Hellebores and Hell’s a Bore.

In the year 1958, Katharine S. White, an amateur gardener, began to write a gardening column, Onward and Upward in the Garden. She was an editor at The New Yorker and she was married to E.B. White.

She also tended her own garden in Maine and nurtured a fun little hobby she was sure was not hers alone–the pleasurable escape of reading garden catalogues.

Thank goodness she had enough time left over in her life, in those days, to begin writing about what she read in the flimsy pages of the catalogues. She joined in with the community of quirky, and seriously devoted, garden-writing stylists whose work existed in an exclusive, sumptuous, and untrammeled green forum.

It didn’t hurt that the garden catalogues, composed with fantastical flower, fruit, and veggie pictures, were delivered though the U.S. mail at a time of the year when Katharine S. White was probably cold, tired of snow, and, at times, weary of her job as an editor with its attendant frustrations over the puzzling art of poetry.

E.B. White documented one of his wife’s earnest pleas, directed at poets, in his essay, Poetry, from his book One Man’s Meat:

“I wish poets could be clearer,” shouted my wife angrily from the next room. Hers is a universal longing. We would all like it if the bards would make themselves plain, or we think we would. The poets however, are not easily diverted from their high mysterious ways. A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

White’s essay continues to ruminate about poetry. He injects a little humor: “I think Americans, perhaps more than any other people, are impressed by what they don’t understand and poets take advantage of this.” He also writes that he is jealous of poets and wishes, more than anything else, to be a poet.

Well, harumph to the days of sitting around dazed and confused about poetry, thumbs available for twiddling. Haha freakin harumph. How I long for them! I think Americans, nowadays, are impressed by how busy and preoccupied and stupendous their multiple electronic gadgets make them appear to be. Or, at least it started out that way. Now, now, they seem willfully seduced by all things glowing Google. They are so smitten, they claim they can’t help it. They’ve devoured every marshmallow of self-restraint on the researcher’s table and slept with every sexy plate of pasta tweeted by the Food Gurus. They are busier than Sheryl Sandberg leaning up against my front door, while giving birth, and running a meeting on her laptop, and having a happy marriage, and trying to sell me her book.

I think I am supposed to be feeling sorry for the busy people, because it’s not their fault. I watch them raise their syrupy eyes every now and then to make sure everyone else is wearing their favorite pair of fat busypants. Oooh. They’re so comfortable. The electronic wizards croon. I make a note to find out where I can purchase a pair.

But. The truth is. I drink alone.

Because there’s no one in the bar anymore. First, they took away the cigarettes. Then, they took away the band. They allowed phones on every table, computers too, and all other kinds of screens and toys that I am urged to swipe my fingers over. That’s gross.

I am drowning in mugs of beer gone stale because no one could sit still long enough to finish theirs.

God knows I am depending on Him to reserve a place in paradise for the poets and garden writers.

Because this hellish fad of busy buzzings is a damn bore. Or maybe I am just a big bore. And, I’m not even sure God exists or that the poets and gardeners will make it to His paradise if He does.

What if this is it?

I head for the woods.

*****

It’s springtime.

Upon the surface of the forest’s vernal pools floats the reflection of the cloud--an ugly crust of emails, downloaded photos, saved documents. I step in, sloshing about—sinking—getting all muddy and slicked over. It scares the salamanders, at work breeding the old-fashioned way, but ending up with extra toes, tails, and spots. And too many emails.

If you go to Starbucks, you can’t buy CD’s with your coffee anymore. I should have taken better care of mine. I have only been inside a Starbucks once in my life.

Someday, they’ll say we have to do everything we can to save the strange-spotted, toeful, double-tailed salamander. And the researchers will ask for donations to the Salve the Salamanders Project, which will fund safe, water-soluble forms of Xanax for vernal pools so the creatures can deal, gently, with all those emails, extra toes, tails, and spots.

I don’t understand literature or poetry. Or French. Or Russian. Or Chinese. Not even Spanish.

I don’t know how to use punctuation and I don’t know grammatical parts of speech. When I write, in English, which is the language of my youth, I am wriggling around, panting, laughing.

I will never catch up! I wasted my childhood playing, when I might-should-have-been reading and studying and obsessing over something I could do–and do like a champion–forever.

It snowed so much this winter, I wondered about the plants in my garden instead of my periods and commas and quotation marks.

