My Garden

Have you ever questioned something you knew made no sense to question? Or, if you’re more self-aware than me, maybe you’ve wondered about your own perception of something that seems to change but doesn’t. I’ve spent my whole life living right on the coast, in a small town called Lavendale situated at the crest of a giant cliff side facing the water, with my house on the best spot right below the the tiny garden at the top of the hill. The garden is full of lavender and dahlias and rhododendrons that the locals maintain out of habit and some small pretense of tourism. In reality people hardly ever visit because there are far better views 25 minutes north to the state park, so this little garden was all mine. During the day Mr. and Mrs. Wexley might walk up for the exercise, and Amber and George would spend their early retired mornings tending to the plants, but everyone was asleep by eight thirty at the latest, so I got the evening all to myself.

               I never cared too much about the plants – I appreciated their presence, and the sense of privacy they gave the lookout point, but it was never about the plants. Rather, it was about the paradox of anxious and excited mystery of the ocean, and the rhythmic breaking of water rushing into the cliffs below, and the smell of the salt water all wrapped up in an exquisite sensory bundle that either relaxed or inspired me, depending on my mood. All this so that even when it was an especially chilly night, or drizzling, I would walk up that path behind my house with my flashlight and up to the garden and sit on the cold stone bench underneath the cedar that marked the transition to the forest and watch and listen and feel.

               When I was a kid I would have sworn that path was never ending. My parents would walk me all around town but after two or three times of dragging me up the hill to the garden I would kick and cry and scream until they figured it wasn’t worth the effort and gave up all together. It wasn’t until I was 12 or 13 that my dad told me I wasn’t cut out for the intense physical demand of what really amounted to only a 20 minute walk that I set out to prove him wrong and never stopped. Once it became a staple of my daily routine I began to jealously guard it from the stray outsiders that found themselves in Lavendale on the way to somewhere more interesting. My neighbors I could forgive but not the sullied, grimy presence of frugal hikers in their discolored 2000s Subaru Outbacks and decade-old tattered and frayed hiking boots. I remember once when I was 14 I saw a couple of guys sitting in the diner I didn’t recognize and beelined up the hill and crouched behind the towering rhododendron that framed the northeastern part of the garden telling myself I would scare them off with rocks or ghost sounds or something. But when they made their way up, surely on the recommendation of Elda, the loquacious owner of the aforementioned diner, I chickened out and just watched them look around instead. They were courteous enough to ignore me, and instead snapped a couple shots of the view and went on their way – and along with the anger I expected at the violation of my scenic viewpoint I also was disappointed they didn’t seem to appreciate it more.

I’ve been to the city before – brought on a school field trip to see the Pacific Science Center and Pike Place and the sculpture garden overlooking the waterfront. It was fun until some crazy guy started screaming at people on the street. Disheveled and dirty, reeking of dried urine and vomit, I was taken aback at his anger at random people. I made the mistake of making eye contact, and I’ll never forget the look of vitriol, the pure, unadulterated intensity and fury. I latched onto my friend’s hand and quickly looked away. My classmates joked nervously after we had safely passed but I was disturbed, that night and for a long time afterwards. I was afraid. What was his family thinking letting him soil himself in the streets? What had I done to deserve that angry look? How dare he make me feel that way!

For a long time I was afraid of going back up to my garden, becoming paranoid that this strange, horrible man somehow followed me back to Lavendale and was hiding in the big patch of roses on the southern side, just waiting to jump out and do terrible things to me. It wasn’t until my mom whispered defeat under her breath as she looked away from me and out the window towards the city that I decided to go back and watch the ferries trudge through the water.

The funny thing is that every time I went, the walk to the garden got shorter and shorter. I would go so often I wouldn’t even notice the time go by – the winding path through this sliver of forest just became the sign that marked the entrance and the big boulder covered in moss and lichen to the side by the ferns and the sharp turn you had to do behind another giant cedar, not the one in the garden, which meant you were almost there and suddenly you were. But it’s funny because if you try to think about how short the walk was it became much longer again. The way the branches intertwined by the entrance above your head and the rotting stump with someone’s initials carved into it and the strangely curved trunk of a Douglas fir you could almost sit on but not quite but also the stubborn nagging in your head that told you it was an inconvenience to walk any further, and how much better it would be to just go home instead of wasting your time outside. If you think too much about every step of exertion required to go up the path, you won’t go up the path.

