The end of the path
Sep. 19th, 2013 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violetcheetahAnother writing workshop missed, but another poem offered as a prompt (Robert Frost's "After Apple-Picking")
-----
I spent the day Tuesday at Michele's, playing in the dirt. It's not gardening; gardening is orderly, neat, or at least aims for that. Gardening has a goal, an ending: the perfect bed, vacant of weeds and filled with flowers but not over-full but no gaps, either, of course. A gap means something died, had to be pulled out like a decayed tooth, and you couldn't be bothered to buy a pot of annuals, I mean really? Gardening has a plan, preferably laid out on graph paper; short in front to tall in the back, complimentary colors and similar bloom times together. All this planning pays off with a display out of a Monet painting, effusive but peaceful, creating a longing in passersby to create something this beautiful, an ache to embrace the whole scene and carry it with them, knowing that even tomorrow it won't be the same, knowing even a photograph won't capture it truly.
Gardening is bullpucky. How many groundsmen were necessary to keep order long enough for one Monet painting? And then what did the garden look like the other 360 days of the year? There is no ending, no final goal, no set plan, not unless you want to be heartily disappointed. Hardy flowers wither for no reason, and it turns out the beautiful silver-green leaves on the new plant are a magnet for slugs or caterpillars. The huge bearded irises turn out to be too heavy for their stalks, like an overplumaged male peacock, and you get those stakes with the circle in the top to hold the stalks, but the ground is rocky six inches down, and you can't stick the damned things in deep enough to do any good, and anyway, they aren't really that picturesque. And there's always a new weed, sprigs of grass runnering from the yard side of the edging, and the flowers wilt and turn brown and have to be snipped off, and it took two years to coax the wisteria to climb the chain-link fence like teaching a reluctant newborn to suckle, and now it's reaching out to embrace the ends of the pear-tree limbs 20 bloody feet away.
It used to drive me crazy, the endlessness of it. Not the constant work — I liked that — but that there wasn't a point where I could sit back and say, "Okay, I'm done. I finished a project." I hated that I was too flighty to finish anything; I'd abandon a bed when it was tolerably non-chaotic, because wow this other bed is a mess, and now the yard needs mowing, and the yews are once again taller than I am, and then... Ten fingers in ten leaks in the dike.
But I realized something a couple of years ago: I hate endings. I hate finishing books, not just other authors' books, but my own. I was writing a short memoir and stringing scenes together, and then that was the last scene and fuck! I'm done. There isn't anything else to do, at least on the first draft, and I don't have the distance in time to do revisions, and I've been moving on this path, toward this goal, and now I'm there, I'm past there, it's behind me, and I'm not ready.
Around the same time, I ended up finishing some of the sewing projects that I'd started sometimes over a decade ago. I hemmed the bottom or sewed the last button on or top-stitched the waistband, and I sat, over and over, in something numb and ridiculously like grief. I had a shirt or a dress, yes, but I no longer had the promise of a garment. And it wasn't that the finished product was a disappointment; with few exceptions, the projects lived up to my hopes. They were hope made manifest. But now where had the hope gone?
I'm still making my peace with endings. I'm still learning to feel the loss and gain at the same time. I'm still learning to stop when I'm done, even if I can't sit back and enjoy the result of my work, to just stop. Sit. Wait for the gears to spin down, the engine to cool, before I start up something new.
Tuesday, I dug in the dirt, and I finished the end of a path. It was a path I started working on two years ago, and for various reasons it made sense at the time to work on the middle of the 50 feet or so first. The path was part of a larger project that involved digging up a huge swatch of yard, and that part of the project is complicated by the anal-retentive desire to dig up the non-weedy patches of grass and transplant them to crappy parts of the part of the yard that will stay yard, which requires digging up those crappy parts of the yard. I dug up some more of these grass toupees last week, from near the part of the path that's done, and then yesterday started hand-tilling the dirt beneath. But then later in the afternoon, I switched to digging up some of the good grass at one end of the path, where one day Michele wants the path to meet the driveway. There was about 15 feet of not-yet-path, and only about 5 feet was good grass. I transplanted it to the waiting bald spot, and then came back to the not-path. The path will be three feet wide eventually, the width of the weed cloth. The not-yet-path near the driveway has a mound of dirt next to it, from a previous project; this mound extends into the not-yet-path about a foot and a half. I can't really complete that end of the path until the mound moves, and it's waiting on another project. And maybe that's why I picked up the hand-tiller again, at 6 p.m., my hands starting to get chilly as the temperature dropped below 60 and the sun dropped low in the sky. I started tilling the part of the not-yet-path up to the mound, and then around the mound, and then to the driveway. I didn't have time to smooth and tamp the ground; I just tossed the weedy sod in the wheelbarrow and left the loose bare dirt lumpy.
But it's bare. It narrows to barely a foot where the mound crowds in, but there is a strip of grassless, weedless earth leading from the driveway to the honest-to-goodness path. I looked at it, and tension sent me up on my tiptoes, my fingers curled not just from cold. There was an end to the path. I had ended something.
Then I took a breath and looked down the line, past the path-to-be, past the honest-to-goodness path. That end of the path stops ten feet from a stand of yews; it cannot continue straight because the yews jut out from the fence in its way. Michele and I have some vague thoughts about what to do about that end of the path: maybe it swerves around the yews and keeps going, or maybe it circles back toward its beginning in a loop, or maybe it meanders out into the yard. Nothing is decided. It probably won't be decided this fall, maybe not next spring, either. My heels rested on the ground again, and I flexed my fingers. It isn't finished. There is still work to do.
