WITH GRACE AND WITHOUT REGRET

 

Yikes!!  I have accepted an offer on my house. This feels like a very big deal.  

  

Shall I explain?

 

My ex and I bought this house in 1993 when our girls were young.  The girls are now grown and have families and homes of their own.  My marriage to their father ended over 25 years ago, and I shared this house with a new husband for more than 20 years, until he died last summer.  

Since Bill's death, I have been living in too much house with too many memories.  It is definitely time to downsize.  Still, leaving this house where I raised my daughters and saw Bill through his final days, and starting over by myself in a new neighborhood feels daunting.  Perhaps most daunting is the thought of leaving behind the garden I have tended for so long.  It is true I have reached the point where the garden has become too much for me to handle, but it will still be a wrench to leave it behind.  

 

                                Here is a slice of the garden I am so reluctant to part with.

I have read that our bodies experience fear and excitement in exactly the same way--racing heart, sweat, adrenaline--and that it is our brains that decide which label to apply.  At the moment, my brain is vacillating between fear and excitement.  And is it any wonder?  This whole house-sale thing happened very fast--just a few days between listing the house and accepting an offer. 

 

My head is spinning.  

 

I was the weekly garden columnist for The Columbian (my City's daily paper) back in the '90s, and while riding my waves of emotion this morning, I remembered a column I had written about making peace with the transience of home and garden ownership. Thinking I might find some wisdom there from my younger self, I hauled out a box filled with my columns and found the one in question.  

 

Here it is, more or less as written in 1995:

 

             A year and a half in this house and I was beginning to feel that this garden was really “mine."  Sure, I had been intimidated at first, impressed by the 30 years of landscaping that had preceded my residence.  But hadn’t I ripped out miles of ivy and replaced it with perennials?  Hadn’t I disposed of a slew of junipers and put in blueberries and old roses?

 

             Surely my hours of weeding and planning, not to mention the title to the house, qualified me as the rightful owner of this garden. Well, yes, but yesterday I was reminded of the tenuousness of my claim.

 

             Here’s what happened.  When we moved in, there was a small, square wooden planter out in front of the garage.  Painted the same color as the house, it looked as though some thought had been given to its placement.

 

             There was a Mexican heather in the box when we took up residence in November of 1993, but it didn’t survive the winter.   So, last spring, I replanted the box with various annuals and kept them watered and fertilized.  Nothing thrived.  This spring, I set out some perennials, but again they just sat there looking puny.

 

             I decided to empty the box, replace the soil, and start over.  Which brings me to yesterday when I lifted the box to dump the soil and found a board at the bottom, carved with the names of the home’s former owners.  I expect they would not want their names bandied about in this newspaper, so I will call them Dan and Susan. 

 

             Susan is living in a condo now, where I understand she has a small space for gardening.  And Dan, far too early the victim of Alzheimer’s disease, spends his days and nights in a facility for those stricken with this cruel ailment.

 

             But when I uncovered that board, I was filled with the sense of  their presence.  I could see them planning the gardens, planting the junipers, trimming the bamboo, raising their kids, living their lives on this small plot of land to which I have so quickly become so fiercely attached.

 

             And I could see for a moment the next resident finding some artifact from our days in this house and pausing to wonder about our lives, then gathering her own life gratefully about her and getting on with the task at hand.

 

             Isn't this is as it should be? We don’t really own the land, no matter how many deeds we have in our safe deposit boxes.  It’s a funny thing about gardening--it makes you feel closer to the land, but it doesn’t necessarily heighten your sense of ownership.         

       

             Maybe that’s because gardening is an activity marked by transiency.  We watch as seeds grow into plants, then tumble into compost.  Favorite blooms—iris, tulips, peonies—are often the most ephemeral, and while gardening activities may stretch to cover seven or eight months in our mild climate, the high gardening season lasts five to six months at best.

 

             With so much of gardening given over to dreaming and planning, rearranging and starting anew, there’s rarely a sense of  being finished, even after many years.

 

             And while it is possible to view a house as a thing, a property to be owned and sold, the longer we labor on a piece of land, the less likely we are to believe that it belongs to us.

 

             Of course, we may become attached, even devoted to the land that we tend, but our very work forces us to see the larger hand of  nature at work. If we seek to create beauty without doing harm, we come to understand that we are mere stewards of the land, handmaidens to the seasons.

 

             And so, as I work outside today, I think of Dan and Susan and their family, and I feel gratitude for their stewardship and for our time in this garden, which I hope will extend for many years.

 

             And I also hope that when the moment comes for us to move, we will pass along this patch of earth to its next caretaker with grace and without regret.

 

Reading over this old column all these years later, I understand what it is I must do to midwife myself through this move, and that is to move forward with grace and to waste no time on regret.

 

Happily, the new owners, if this deal goes through, seem like they will make good stewards of my home and garden.  Believing this helps me to lean more toward excitement than fear as I imagine my next home.

 

There will be another, more manageable garden.  There will be another, smaller house. I can't quite see the details yet, but I expect it will all be just right for this new chapter of my life.