Stopping In My Tracks

On Saturday mornings my daughter has a gymnastics class that has become part of our weekly ritual.  We go and sit in the bleachers with our coffee while she learns to somersault, walk backwards on a beam, and perfect the art of making her parents freak out every time she slips.  This is good practice for all of us, I’m sure.  Each week she gets a little more comfortable and a little more coordinated than she was before.  She is growing incrementally and the change is so slight it is hard for someone to see it.  But once in a while she will say or do something that (both literally and metaphorically) stops me in my tracks and I will see her in a new way.  The child I once saw as merely a reflection of her parents has somehow trasformred into a thinking, opinionated, humorous little girl. These changes and these moments are worth remembering.  That’s an easy thing to write and probably an easier thing to just read over.  But these moments in our lives really are worth remembering.     

I normally drive by myself to gymnastics so that I can go home afterwards and start my yard work while the girls do the things that girls like to do when they don’t like to garden.  This past Saturday, as I drove back to our house, I was struck by how swiftly the signs of spring had come to Sacramento.  Many of our trees are in flower, daffodils are nearly finished blooming, and the sun is warm.  I had noticed these changes a little and even snapped a few photos of trees in bloom last month.  But then, just like with my daughter, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks . . . this time my car's tracks.  I actually said, “Wow” out loud when I saw this:   

This is on the corner of a very busy street in town and the entire front yard is walled in by the white-washed stucco wall.  I have driven by this house a thousand times and I have never noticed it before.  I felt lucky to have noticed it that day and I thought it would be worth remembering so I pulled over and took a few pictures with my phone. 

Although the picture above was worth posting on its own merit, I was inspired to put fingers to keyboard this morning because a third thing happened to me that stopped me in my tracks.  Clearly, I am in a time and place in my life where I am feeling compelled to stop and take note of what is going on.  This third event happened to be an e-mail I received.  I have infrequently written about the Library of Congress' weekly e-mail column called American Life in Poetry.  This week's poem has a gardening theme so I think it is appropriate to be shared here and I hope that it finds you in a place where you can stop and consider why we garden and what that says about your life as it did for me this morning: 

Cement Backyard

My father had our yard cemented over.
He couldn’t tell a flower from a weed.
The neighbors let their backyards run to clover
and some grew dappled gardens from a seed,

but he preferred cement to rampant green.
Lushness reeked of anarchy’s profusion.
Better to tamp the wildness down, unseen,
than tolerate its careless brash intrusion.

The grass interred, he felt well satisfied:
his first house, and he took an owner’s pride,
surveying the uniform, cemented yard.
Just so, he labored to cement his heart.

-Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Business and Blossoms

My work life changed recently (busier and more stressful) and it's left me feeling a little out of sorts so blogging has taken a back seat the last couple of weeks.  But spending time in my garden has been as important as ever to me.  I find that when life gets hectic, my time in the yard becomes more valuable.  

Although I've managed to keep up on a few of the important gardening tasks like planting my tomatoes and zucchini, I haven't had a lot of time to clean up and make everything tidy the way I like it to be.  And that bothers me some times.  

But then I remember a poem that was featured in American Life in Poetry* a couple years ago written by Carol Snow:  

Tour
Near a shrine in Japan he'd swept the path
and then placed camellia blossoms there.

Or -- we had no way of knowing -- he'd swept the path
between fallen camellias.

****

Here's a picture I took a couple days ago.  It's a picture of a mess.  But I think I'll just leave it this way for a few days.

Orange blossoms and bacopa

*If you are at all interested in poetry, I highly recommend subscribing to American Life in Poetry which is a program started by former U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser, and supported by the Library of Congress.  Every Monday you will receive an e-mail with an introduction from Kooser and a brief poem like the one above.  I am consistently inspired, touched and edified by these poems.