The snow has melted and my Hellebores look wasted. They’re a colorless, dull black and they are limp–splayed flat out in the garden. But there’s some hope in there. The little green buds.

The Hellebores look like I feel because after I read about Starbuck’s, I read that the Apple watch will soon be strapped around the wrists of my countrymen. They will strap them around their chests and foreheads, too. Boomp, pa, boom. Boomp, pa, boom. Click. Click. Hummm.

What keeps you alive?

After a long walk in the woods, I stroll my garden. It looks like hell alright. There are cracked and dropped branches. Lots of prostrate, spent, plant debris begging me to bend over and get to work. A woodpile still needs to be stacked. It’s a security blanket. I’ll wrap myself up in that work on a day when I think about something else I read in the newspaper–that no one wants a garden anymore. It’s too much work and everyone is too busy. I know it’s true.

I only received three garden catalogues in the mail this year. I don’t want to look at them on line. I want to read them and hold them in my hands and smell them. Like my Weekly Reader back in grade school. Something fun, delivered. I want to dog-ear the pages that have all my dreams four-color-separated onto them.

*****

I’m going to wait for my Hellebores to get it together. But I saw some pictures in one garden catalogue that got me all two-stepping about ordering new ones. The pictures have been spread out across my desk for many days now. I’ve never ordered a plant nor seeds from any garden catalogue.

They look like so much fun! Next follows a picture of something I might buy from another catalogue I got from a place called Logee’s in Danielson, Connecticut. I took an excursion to their greenhouses in wintertime. It was like walking through the hollow of a tree, in a hidden forest, into a flowerscape of foliage and blooming weirdness. I felt like a bug, crawling around, smelling, dodging, getting lost, not caring if anything stepped on me or ate me.

What will happen if I grow this tropical freak-out in my New England garden! It will remind me of the first time I went to Hawaii. My children were so little. We didn’t allow electronic games in our household. Not much television, either.

My babies in Hawaii!

*****

Come May, my Hellebores will be thriving again. I will float them in crystal bowls filled with water.

*****

Katharine S. White’s garden writing included recommendations for hand-held, real books. She wrote about The World of the Japanese Garden, from Chinese Origins to Modern Landscape Art, by Loraine Kuck: “This unusual book is my nomination for the most beautiful of the big, expensive garden books…”

She goes on to make a claim about the book’s photographs: “Takeji Iwamiya is Japan’s leading color photographer and his color plates are bright and airy, or cool and dark, and all of them are haunting.”

I bought the book. Seduced by all things Eden–I can’t help it–I have already begun to swipe my tongue across the pages.

I’m going to order Elephant Ear, “Thai Giant”, Colocasia gigantic, too.

I have some seed packages and I hope to get more for Mother’s Day.

My green thumbs are twitching like crazy.

But I’m a garden geek.

No matter how busy I get,

I will always long to remain immersed,

in this poetry of confusion called life.

The Witch Hazel’s Spell.

Where is it that we tend our gardens, beneath the heavens or upon the roofs of hell?

And what is the work we do there? Is it the repeated raking away at our own dreams, which grow back, only to be raked away again?

We are not gods. Yet how hopeful we gardeners remain—our tedious work such tranquil therapy for dealing with the experiences in life that can never be made right again.

Something horrible happens. It is permanent. It happens to us or it happens to someone we care about.

And the gardener is called upon to catch silver sparkles from clouds of doom. But she prefers, instead, to visit a flower or observe a honey bee or destroy a rogue weed. These are the things she can control.

Within the terrifying flames of unmanageable heartache, the gardener can be heard crying out loud, making her face ugly, and getting her hands dirty. She is defiant.

She retreats to her garden, because there is always work to do there, or something to look at, or a place to sit. Maybe angels hover—sympathetic to the steady work of creating calm, by growing altars.

*****

I watched spring come to my garden through the Witch Hazel, Hamamelis.

The flowers unfurled over several days. They trembled in the passing breeze, like little hula skirts.

Honey bees showed up.

The bloom became profuse on a day when a friend called with tragic news. It was news of trauma that will never be okay.

After we talked, I went into my garden and gathered Witch Hazel blooms. The plant grows divining rods, dowsing sticks, and its twigs are thought to have the power to heal a broken heart.

I arranged some blooming twigs in a vase. And carried them with me wherever I went.

