the flower bed

this year's garden

We have never had the garden all planted and set before Memorial Day. Not since we moved here. They say to wait, to be sure, until after the holiday weekend. But this year it has been so warm and all that digging and prepping and planting seemed right on time. So it is in. For the first time in the five years that it has been ours to tend. Our fifth garden for our sixth summer planted on this hillside and the one that feels the most like us yet. 

I gave maple her own bed this year, for whatever she likes. She planted flowers of all sorts. I think she may have been waiting for this sort of invitation into this space for years but it only just now occurred to me to make specific space for her in this particular and well-delineated way. 

In our first summer there was no garden. There was a move and a baby and the discovery of this reconfigured and relocated family. A new form to uncover. At the beginning of living in a new place (and with a whole new person) life is the interface of dreams and overwhelm and it is so tempting (and impossible) to pretend we may know who we could become in this new place. 

It is not new now. It is us. And this summer, with this space so clear in its intention and work, I cannot help but feel like our family is sitting on the edge of dissolution. I know that is dramatic. It is. I could say that we are morphing forms and maybe that would be more gentle but the girl we have raised since I wasn’t all that much more than a girl myself, will walk down the hill before this season ends and drive herself, or we will drive her, to her next home on the edge of the sea. 

Will we have cut all her flowers by then? Will her place in the garden be empty then or, more likely, will it be all the way full to overflowing? Will I give them away? Or hoard them all? Will I tuck the bed in at the end, when all is harvested or will I walk away and leave it for future spring meg to manage?

As much as it seems perfect for her to leave, and I often feel ready for her embarkation, her stepping out of us and into herself; I also sense my heart all the way broken now. So that it no longer sits in my chest but has dissolved into all of its small singular cells and my grief floods my blood evenly with my love. 

I do not know how to end. I do not yet know how it will be to mother her from a distance. All of my growing up I have done, in most part, by virtue of being her mom. She ignited who I have become. Who I am. What is most real in me. 

Where do I go when she is gone? What do I become next? 

I knew from the first moment I held her soft baby skin and smelled her sweet baby head that 18 years would never be nearly enough. And I was right and it is not. But here we are and there she goes and it is everything I ever dreamed it would be and this was always the aim and I just cannot imagine not having her here to grow and pick and arrange and compost all of these countless flowers this and every summer.