-----
I spent the day Tuesday at Michele's, playing in the dirt. It's not gardening; gardening is orderly, neat, or at least aims for that. Gardening has a goal, an ending: the perfect bed, vacant of weeds and filled with flowers but not over-full but no gaps, either, of course. A gap means something died, had to be pulled out like a decayed tooth, and you couldn't be bothered to buy a pot of annuals, I mean really? Gardening has a plan, preferably laid out on graph paper; short in front to tall in the back, complimentary colors and similar bloom times together. All this planning pays off with a display out of a Monet painting, effusive but peaceful, creating a longing in passersby to create something this beautiful, an ache to embrace the whole scene and carry it with them, knowing that even tomorrow it won't be the same, knowing even a photograph won't capture it truly.
Gardening is bullpucky. How many groundsmen were necessary to keep order long enough for one Monet painting? And then what did the garden look like the other 360 days of the year? There is no ending, no final goal, no set plan, not unless you want to be heartily disappointed. Hardy flowers wither for no reason, and it turns out the beautiful silver-green leaves on the new plant are a magnet for slugs or caterpillars. The huge bearded irises turn out to be too heavy for their stalks, like an overplumaged male peacock, and you get those stakes with the circle in the top to hold the stalks, but the ground is rocky six inches down, and you can't stick the damned things in deep enough to do any good, and anyway, they aren't really that picturesque. And there's always a new weed, sprigs of grass runnering from the yard side of the edging, and the flowers wilt and turn brown and have to be snipped off, and it took two years to coax the wisteria to climb the chain-link fence like teaching a reluctant newborn to suckle, and now it's reaching out to embrace the ends of the pear-tree limbs 20 bloody feet away.
It used to drive me crazy, the endlessness of it. Not the constant work — I liked that — but that there wasn't a point where I could sit back and say, "Okay, I'm done. I finished a project." I hated that I was too flighty to finish anything; I'd abandon a bed when it was tolerably non-chaotic, because wow this other bed is a mess, and now the yard needs mowing, and the yews are once again taller than I am, and then... Ten fingers in ten leaks in the dike.
But I realized something a couple of years ago: I hate endings. I hate finishing books, not just other authors' books, but my own. I was writing a short memoir and stringing scenes together, and then that was the last scene and fuck! I'm done. There isn't anything else to do, at least on the first draft, and I don't have the distance in time to do revisions, and I've been moving on this path, toward this goal, and now I'm there, I'm past there, it's behind me, and I'm not ready.
Around the same time, I ended up finishing some of the sewing projects that I'd started sometimes over a decade ago. I hemmed the bottom or sewed the last button on or top-stitched the waistband, and I sat, over and over, in something numb and ridiculously like grief. I had a shirt or a dress, yes, but I no longer had the promise of a garment. And it wasn't that the finished product was a disappointment; with few exceptions, the projects lived up to my hopes. They were hope made manifest. But now where had the hope gone?
I'm still making my peace with endings. I'm still learning to feel the loss and gain at the same time. I'm still learning to stop when I'm done, even if I can't sit back and enjoy the result of my work, to just stop. Sit. Wait for the gears to spin down, the engine to cool, before I start up something new.
Tuesday, I dug in the dirt, and I finished the end of a path. It was a path I started working on two years ago, and for various reasons it made sense at the time to work on the middle of the 50 feet or so first. The path was part of a larger project that involved digging up a huge swatch of yard, and that part of the project is complicated by the anal-retentive desire to dig up the non-weedy patches of grass and transplant them to crappy parts of the part of the yard that will stay yard, which requires digging up those crappy parts of the yard. I dug up some more of these grass toupees last week, from near the part of the path that's done, and then yesterday started hand-tilling the dirt beneath. But then later in the afternoon, I switched to digging up some of the good grass at one end of the path, where one day Michele wants the path to meet the driveway. There was about 15 feet of not-yet-path, and only about 5 feet was good grass. I transplanted it to the waiting bald spot, and then came back to the not-path. The path will be three feet wide eventually, the width of the weed cloth. The not-yet-path near the driveway has a mound of dirt next to it, from a previous project; this mound extends into the not-yet-path about a foot and a half. I can't really complete that end of the path until the mound moves, and it's waiting on another project. And maybe that's why I picked up the hand-tiller again, at 6 p.m., my hands starting to get chilly as the temperature dropped below 60 and the sun dropped low in the sky. I started tilling the part of the not-yet-path up to the mound, and then around the mound, and then to the driveway. I didn't have time to smooth and tamp the ground; I just tossed the weedy sod in the wheelbarrow and left the loose bare dirt lumpy.
But it's bare. It narrows to barely a foot where the mound crowds in, but there is a strip of grassless, weedless earth leading from the driveway to the honest-to-goodness path. I looked at it, and tension sent me up on my tiptoes, my fingers curled not just from cold. There was an end to the path. I had ended something.
Then I took a breath and looked down the line, past the path-to-be, past the honest-to-goodness path. That end of the path stops ten feet from a stand of yews; it cannot continue straight because the yews jut out from the fence in its way. Michele and I have some vague thoughts about what to do about that end of the path: maybe it swerves around the yews and keeps going, or maybe it circles back toward its beginning in a loop, or maybe it meanders out into the yard. Nothing is decided. It probably won't be decided this fall, maybe not next spring, either. My heels rested on the ground again, and I flexed my fingers. It isn't finished. There is still work to do.