*****

What is this garden you have? The passerby says. It is so much work!

Yes! I say.

Yes!

To plant the flower and hope that it grows!

It is so much work!

An Eccentric Easter Excursion.

For a brief time in spring, beginning with the week before Easter, a sentimental tradition of floral joy appears at what is now known as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Nasturtium vines spill from third floor balconies, draping the walls of an interior courtyard with jeweled, painterly impressions of summer. The Venetian palace that hosts this happy display, known as Fenway Court when Mrs. Gardner built it in 1903, is a sanctuary for romantics. Gallery after gallery keeps precious the treasures of art that comforted one woman’s grieving soul. The treasures were arranged by that very soul. Think whatever you want to think about them. There are no labels or titles accompanying the art. Decide for yourself if you like it. Or not.

Sitting under archways in cloisters surrounding the courtyard, gentle, percussive patterings of garden fountains are meant to relax the visitor. Yet there is no rest for anyone who likes to grow things. The mind leaps, onto several paths, every one of them bound for another dream garden waiting to be realized. One season, I planted Nasturtiums in flower boxes so that they would cascade from one level of our deck, down to the next level, a la Isabella G. The simple plants, grown from fat seeds, accomplished so much in just a few months!

*****

Isabella Stewart Gardner had a reputation—an easy thing for any unconventional woman in Boston to acquire. Gossip girls and boys followed her relentlessly, trying to figure her out and judge her. They still do. She is an intriguing personality.

I have always zeroed in on the defining tragedy of her life—the death of her only son, from pneumonia, when he was not yet two years old. After his death, Mrs. Gardner suffered a miscarriage. For two years, grief, depression, and illness consumed her. In a state of despair, she and her husband retreated for a year to travel the lands of Europe where she was encouraged to pursue her passions for art. Mrs. Gardner returned to America when her husband’s brother, a widower, died. He left three sons. Mr. and Mrs. Gardner adopted their nephews. History speculates that the beloved boys were gay, and that the oldest committed suicide at age 25 when he fell in love with another man who rejected his amorous affection.

Mrs. Gardner, to me, was a woman on a quest to fill the voids in her life. Voids that could never be filled.

She sought solace for relentless heartache.

*****

In the Spanish Cloister gallery on the first floor, a painting by John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo, gives moody homage to the human quest to feel happiness, without reservation or guilt. The painting depicts the experience of escaping into the music, dance, and dress of idealized Gypsy freedoms. The year it was painted, 1882, was a time when Gypsies were scorned by polite society because polite society judged the nomadic, exotic culture as one that believed in false magic and superstitions. Polite society honored magic and superstition only if it was wrapped up in the confines of organized religion—and called such things by other names: miracles, prayers, devotionals, sacraments.

From El Jaleo, Mrs. Gardner leads us into deeply intimate and personal journeys. Religious art abounds. The quest for faith, the search for happiness, and the desire for immortality are human struggles we are never sure of. The soul never stops seeking communion with the spirit of a true, supreme being.

*****

Since it is Easter season, I take interest in the Stations of the Cross, carved into stone, displayed near the tranquil courtyard.

I want the story of the resurrection to be true.

I want to be reunited with all the loved ones I’ve lost.

I seek a triumphant end to all the suffering my fellow human beings have endured.

I like Mrs. Gardner. She left all the doors, to all the rooms of her own, open. Her rooms are churches, sanctuaries, galleries, studios, dance halls, performance halls, dinner halls, salons, and quiet study halls.

She is the high priestess of the collection and she wants to share how art saved her.

She inscribed, upon a plaque for the museum: “C’est mon plaisir.”

It is my pleasure.

She wants art to save us, too.

*****

I walk upstairs from the courtyard and enter the Raphael Room. There, a little painting facing a chair and a desk, near a window, perpendicular to the room, captivates me. The painting is delicate in size. It is Raphael’s bittersweet Pieta. And, I have breezed past it on every other visit to the museum.

Mary and Saint John cradle the body of her dead son, Jesus, as Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who removed him from the cross, are present, prepared to assist in his final burial. Mary Magdalene kneels and kisses the feet of the adored Jesus.

Next to the painting, on the desk, is a vase holding stems of dried Teasel. The Teasel’s sharp points evoke the Crown of Thorns used to humiliate Jesus.

