Good News and Bad

In my last post (sigh–3 months ago) I said that I was going to be writing about the restoration of my humble little garden, and that the writing would be a goad to my doing the actual work on the garden. The bad news of course is that I've failed at the writing bit, though the good news is that I have nevertheless started the garden work, un-goaded.

No really good excuse for not posting in February and March, except that a combination of other projects (both personal and political) were consuming much of my spare time. It's a shame, because both months offer opportunities to reflect and observe, and I've long wanted to write about how we can stay connected to the natural world, even during the dead, drab months of New England winter.

Of course I can still write about those months, but my goal was to gather my observations as I was experiencing them, which would have required at a minimum taking some notes. Rather than try to reconstruct my thoughts in the moment, I'll have to hope I'm more attentive same time next year. Nevertheless, here's a quick summary of the major themes I had hoped to touch on.

As I briefly mentioned in my previous post, if one is attentive, one can see signs of spring even in February. Without going into detail, I'll just mention the lengthening days, the buds appearing on trees and shrubs, and the occasional warm spell.

Though March is still cool, wet, and grey, things start getting in gear. It is the month when I usually "wake-up" the garden. That involves removing the dead leaves and stalks from last summer. Gradually the beds shift from the silvery tan of dead growth to the green and black of new shoots and refreshed soil. This work is when the gardener is first reacquainted with the sensory satisfactions of working the garden by hand. If I manage to keep this blog going, I will be writing a lot about those satisfactions, as they are at the heart of my reason for wanting to write about gardening.

April has been about laying the groundwork for my restoration project. But first, what I owe you, dear reader, is a clearer picture of the garden plots I'm talking about.

The Neighborhood

We live in a dense, urban neighborhood of a decidedly New England character. Most of the buildings are detached triple deckers, three story wood structures with identical apartments on each floor. Built in the 1880's and 90's, when plumbing and central heating became feasible, they offered a successful path to homeownership for working class folk who usually occupied the first floor and rented out upper floors for income, or shared them with relatives.

Sadly, changes in zoning laws in the 1920's stopped the construction of new triple deckers, perhaps because they were too explicitly for the working classes.

When we moved into the neighborhood 40 years ago, the triple deckers were still mostly occupied by their owners, many of them town employees: police, fire, highway or water workers. Most of them were of Irish descent. The success of the American dream meant that their children were typically buying homes in the suburbs, rather than remaining here. Over time the character of the neighborhood has changed. As the older owners have died off, the triple deckers have been converted to condos, or bought by absentee landlords renting to students and young adults. The neighborhood is more multi-ethnic, but since more people are transients, it's also lost some of the village-like quality of everyone knowing each other's name and their business.

Scattered among the triple deckers are some older farmhouses—two regular stories plus a third story of smaller rooms under the dormer roofs. These were built in the 1870's, before heating and plumbing—which was added in the 1890's. We live in one of these farmhouses, one whose owner most have sold off every possible inch of adjoining space to the developers of the triple deckers.

The house in winter, before the renovation. Front and side plots are visible, as are the abutting triple deckers.

The Plots

Our Site plan

For some mysterious reason, our house is not perfectly aligned with the street or the two triple deckers that abut it. The result is three small triangular plots of garden on three sides of the house, and a driveway on the fourth. The sunny street-side plot is skillfully managed by my wife, who plants dazzling annuals every spring and summer. I garden a plot with partial sun on one side of the house, and an elongated very shady plot along the back. I prefer perennials and shrubs. Where my wife is drawn to blazes of color, I am more interested in the architectural qualities of different masses of plants. I'm trying to create a landscape (though I do like playing with color as part of that).

My wife gardens from strength to strength, and every year surpasses the last. My plots peaked in the aughts, and then gradually declined due to neglect. Before the pandemic we began planning a top-to-bottom renovation of the house, and knowing it would wreak havoc on my remaining plants, I stopped trying entirely. The construction happened during 2022, and the combination of a dry summer, no watering, and the tromping of carpenters, roofers, plumbers and painters sealed the fate of all but the hardiest plants. And so I get to begin again.

To be continued…

A man, a plan, a garden

If you are a gardener, January is the absolute nadir of the garden season. There are gardening chores to be performed into November, and the December holidays usually furnish opportunities for decorative greenery. If you're alert to it, signs of spring can be observed before February has run its course. But January offers up nothing, unless you count dead Christmas trees left by the curbside. The only thing you can do with your garden in January (with or without the aid of garden catalogues), is dream about it.

My garden is among the things I hope to write about in these here parts. Or perhaps I should say ex-garden, as the very small plot that I used to work avidly has fallen into disrepair over the last decade.

In any case I have a plan. Blogging about the garden is a ploy to goad myself into actually doing the hard work of restoring it—even if only to avoid the shame of writing regular updates about my failing to work on the garden. In turn, working on the garden is a ploy to goad myself into more writing.

