“Don’t make any plans today,” my husband warned me. “There’s are two Yankee games and one Giants game on this afternoon.” I’d actually thought we might do something adventurous, or at least entertaining, today — a drive in the country, lunch and a movie, a trip into the city — but I was secretly relieved. What I really wanted to do was work in the garden, and John’s sports schedule gave me permission to do just that, without the guilty sense that, really, I could be using my time more creatively.
Our front lawn is a nightmare, at least if your ambition is to actually have a lawn. The maple tree that sits between our property and our neighbors’ has rendered both yards desert ecosystems in miniature. Growing grass is possible, but requires the kind of dedication most people reserve for battling a life-threatening disease: The tree’s roots are shallow but so dense that, when you dig them up, they seem like knitted steel. For years, I’ve put down seed in the fall and gotten a lavish flush of green, which, every summer that follows — no matter what the weather — has turned to pale matting by the middle of September.
This year, I was going to turn over the whole mess with a pitchfork, dig three trenches, plant tulips, grape hyacinths, and white daffodils, and top it all with vinca, a groundcover that, so the garden catalogs promise, “loves dry shade.”
I was about two thirds of the way through this endeavor — having about as much fun as a Guantanamo detainee — when a woman who looked to be about 70 walked by with what I guessed were her two grandchildren. I smiled at her and she smiled back and said, “It never ends.”
“I know,” I said.
“Do you?” she asked.
I didn’t know whether she was referring to the endless work that a garden necessitated, or the fact that having children was frequently followed by having grandchildren, but either way, I sensed that she had something.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, sticking my pitchfork into a mess of roots that might have been concrete spaghetti. Maybe her words were a warning, but to me, they sounded more like a promise.
“It never ends.”
What a lovely thought. That whatever stage of life you find yourself in, you’re always going to be needed, whether by your grown children, or your grandchildren, or the projects that need completing, or the dreams that tug at you in those rare moments when you give them rein.
I thought of my daughter, starting her own life, and of the bulbs I’d just planted — 110 of them, which, if things went as I’d hoped, would startle me next spring long after the pulled muscles and achy joints that went into their planting had long ago repaired themselves — and thought, with a sense of gratitutde, “It never ends.”
Could any of us ask for anyting more?
Yes, it never ends. Hopefully my luck will hold all the way through my dream vacation in Greece, the islands, and Istanbul. I’ve had the same lawn problem. Lush at first only to slowly die out. First it was all the heat with no rain. Now it’s all mud because of the relentless rain. My property is surrounded by big trees with huge roots, both front and back yard. Vinca does work. Try it
You’re right about vinca — I’ve got it growing at the very back of my yard, which is extremely shady, and it thrives. If only I could solve all my problems with vinca . . .