A hummingbird descends from the pine tree and drinks from a large red zinnia.
I want to start this story at the end because I want you to have that beautiful image in your head as long as you can. I want you to know that magic really can happen anywhere.
This story begins in July when I returned after months on the road. I spent a weekend in the garden weeding and clearing the raised bed. Acknowledging the reality of my schedule, I decided that rather than many sorts of vegetables and flowers, I would buy two flats of zinnias and pack them into my raised beds and borders. The next day I left again for two months.
Actually, let’s start the story years even before that. In the summer of 2020, my garden was the place that absorbed and soothed my Covid anxiety and my cabin fever from lockdown. It was the place that helped me --a country mouse-- feel at home in a city. It was a big enough plot to challenge me and a small enough plot to not overwhelm me. It was a harmless place to let my desires and wants run wild—with stacks of seed catalogues and trays upon trays of chubby green seedlings. It is hard to describe what a lifeline of hope my garden was during that time. And how much it taught me to look for love in small things.
There were years of presence in my garden –where I was planting seedlings, growing vegetables, and cooking dinners for friends from the vegetables I grew. Radishes and butter. Fresh pea soup. Roasted eggplant. And there were years of absence—where I was recovering far away from home with my legs in casts, or far away working with groups. These years of absence meant that I needed to get help in my garden—which meant that it was cared for and tidy—but it ceased to look like my garden—with a new lawn, smaller borders, and fewer plants. It felt like a home that had once been filled with children and dogs and now sat empty. It was respectable, but it didn’t feel like mine.
Which brings me to yesterday. When I returned home two days ago to teach a class, I peeked out the window to my garden. I saw lots of green, and not much else, and I couldn’t make myself open the back door. I wasn’t sure I could face the loss of what the garden had been or face what it might have become. I didn’t have the energy to manage the disappointment I anticipated and decided to wait a day and do it after a good night’s sleep. A lot of difficult things in life are better (if it all possible) if you wait a day and get a good night’s sleep. So yesterday after teaching, some lunch, and a bit of a rest—I put on my green overalls and headed out my back door into the garden.
It was all very green, and things were overgrown, but not horribly so. And the lawn was tall, but mow-able. I pulled out the reel mower and mowed the lawn first, so it would already feel a bit more contained--which helped me feel less anxious. And then I began to pull the tall and tangly weeds from my raised beds. Crab grass. Morning glory vines wrapped around the plants. Clover. Chickweed. Grapevine.
But most remarkably, the garden was filled with color. Zinnias stood nearly my height, covered in blooms that were bright and clear. Pink. Red. Orange. Yellow. They filled one raised bed and they bloomed in the midst of a morass of leaves in my perennial border—flanked by pink spirea and purple butterfly bush.
I worked my way through my garden, pruning branches that blocked the common alley way, and pulling grapevine from the border, until I got to the raised bed filled with the zinnias. I bent low, pulling weeds and trying to free the area around their base so that they could get air, and rain, whenever it came. Finally, I stood up, and I looked at the flowers, free from the distraction of weeds among them, colors clear and bright in the late afternoon sun.
Words feel too small to say how grateful I was to these flowers for holding vigil over my garden these many months. Like helpful neighbors or loving aunts—beings who swoop in bring love when its needed. For bravely carrying on in my absence. For being so radiant and cheerful. For welcoming me home in a hard week.
And I was still reeling in gratitude, trying to catch my breath from the hard work of weeding and the immensity of appreciation I had for gift of the flowers when suddenly a hummingbird descended from the pine tree, and I watched it dip in for a drink from the big red zinnia. It hovered for a bit, sunlight catching its wings, turned toward another flower, and flew away.
I burst into tears.
To witness wildness and beauty is one thing. To watch it bring its tenderness to something you love and care about is something different. The moment was fleeting. So full of light and motion. So small, really, in every way. But huge. Grace, unearned, changes you. Yesterday, I walked into my garden one person. And I walked back into the house, another.
© 2024 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD
