Graduating: Day 3: Garden

by Lucy S.

I think what I’m trying to do is write every day for a week about this aftermath of graduating. And then… maybe I will write about it again once a week or once a month. I don’t know. And I don’t know if yesterday’s post really qualified as an aftermath, except that there is this connection. I left college years ago because I moved to Germany. (I almost wrote “had to move to Germany,” and that was how it seemed to me at the time.) So graduating with my master’s is the fulfillment, after all the years, of my dream to be able to teach at a community college.

I don’t know beyond that yet what I am going to do. Will I apply to PhD programs? Will I try hard to get all the work I can at community colleges? Will I find other ways to teach and write? Hit the road to just travel for a lot of the year (or years)?  Move? Focus on growing all the food I can this summer? I am confused. It is overwhelming to go from feeling so intensely focused on the work of the semester to the utter freedom of the aftermath, that swing out over the void.

In the meantime, we are planting and in other ways, getting the garden ready. Justin and Jonathan helped clear weeds out of the strawberry bed the other day. Jonathan, Sean, Ryan, and I planted some vegetables, herbs, and flowers yesterday. The hummingbirds and butterflies love zinnias. After all these years of growing tomatoes, I learned a new trick: to throw a garlic clove into each spot dug for a tomato plant. That helps fend off fungal diseases. I also planted marigolds in between the tomatoes and some basil near them. All these things are supposed to help prevent the diseases they can get in our upper Midwest humidity.  I need to get jalapeños and cilantro planted so that everything to make salsa is growing. And some tomatillos for green salsa.

In this frightening uncertainty about what to do next, I am plunging into the comfort of the tangible and what I can at least imagine as unquestionably ‘right’ and ‘good.’  I’m so tired of thinking, with regard to so many things, “Yes, but then again….”  So tired of feeling wrong in some way or another. Right now, I want to know that I can plant chard, start eating it by mid-July, cooking it in coconut oil or butter (I learned through personal experience that I feel better with these healthy fats), and keep eating it throughout the summer. Right now, I can look for stinging nettle growing out there wildly, ready to sauté or boil. For so long now, I’ve imagined what these neighborhoods would be like if everyone grew lots of food, especially out in the front yard, where we’d regularly encounter one another out there working in our gardens. I picture us walking over to give away extra fruit and vegetables and herbs (or pots of flowers), and coming home with bags, baskets, or armfuls of something else that we aren’t growing but others are. Gardens are to LIVE in, by, and with; to work in, nourishing ourselves and others; to touch, eat, plunge our hands into, inhale, sit in, share, spread beyond the confines of notions of private property.

Ryan planted blue morning glory seeds today along one side of the fence and near the post that the mail box sets on, and around some long branches that he hunted for out in the back where they were blown over when the winds cracked them off of one of the big trees. He placed those branches in the back of one of the garden beds, leaning against each other, for the morning glories to twine around and clamber up later this summer. This was his idea. Ryan also told me that he loves to see the white candytuft flowers growing out of the cracks of the retaining wall, where they have somehow pushed through this spring.

Jonathan is home now and angry that even though he told his supervisor at the coffee shop to schedule him off for certain days or times so that he could rehearse for the show he’s supposed to be in during June, she keeps scheduling him to work.  What is the reason for this?  Is she trying to make him miss the show?  Why has she started scheduling him specifically for the times he asked for off, when she was not scheduling him for those times as much before he asked for them off?  I don't believe in bosses. It warps people's personalities and leaves others at their mercy.  Not all people; some are 'nice' bosses. But still, we don't need them. 

Jonathan, like Ryan, always loved gardening. And he loves performing and other aspects of creating plays. I’m trying to hold onto this feeling I have, this more playful or intuitive sense, a quality of seeing or thinking, but with the thought of Jonathan stuck in a job serving coffee, scheduled at maximum flexibility of his manager, blocked from doing what he loves most, my mind slips into thoughts again about worker-owned businesses, better work, better answers…