Confessions

April is gone already and as she left us, Winter tried one last time to take control again. At least I hope it was the last time. Actually, I doubt it was the last time. We descended from a pleasant 75 degrees on Monday to a depressing 33 degrees and snow on Wednesday. I went from sweating in the sun to huddling in the house in just a few short hours. On Tuesday night and through the day on Wednesday, it snowed, but it didn’t stay long. By week’s end the temperature had begun to rise toward the pleasant again, but the flowers are showing signs of their suffering from Winter’s last attack. Now May is here, and although Spring will push forward, there is always the chance for frost and snow here on the Northern Allegheny Plateau.

May can be a lovely month, one of the most beautiful of the year when it works out right. It is apple blossom and lilac month. It is a happy month with more family birthdays and anniversaries than any other. My parents will celebrate 69 years of marriage on the 9th. Stacey and I will celebrate 38 on the 25th. My father turns 92 on the 27th. Stacey's birthday is on the 17th. And there are birthdays for one of my granddaughters, my brother, sister-in-law, brother-in-law, and several nieces and nephews throughout the month. May is an important month.

Planting Out Day comes at the end of May and in preparation for it, I’ve been starting seeds for weeks now. But I’ve had some trouble this year. Many of the seeds I started sprouted and grew just fine, but then suddenly wilted. I lost all of my tomato and cabbage seedlings and have had to start again. I don’t know if this next attempt will fare any better. The local nurseries open this week and I will buy flats of backup plants just in case.

Plants on the back porch waiting to be planted out.

Last week, after the weather had turned wintry yet again, I spent my afternoons after school painting sign orders, which means I spent a lot of time waiting for paint to dry. My mind works in strange ways. A song, a sentence, a word, a line from a movie, or an overheard comment can send my thoughts on long and tortuous trails. For instance, during those long pauses while painting, I usually keep my brain occupied with a book or a movie. On Tuesday I chose a movie – one I love and hadn’t seen in a while – the 1993 version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh (no one does Shakespeare better). My favorite moment among many in that film is when Benedick and Beatrice confess their love for each other after much brilliant and antagonistic banter.

Beatrice and Benedick

BENEDICK: I do love nothing in the world so well as you: is not that strange?

BEATRICE: As strange as the thing I know not. It were as possible for me to say I loved nothing so well as you: but believe me not; and yet I lie not; I confess nothing, nor I deny nothing. I am sorry for my cousin.

BENEDICK: By my sword, Beatrice, thou lovest me.

BEATRICE: Do not swear, and eat it.

BENEDICK: I will swear by it that you love me; and I will make him eat it that says I love not you.

BEATRICE: Will you not eat your word?

BENEDICK: With no sauce that can be devised to it. I protest I love thee.

BEATRICE: Why, then, God forgive me!

BENEDICK: What offence, sweet Beatrice?

BEATRICE: You have stayed me in a happy hour: I was about to protest I loved you.

BENEDICK: And do it with all thy heart.

BEATRICE: I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.

The scene is magical. I rewound the film and watched that scene twice. Later on that evening I was thinking about famous confessions – confessions of love, confessions of guilt. There are so many. There are some great confessions of love in literature – George Emerson to Lucy Honeychurch in A Room With A View, Mr. Rochester to Jane in Jane Eyre, Mr. Darcy to Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, Wesley to Buttercup in The Princess Bride, Mr. Thornton to Margaret Hale in North and South. And, happily, there are excellent filmed versions of those romantic confessions. My wife and daughters watch some of those films several times a year, waiting for those scenes of confession.

There are other famous, but not romantic, confessions in literature too – St. Augustine’s Confessiones, Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions to name a few. That type of confession is usually an autobiographical account explaining how that person came to be who they are. The most popular sort of confession seems to be a confession of guilt, the driving force behind every crime and police story ever filmed. We want to see the criminal get caught and hear them confess their offenses.

St. Augustine writing his confessions.

The word “confession” comes to English from the Latin confessio, which means “an acknowledgment.” It is an acknowledgment of why we are what we are, and why we did what we did. It can cover everything from an admission of guilt to a crime, a religious disclosure of sin, a declaration of faith, or a romantic avowal of love, and sometimes all those things at once. I wondered if I were to write an autobiographical confession like St. Augustine, what would I disclose? It’s not an easy thing to try and sum up your life, weaving the various threads of the influences and events to make some sort of sense of the fabric that results. A confession usually focuses on a few of the most profound aspects. I pondered on several approaches to my own life and decided that if I were to write such a work, I would write The Confessions of a Gardener.