I think of how Mrs. Gardner must have chosen to sit, in the little chair near the window with this painting, during intense experiences of mourning. The painting might have soothed her into hoping for an afterlife. On other days, perhaps the painting assuaged her own despair, as she transferred some of her pain to Mary, another woman bearing the unfathomable pain of losing a beloved child.

*****

From the Raphael Room, I walked into the Tapestry Room and stood in the darkened, atmospheric space near a painting of the Assumption of Mary and a horrid sculpture of painted lindenwold representing the head of Christ, crucified. The backlit greens and oranges of Nasturtium flowers and their circular leaves, hung past an open balcony, like a veil I wished to wrap all around me. I live in a modern world, where the savage torture of human beings continues. My shoulders slumped at the thought of a contemporary Christ, how his crucifixion would be broadcast through social media.

I left the Tapestry Room and walked through the elevator passage, stopping to admire the Asian art within it, and ascended the stairs to the third floor. One of my favorite rooms, the dark and sexy, leathery and lacy, Veronese Room led to the Titian Room where you can study the simple set up for the bountiful Nasturtiums. Pots with carefully-tended, planted vines are elevated on overturned pots and arranged in rows of three on wooden benches. Light streams into this room.

I have reached a pinnacle.

This is the gallery featuring Titian’s grand Europa. The painting is powerful and I engage in a spiritual conversation with Mrs. Gardner about her placement of the painting, in line with another small desk and chair, near a window, with a vase of fresh flowers, with another painting on the desk, Christ Carrying the Cross. I sit in the chair (in my mind), and consider the line up.

Human passion, ecstasy, seduction, loss, transformation, control, surrender, cruelty, deliverance, redemption, tragedy, triumph. Resurrection. Peace.

Where—and to whom—or to what—do we commend our spirit?

How do we fill the voids?

I am sure Mrs. Gardner sat here, numb, many hours. Never coming away with any answers.

Grateful for art.

What is more true than art?

*****

My impromptu Easter excursion continued as I stepped from the Titian Room into the Long Gallery. This is a fun part of the museum where cases filled with memorabilia are covered with cloths that can be lifted for personal exploration. There is a case with James McNeill Whistler’s walking stick, also known as his wand, which he gave to Mrs. Gardner in 1886. Underneath the walking stick is a letter he wrote to her, including wonderfully incorrect spelling and punctuation:

“The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter—perfect in it’s bud as in it’s bloom. With no reason to explain it’s presence—no mission to fulfil—a joy to the artist—a delusion to the philanthropist—a puzzle to the botanist—an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man.”

At one end of the Long Gallery there is a charming terra-cotta sculpture, Virgin Adoring Child. But I think it looks more like Mary teaching her little son Jesus how to pray.

The other end of the Long Gallery is anchored by Mrs. Gardner’s personal chapel with French Gothic stained glass, carved saints, Italian choir stalls from the 16th century, and a prayer desk I wish I owned. There are two places to kneel here, facing the stained glass, and after walking all through the museum, this becomes a perfect respite. Kneeling, there is time to tip the eyes up and all around, admiring all of Mrs. Gardner’s spiritual nook. The stained glass transported me to Sainte Chapelle in Paris, the most beautiful and magical cathedral, built to house the Passion Relics, especially the Crown of Thorns.

*****

Before leaving the Gardner Museum, I stop into the MacKnight Room, a most intimate room of Mrs. Gardner’s own. There’s a bottle of collected sand from a trip to see the pyramids in Egypt. And, there is a reproduction of a watercolor, Mrs. Gardner in White, painted by her friend John Singer Sargent after she suffered a stroke. The iconic, scandalous portrait of a more youthful Isabella Stewart Gardner that hangs in the Gothic Room—the one that caused a great deal of vicious gossip in Boston— (and was never again exhibited until after her death), gives way to an intensely personal portrait of a woman who seems to have arrived at a state of peaceful acceptance with her own life.

*****

In the end, Mrs. Gardner was not ashamed of how she had lived, nor how she looked. Art sustained her and helped her recapture a dramatic zest for life. She wraps herself up in a white shroud and sits for a final portrait.

She was buried between her husband and her son at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

Because it is Easter, I prefer to believe she is with her husband and all of her lost children, including her nephews, in a paradise where there is no suffering,

in a kingdom without end.

*****

Gypsy Picnic. Gypsy Zing Sauce.