               Sometimes I am so tired. There’s this feeling of defeat that looms and overtakes or drags or craftily coerces you into your house and once you’re sitting down in your ridiculous recliner or your bed you just… stay there. This isn’t the kind of tired you get from running for an hour or from walking around all day carrying shopping bags – it’s the kind of tired that sticks with you when you wake up and don’t drink enough coffee until you feel like laying down on the side of the road in front of your neighbor’s house because it’s just too much effort to even get home. It’s the kind of tired too that even if you miraculously make it back somewhere socially acceptable in which to collapse you can’t relax because you feel so bad about doing nothing so you distract yourself with books or tv or anything because you won’t be able to fall asleep and get rested no matter what.

               When I climb up to my little garden I feel good. I’ve told myself time and time again that it makes me feel good – I understand it objectively, and intuitively once I make it to the top. But even if I really know it, there is this grimy, viscous something that keeps me from going. Sometimes I feel so light and energetic and excited and inspired I’ll fly up that path in no time, and other times my foot is caught in the slime and I convince myself it’s not worth the effort. There is something about our collective human psyche that keeps us from doing the things that we know will make us feel good. I’ve heard it called activation energy, a miniature decision, very much in a way the opposite of procrastination or instant gratification. There must be something wrong with me that prevents me from acting on that. The grime is just too thick some days.

               My mother is not an especially beautiful woman. I’ve read enough cheesy coming of age stories about boys glorifying their young mother that always came off to me as rather perverse, sickening implications of sexuality – in any case, this was not an issue, both because I had no male siblings and, like I said, my mom was not pretty. She wasn’t pretty in a lot of ways, I should clarify: she was tall, taller than me, but steadily had been putting on weight ever since she hit her 30s. She slept very little, so always had bags under her eyes, and at some point she stopped using even the littlest bit of make up to touch up the acne scars she had acquired in her youth. Her nose was somewhat hooked, her eyelashes could have been longer, and she stopped trimming or controlling the lip hair that got just the faintest bit thicker every day. All of this, I admit, made me extremely vain about my own appearance – many years of too much makeup, hours spent examining myself in the bathroom mirror, looking for just a trace of any my mother’s unfortunate phenotypes.

               Over time I’ve come to accept that part of my mother’s appearance is not under her control – the nose, the mustache; it all is insignificant, in the end. But my mother is ugly in many ways, and her other form of ugliness reflects itself in the way she eats and drinks and refuses to sleep. My mother is miserable. Not for any good reason, her husband is alive and well, she has one mostly competent child, she lives in a beautiful little town surrounded by nature and water, and lives thousands of miles away from the family that she hates. But if I sometimes have my foot stuck in the tarpit, she has submerged completely long, long ago.

               So one day she divorces my father and uses her savings to rent an apartment out in downtown Seattle with a view, convinced that her problem was location. But it wasn’t, and for all the problems Lavendale may have with racism and incessant gossip Seattle has both and more. I remember visiting my mom and she was looking out the window in her new studio that she could only have been able to afford for a couple of months and I argued and pleaded and cried and still she looked out the window towards the city and whispered, under her breath, that she would never be happy, something I only barely caught because I had finally stopped sobbing, and then she

               So I went back to my garden, because I wasn’t afraid of that homeless man anymore, and I watched the moon shine for all her children. That night it was perfect: just cold enough to send a shiver down your spine every so often, even with a coat, and it had just rained during the day so it smelled of dirt and moss and the forest. I remember hugging myself and almost vomiting and trying not to make too much sound because I absolutely could not stand someone else’s presence, and in between the pain I would see the stars and hear the water and taste the air all from my little garden until years and years and years later it was OK. And now, the walk up to my garden is the shortest walk in the world.