For a number of years I've been thinking about writing a book titled "In Praise of Small Gardens." Indeed I kept mulling the core ideas for the book even as the actual garden was undergoing its slow, steady decline. So my plan for 2024 is revive my garden and either give birth to the book, or flush it out of my system through this blog.

In coming posts I'll describe what the garden was, why it declined, and how I'm reworking it. I realize no one is clamoring to read the minutiae of one amateur gardener's struggles, but I'm hoping through this work I can get at larger themes of how we relate to the natural world, and how we align our desires with what is possible, and what is sustainable. Stay tuned.

Candles

When we were children, my brothers and I played a betting game every night of Hannukah. Each of us would pick a different candle in the menorah, betting that it would be the last one burning. It was a reverse race, with victory going to the slowest. Since the candles were of uniform size they burned at similar rates, and the finishes were usually close. Years of competition led me to conclude that the results were pretty random. Neither of the observable variables—not placement toward the center or the outer edge of the menorah, nor color of the paraffin—seemed predictive of performance.

When I had young children of my own, we continued the game. With the kids grown and out of the house, my wife and I still try to pick the winner, but as often as not we're out of the room when the race ends, and we miss the payoff.

As with any sporting event, we spectators would tend to narrativize the race, and since we were invested in the outcomes, we found the endings dramatic. Sometimes a candle seemed destined to lose, burning faster than its rivals, but then magically it would hold on for the win. Reduced to only a red hot wick in a pool of liquified wax with the faintest of blue flames, it would somehow outlast the still solid stubs of neighboring candles. More often the winner would be the stately candle that burned slowest from beginning to end. It was fun to assign virtues to the candles, whether they be the scrappy survivor, or the calm steady presence. As with all games, the variety of outcomes accommodated a variety of contradictory metaphors about winning and losing.

But one metaphor has been pretty consistent over the years, and it applies to the moment each candle is extinguished. Perhaps everyone has observed a candle burning out, but we would watch for it avidly. The moment is clearly marked by a puff of smoke, more voluminous than one might expect from a fading ember. Sometimes the smoke ascends upward in a beautiful curving thread. Sometimes it forms a curling spiral. No matter the pattern, after a moment it's gone. It's hard to witness the extinguishing of a candle and not contemplate death. And the metaphor works just as well whether we envision a soul ascending to heaven, or a consciousness leaving a body and passing into oblivion.

This year it was painful for me to watch the candles die, because each puff of smoke reminded me of the lives being snuffed out on a daily basis in Palestine. I realize that innocents die around the world every day, and have through all the Hannukahs of my existence, but on a holiday that celebrates my people's fight for freedom, it was too much to bear my people's heartless, relentless bombing of civilian targets.

The idea that there is a progressive form of Zionism died in me a long time ago. As a child I was raised to think of Israel as a symbol of religious freedom, of a country striving to create a socialist paradise. I was not taught about the people who were displaced in Israel's creation, nor about their ongoing segregation and oppression. (Not unlike the way I was raised to think of America as the triumph of democratic idealism, with scant attention paid to the Native Americans or enslaved Africans who were actually central to the narrative.) By my early adulthood I no longer believed in the righteousness of Zionism, but remained surrounded by well-meaning loved ones who wanted to believe that the story of Israel was a happy, hopeful one.

Even as Israel grew more militantly right-wing, even as settlements spread unabated, too many of my Jewish relatives, friends, and colleagues continued to hope for a path to peaceful coexistence with Palestinians through a two-state solution, though that solution looked more chimerical with each passing day. Because these are people I love, I forgave them their illusions, understanding that like me they had been raised in the grip of a powerful but profoundly false myth. (I also looked for opportunities to challenge that myth, but rarely pressed the point when I encountered too much resistance.)

October 7, and the Israeli response has changed everything. To continue to believe that Israel is reasonably working toward a peaceful resolution, one has to somehow ignore or minimize the 20,000 deaths it has caused in the last 10 weeks. And yes, Hamas' attack was brutal and totally unforgivable, but being the victim of evil does not give one the moral high ground to perpetuate an evil at 17 times its scale.

And so as I watched the puffs of smoke emerge from the menorah this year, I was pained not only by the deaths of innocents, but by the moral deaths of those loved ones who have been unable to confront the magnitude of Israel's crimes, and unable or unwilling to grieve the loss of life Israel has caused.

But though I felt totally hopeless as I watched the candles of the menorah die, writing this I find myself nurturing a new hope. The death of the fantasy that there can be a progressive Zionism leaves a vacuum, where those Jews who always wanted to do the right thing can throw more of themselves into the struggle to create a world of justice and lovingkindness for all of humankind. When we stop believing in nations, we have no choice but to believe in each other.