I have a new favorite salon and it’s in the drab and under-appreciated city of Worcester, Massachusetts. I’ve never been a spa or salon girl—in fact, if I could cut and color my own hair, as nicely as I cut the lawn and color the garden with flowers, I would do it.

Drab hip is what’s cool about Worcester—there’s a fragmented grunginess about the city that leaves itself alone. Not much legacy or nouveau riche, dreadfully fine* money polishes its urban edges. Go in search of somewhere to hang out, and you’ll feel yourself pulled into a pause. Disoriented, you could be right, you could be wrong about where you’re standing. Something creeps underneath the radar, maybe. There are no crowds to follow and no painted lines to a tourist kiosk. No costumed, smiling docents. The art museum is superb. The array of educational institutions is world class. There are great places to eat and drink. And there are businesses, like Barney’s Bike Shop, with an excellent link on their website about where to hit the road, or the trail, with a bike.

*Dreadfully Fine: I learned this from my son and his friends in college—it means you are depressed due to the fact that everything about your life is so dreadfully fine.

The beauty salon I found in Worcester is Tu Moda Spa and Salon on Pleasant Street. Their decor is American slash European-Hill-Town slash Almost-Chic, and the music piped in, at least during my last several visits, has been tres hip. (Important.)

The European thing lured me to this salon when I went looking for a place to take my daughter for her birthday. She is a spa girl. She is also a lucky charm and I ended up finding a hairstylist at Tu Moda I like a lot. My new hairstylist is tres tres tres tres tres hip. Five-star hip.

First of all, she loves Acadia National Park. So do I. She loves it through and through. She loves how she can go there with a group of friends, and there’s something for everyone. She loves how it’s hidden, but not really, in New England.

She loves to cook. Me too.

She loves to bake, but thinks it’s more challenging than cooking. Same.

She traveled to visit family, as a child, into the summertime countrysides near Amsterdam. The beauty formed within her while spending time with her family, (for she talks of it with joy), has not faded.

Today, when I sat in my hairstylist’s chair, I told her about the recipes I cut out of the Boston Globe and the New York Times. We gushed on and on about radishes fresh from the farm in summertime. There was a recipe in the paper for Butter-Stewed Radishes. I told her I think everyone should get a hard-copy of the newspaper, at least on the days featuring Food. You can tear out the recipes, and keep them. After reading through the newspaper food sections, first thing in the morning, right off the bat you’re ready to saddle up the horse and ride to a farmer’s market.

My hairstylist loves music festivals and following favorite bands.

She loves her dog. I don’t know her dog, but if I did, I am sure I would love her dog, too.

She likes to wander around Worcester and find great bakeries, great places to drink coffee, great bars to share beers with friends.

She tells me about unknown bakeries and funky shops and where to eat the best brunch.

She loves gardens and is helping her friend make a garden at her friend’s new house in Providence. I told her about the Beacon Hill Garden Tour. I said she and her friend should go on the tour together to find ideas for small, delicious, dreamy, urban gardens. She said spending money to go to Boston for a day with a friend to look at gardens, would be worth every penny.

She was an artist in high school, applied to art schools, was accepted, but couldn’t afford to attend any of them. So, she became a hairstylist, because it was something else she thought she would enjoy doing.

She is a cheerful artist who is a hairstylist—perhaps it’s a little bit like being a happy poet who is a therapist. But way more fun.

She lives with, and takes care of, her father. He had a stroke a few years ago.

She told me her father had always admired Bob Dylan, so she took him to a concert several years ago. Elvis Costello was the opening act. Dylan was horrible, she said, and she felt awful for her father. I told her we went to the same show and thought, thank goodness for Elvis Costello, because Dylan was lost in a caricature of his many selves, all of them muddied into one unappealing performance. We both said it can’t be easy to be an artist who is expected to perform, and live up to, great expectations.

I especially like when my hairstylist tells me gentle stories about her father. He used to enjoy cooking. So, she will ask him what he might want for dinners, they will talk about recipes, and then she will assemble the ingredients and orchestrate the process–making sure to allow him to cook as much as he can.

I tell her how much my husband loves to cook and how he will artfully arrange the food just so, taking his time to arrange perfect sprays of fresh herbs, perfect brush strokes of secret sauces, and perfect garnishes of fruit, flowers, or veggies. She says her father wants to do all of that, too. She said he used to work in the garden so she recently bought him small, terrarium gardens to tend, after she found them at an eclectic and strange shop in Worcester called Seed to Stem.

