type. Trying to remember how to make the brain do the think stuff. Make the letters do the word things.

Does any of that make sense?

I want to write but the second I have a second I can’t remember how to or all I can think about is all the other stuff that I should be doing. All that stuff that equals progress and profit.

I am having one of those terrible times when I feel as though I can’t be like the “other mother”.

You know “other mother”. The one who works full time and volunteers 132 hours a week. She runs some kids club or team or both, wears the same size as her 10 year old daughter, and cooks organic “whole” food dinners ever-damn night.

The one that is soo proud her fourth baby is valedictorian of third grade just like their siblings were. Her husband has posted more than once on his social media how proud he is of her and their family and even includes an un-embarrasing photo of her that HE took.

She runs for fun and she has over three thousand facebook friends and wants to know if you’d be interested in trying the product that changed her life and paid for her to go to the Bahamas with the other former cheerleaders she sells with.

Yeah, you know “other mother”.

I gave up long ago on ever being her to be totally honest.

(Do I sound jealous? Because I am.)

A friend had a baby not long after I did. She is already back to pre-baby body, which is the same body she had in high school. She works part time and is starting a home bakery. Among other things.

Then there’s me. For the life of me I can’t seem to just get my most basic shit together. I am honestly avoiding pushing the publish button on this post because I keep re-reading to discover that several words are missing and some of them are so misspelled spell check wants to know if I’ve had a stroke.

I can barely get through the day without an unintentional nap in between switching clothes from the washer to the dryer, or restarting the washer because I forgot about it. Again.

My give a damn is broken and I don’t know if I have enough damn to keep going sometimes.

Send help.

Actually don’t because my social anxiety is back.

Just kidding.

It never left.

Does This Blog Make Me A Writer?

I’ve let this whole project/blog/thing fall by the wayside, haven’t I?

In the past few months I’ve really considered shutting the whole thing down. But something always makes me pause and want to start again. I write a few things and save them in my ever expanding draft file. Then life gets in the way and I start the whole cycle all over.

The thing that keeps me going is that I really do love writing.

It’s an ache that sits inside me, constantly waiting. Gnawing at my brain day and night.

I’m proud to say that, if anyone cared to ask, as a child I was known for always having my nose in a book. From the time the question “What do you want to be?” was asked of me (which seems to be younger and younger as the years pass) I have always said “Writer”.

Even when most were declaring superhero or princess, my dream was to write. I would sit and scribble lines in whatever discarded notebook was lying around when I was too young to know how to create words.

And now here I am.

35 years old and what am I doing?

Usually…not writing.

I have journals filled with story synopsis’ and quickly scribbled half thought out ideas. I always try to start the whole NaNoWriMo but usually forget about it half way through the month.

Sometimes I write and write but lose the nerve to publish.

The years I thought would have been filled with writing out my books were instead spent raising children and trying to find my path in a middle class world that was slowly bleeding into poverty.

In this day and age there is always something someone NEEDS and therefore anything considered a want feels superfluous. Even when that want is time and space.

So I keep this little corner of the internet for now. This little page of space.

And I hit “Publish”.