Somehow I have always been a gardener. Even before I ever planted a seed in soil, the desire was lodged in my heart. The first years of my life were spent playing in the ruins of the garden that my grandfather Howe grew behind our house on Bridge Street. He died when I was two and I do not really remember him, but I loved the forsythia bushes he planted and the tulips and daffodils that appeared as if by magic every spring. I loved the roses, larkspur, and the rose of Sharon bush that bloomed there in the summer and the cherries and pears we feasted on from trees he once nurtured. The first seeds I remember planting were in a little kit that someone gave to me as a gift, a plastic tray filled with soil and seeds with a clear plastic dome that I poked holes in with a pencil and watered. The seeds sprouted and grew to become marigolds that I transplanted in our backyard. They seemed miraculous to me.

My first serious attempt at a garden, other than mowing lawns, was when we lived in a house in the country on Campbellsport Road in Ravenna, Ohio. I was fourteen and we had an acre of land and flowerbeds around the house. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I tried anyway and made big mistakes and learned from them. We only lived there for a year, so I never got a second chance to garden there. Our next house was in Naperville, Illinois. It had a small yard with a nice flowerbed along one side of the house and Amling’s Garden Center just two blocks away. During the years we lived there, my gardening skills improved. I planted the flowerbed with bulbs and other flowers. I dug up part of the back yard and planted my first successful vegetable garden and grew more green beans and zucchini than any one family could ever eat. And all the time I read books – books about gardening methods, books about plants.

I left Naperville to spend two years on a mission in Japan where I fell in love with Japanese gardens. When I returned from there, my family had relocated to Sylmar, California, and I had to learn a whole new way of gardening in a milder climate. Over the twenty years we lived in Southern California, I planted gardens in every place we lived. And then we moved here where I have a piece of land all my own where I continue to make gardens, make mistakes, and learn new things.

I am many things – son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, friend – and I have been many things – student and teacher, curator and clerk, poet and pool cleaner, but woven throughout all of it is the part of me that always was and always will be a gardener. It is encoded somehow in my very DNA. I have to plant, and tend, and reap. I need flowers and fruit around me. And like a garden, I even need a bit of winter to rest in during the cold dark days. But as the days grow longer and warmth and light return, I ache to start the cycle again and again. I will keep at it until they plant me in earth at the end of my own season.

Sunrise this morning.

Despite winter’s attempted coups and depredations, spring is taking hold and will eventually triumph. There may be frosts and flurries still, but there is hope and comfort in the greening fields, the budding trees, a box of chicks in the dining room, seed potatoes sprouting on the back porch window sills, and flowers blooming in spite of it all. A gardener’s life is as simple as pushing a seed into soil and as complicated as understanding global weather patterns. There is no end to learning and every season is different and that is what I love most about it.

On Friday evening we finally finished the new peacock pen. We were just in time as the cramped quarters in the barn were interfering with their courtship. Posey was trying hard to display his masculine beauty, but there wasn’t room enough to maneuver. On Saturday we moved them up to the new pen. The transition made them a bit nervous, but I think they will settle in soon and their courtship will resume.

Posey displaying for Petunia.

Moving the peacocks to their new pen.

In their new pen.

Yesterday was one of those satisfying spring days that I need and love. We worked all afternoon in the garden. We prepared a bed for planting strawberries. We planted a second row of peas. We refurbished what was last year’s pumpkin patch to get it ready for brassicas. And we made a new area that will be this year’s pumpkin patch. Kurt worked with his new tractor with its front bucket and rear tiller to move fertilizer and dig new areas for planting. He tilled the place where the pig pen was two years ago that I plan to recondition for a garden next year. He tilled a new strip out in the big garden where we will attempt to grow some wheat. At the end of the day we lit the pile of brush and branches that was piled up in the far corner of the orchard and had a bonfire. It was a good day.

The refurbished brassica patch.

New gardens.

Kurt tilling.

Bonfire at the end of the day.

On the way home from church today it started to rain and that’s good. The newly planted seeds – spinach, lettuce, and peas – could use the moisture. And I’m glad it’s rain and not snow. This coming weekend we have a big event. We are going down to Gettysburg on Friday and Saturday and we’ll tour the Washington D.C. Temple on Monday. That means next week’s Journal will be late. I’ll tell all about our adventures then.