She told me I would probably like Seed to Stem.

I told her my husband’s father loved to cook, too, but he suffered a massive stroke almost three years ago and didn’t survive. He liked to garden, too, and used to grow pleasing varieties of tomatoes for all of his children, from seed, in a unique set-up of lights and growing trays down in his basement. I looked forward to his special deliveries every spring, and his concentrated instructions for transferring the plants into the Earth. After I situated the tomato plants into the garden, my father-in-law never ceased to check in on how they were doing. I made sure to give him frequent updates on the details of our flavorful excursions through the ripe skins of those precious tomatoes.

*****

Today, my appointment was early, so my hairstylist asked if I had any plans for the rest of the day. I said that after reading all the foodie pages in the newspaper, I wanted to design a picnic because my husband and I were going to Vermont to ski and I wanted to pack something new for our lunch.

So far this season, I told her, I’d made homemade chicken salad sandwiches and outrageous homemade meatloaf sandwiches for our ski trip lunch picnics. The meatloaf was an experiment using leftover beef, veal, and pork after my husband made bolognese.

I said I planned to stop at BirchTree Bread, (drab hip warehouse space), over in the Blackstone Canal District to have a cup of soup and check out the breads. The chef there is no hobbyist. He’s focused on food. The morning’s newspaper had included some press about his hideout in Worcester.

Then I hoped to stop at Trader Joe’s.

But now, I said to my hairstylist, I would add her recommended detour to the funky shop—Seed to Stem.

*****

When I got to BirchTree Bread, I tried a killer cup of celery root soup. Great music played on the sound system. (Important.) I slurped the soup surrounded by gray-toned scales of urban decay, blending old warehouse and mill buildings into a sturdy mid-day wash of melting snow, mud, and wet fog. The restaurant space is vast. Computers glowed. One little boy, wearing a bright yellow slicker, laughed. A man conducted business on his phone. People socialized. I was alone, anonymous, content. The pace of my breath slowed to imaginative thoughts. Efforts to preserve history loitered on city streets so deserted, I could make a U-turn on them, in a tandem-tractor trailer, in one fell swooping turn.

God bless BirchTree Bread for bringing some faith to the city. I bought a fresh loaf of their rosemary ciabatta and commenced hunting for the rest of a designer picnic lunch.

Next, I stopped at Seed to Stem. Good music playing! My hairstylist didn’t divulge details about the shop, so when I arrived, surprises were well appreciated. I took some pictures of things that were not for sale.

I found something that was for sale, about another city I like a lot:

At Trader Joe’s, I bought flowers. (Best flowers, best prices, best displays.)

I bought Trader Joe’s thick slices of cooked and salted turkey.

I bought Italian dry salami and pepper jack cheese.

Ideas for sandwich designs began rising and falling in my mind.

For the picnic side dish, I selected a bag of sweet-potato snack chips.

And for dessert, I bought Trader Joe’s dark-chocolate peanut butter cups.

I drove home, unloaded the groceries, and rummaged through the fridge for sandwich start-ups and add-ons.

There was a half can of tomato paste calling out to be rescued.

*****

Final design:

GYPSY SKI PICNIC ZINGWICH

Trader Joe’s cooked, sliced turkey.

Italian dry salami.

Pepper jack cheese.

Lettuce. Tomato.

Fresh cilantro.

Gypsy Zing Sauce.

BirchTree rosemary ciabatta bread.

(Sweet bread and butter pickles—optional.)

Gypsy Zing Sauce: 1/4 c. mayonnaise—3 or so tablespoons of tomato paste—a teaspoon and a dash more of Worcestershire sauce (Worcester!)—half a lemon squeezed out (probably about a tablespoon)—sea salt—coarse ground pepper.

The sandwich contains multitudinous flavors of drab hip, gypsy grit—with zing.

Bon appétit, picnic lovers!

Work. Skiing. Roses.

The Aloha Rose. Fragrant. Velvety petals. Blooms all summer, till frost.

*****

Two weeks ago, I wrote about weather in the Mad River Valley of Vermont. This past weekend, we skied through some of the toughest weather in years—a lively combination of snow, wind, pea-soup fog, and dangerously cold temperatures. It’s a lot of work to arrive at the summit of a mountain being battered by weather and to ski back to Earth from that summit. The work is worth it—you get the trails all to yourself, you get to exist as part of a storm, and you get to collapse, later, brand new.

