This morning I looked at my backyard–naked again now that the blanket of snow has melted, and oh so terribly forlorn– and I saw nothing but piles of dog poo.
I couldn’t call to mind the summer garden that I had tended so carefully. The roses spilling rambunctiously over the fence, the passion flower with its obscene eyelash-fringed, sea anemone-mimicking, saucer-sized blossoms, the apple and pear and cherry in full frothy bloom. My chocolate cosmos and lemon geraniums and wild ginger. The scents! The colors! The hummmingbirds!
But I noticed nothing other than the dull brown of it. Dead grass, dead shrubs, twigs, and leaves blackened by frost. And poo.
Sometimes I look at my work and I see nothing but a big pile of odoriferous manure. And some dead sentences that really need to be pruned, and a few bushy bits that need to be dug out, thrown on the bonfire and burned. Sometimes there is so much that is without life and extraneous that I can’t even see the strong trunk, the good branches that form the work. The solid bones that everything else hangs on.
It’s sunny and warm. Tomorrow it will rain torrentially, I am told. So I make myself go out to the garden. I have tried to avoid it by taking the dogs on two massive hikes along the trails, but my view from the kitchen window while I wash dishes has been ruined by the state of it, so I go out.
I spend an hour or two shoveling shit. Wishing I had a nearby river I could just divert to do the job, though then it would all wash down hill and submerge the nice folk of the Presbyterian church below me.
Things still look terrible. I arm myself with a rake, secateurs, twine. I tie up my clematis and honeysuckle, the trumpet vine and whatever the heck that trailing thing over there is. I remember it has green blossoms like giant pillowy lips tinged with purple. I call it Mick Jagger.
I cut back the lilacs and hydrangeas I swear I cut back in October. (Like starfish they grow their limbs back when no one is looking. And sometimes they migrate from one end of the garden to the other).
I rake piles of Idon’tknowwhat into one big pile. And I straighten the fences. Because without good fences all hell can break loose. And as I look closer, I see things I hadn’t noticed at first. Now that the undergrowth and brush have been cleared away, and the strong frameworks are revealed, I see buds in the Ys of the branches and poking their green hopefulness into the sky. I see new leaves and bulbs popping out from under all the rotting stuff. And I realize that rotting stuff was keeping it all alive through the brutal winter.
I give myself permission to write the rotting stuff. The material that keeps it all moving along. That perhaps serves no purpose other than to get me through the dour winter to the optimistic spring. Because I know that I can clean it all up eventually. I can bag it and put it out the curb and it will vanish as if it never was.
And whatever good stuff is underneath it, will benefit from all that composting.