We went to dinner with a nice group of old and new friends. Some are still working, others are retired. The question What do you do for work? blessedly, never made it all the way around the table to where I sat, with my glass of wine and my ideas for an answer. There are so many things I do for work.

I love work.

*****

Oh, work—if thou were a rose, indeed, thou would grow the sharpest, most plentiful thorns along lengthy, overarching, invasive, multi-branched stems. Beneath thy bowers would accumulate the crumpled forms of bloodied, harassed little beings, hissing and cursing and writhing about. Trapped in your web of jammed and twisted traffic routes, ladders to the top, and paths to recognition, the hard workers would brag about how bloody you caused them to become, how unfairly you paid them, and how cruelly you blocked the ways to, and beyond, the summits of joy.

Furthermore, though your rosebuds unfurl, casting heavenly scents to sweeten neglected happiness—your brambles, it seems, remain consistently smeared with the bloodied bodies, plugged up noses and blinded eyes of grumblers.

They were never able to stop and notice the soft touch of your rose petals, falling to the ground, brushing away tears and smoothing out wounds.

******

I grow roses.

I planted them in my gardens without knowing much about them. They stabbed me. Ensnared my hair. Bloodied my days with wounds that throbbed to the pulse of my heart muscle.

I like to collect rose petals and arrange them into luxurious shapes.

I cook the rose petals until they are transformed into botanical clay and then I roll the clay into beads.

I make tea with rose hips. I dry the rose hips and save them to study or to use in fairy house construction.

I make sure to leave rose hips on the plants for wildlife treats in wintertime.

I make rose water, distilling the fragrance from the petals. It makes my entire house smell rosy.

Roses are a lot of work.

I’m not paid to work with roses. I’ll never become famous because I like roses in my gardens, or because I like to visit them in other gardens of the world, or because I love to read about them and hear songs about them and see artwork that honors them.

Roses can be a bad-boy kind of thing to fall in love with.

*****

I work hard to grow rosebushes near the front porch where I keep a small bistro table with two chairs. You can place onto that table the nicest glasses of wine from the most prestigious vineyards of the world. Next to the wine, you can set out a plate of artisan-baked bread, with cheese—artfully produced in Vermont or France or Italy. The wine maker, the bread baker, and the cheese maker will all be there—in spirit—their hard work appreciated, revered, savored.

I can rely on the promise that a breeze, religiously drifting forth into this romantic setting, will find my roses and rustle them gently. The breeze will rise up, travel some more, and push away the bouquet of the wine, the musk of the bread, and the stink of the cheese. All dressed up in the sensational perfume formed by a once-in-a-lifetime blend of faraway winds, swirled up with sunshine, soil, and my roses—that genteel, sweet breeze will make anyone feel brand new.

One of my roses grew like a heart.

*****

Graham Rose, who was a gardener and a writer, and a correspondent for the London Sunday Times, wrote that the gardener “contrives to make us ignore the world outside and believe that the impossible is readily attainable. The very best of them can take a miserable yard and, by clever construction and planting, lead us down an enchanting track to the idyllic corner of Arcadia, while blinding us to eyesores beyond and suppressing our awareness of noisy neighbors or the rumbling trucks that throng the road outside its walls.”

Graham Rose also wrote that gardeners are romantics and romancers who enjoy connecting themselves to extravagant fictions—remote from ordinary life.

Skiing inside a raging snowstorm feels, to me, like existing inside an extravagant fiction, remote from ordinary life.

Gardening and growing roses, too, is work I do to find and create fantasy lands where anyone can go to escape what is ordinary and become inspired to believe in what might be impossible.

I’ve worked to grow gardens on a miserable acre of land in Massachusetts for a long time. Trucks rumble by every day.

What do I do for work?

I was glad the question never made it around the apres-ski table to where I was sitting—

with my glass of wine

and a bouquet of roses

in the middle of a raging snowstorm.

Excursions

The Gypsy Apprentice

Category Archives: Gardening

Hellebores and Hell’s a Bore.

The Witch Hazel’s Spell.

An Eccentric Easter Excursion.

Gypsy Picnic. Gypsy Zing Sauce.

Work. Skiing. Roses.