Explosions

The house is now in order. Over this last weekend we moved into the house where the gardening has been taking place. Yes, indeed I have been gardening at a vacant house. How's that for insanity? The upside is that the garden looks lovely and cared for and I feel alive and well just looking at it. However, and this is a big thing to me, the garden and lawn at the house we moved out of looks like hell.

I am all for clean slates and fresh starts and this is what I have been trying to give myself by gardening early in this new home. But I can't help but think that I've left a lot of garbage behind me, weeds and overgrown grass, not to mention the crap still lingering inside the house: the dust balls, the boxes, the trash that needs to be thrown out. And god, oh god, the mice! While inspecting my basement and garage yesterday, I discovered no less than eight dead mice stuck in those horrible glue traps. Just thinking about it makes my stomach turn over; more than that, I am sad that eight creatures had to die that way, stuck to a glue trap. Apparently, the exterminator paid a visit and set traps after discovering the treasure trove of mouse turds in our basement. I wish he had told me he set glue traps because I would have removed them and put out humane traps. I used one last week and caught a little brown mouse whom I drove about five miles away and released.

In any case, cleaning out the mice and the turds and all the crap we left behind actually caused me to cry. I stood there with the freaking broom surrounded by piles of mouse crap and my kids' old cradle (which had been partially standing in mouse crap) and I just cried. I cried for the dead mice. I cried for the fact that I would have to clean up all that crap and didn't want to contract hanta virus. I cried for the cradle that held my babies when they were so small they couldn't even hold up their own heads, and now here it was standing in a pile of mouse crap. I cried for the baggage the last four years has brought down on me, on us, and I cried for not being able to hold on, to control time and for losing my babies to the grown kids that they've become.

Today I went outside into my new garden and I enriched the soil with some grass clippings, which provide extra nitrogen as they decay. I stood and smiled contentedly with what I knew was to come....then I broke into a run, hopped into the car and drove. I listened to Anna Nalick singing "Breathe, just breathe...." which is what I need to do and what I can't get out of my head. When I pulled into the driveway of the old house, my neighbors waved hello as if nothing had changed. But I attacked the garden there like it was a last shot at redemption, redeeming this garden to allow the light to shine through to the beauty that was beginning to emerge from beneath. I emptied the baggage of a full winter and half of the spring full of choking weeds and invasive plants which had leapt from their beds and were beginning to strangle the shrubs I had worked so hard over the last few years to enliven. As I ripped and pulled, I felt something in my body begin to surge, and this time it wasn't pain and it wasn't a sadness.
It became a lightening. A lifting. A something that hasn't happened before. It was a shot of adrenaline that engorged my muscles and I felt it ripple over my brain like a shiver and felt it power me beyond what I knew I could ever be capable of doing. Just when I've begun to think that my body has forsaken me, this shedding event enlivened me and empowered me somehow that I don't quite understand yet. But I know it is now three hours later and I still don't have any pain and that is unique.

Sometimes changes happen and they happen to us. Sometimes the changes come and we burst through them. Right now I am bursting, a peony who becomes an explosive, hand-sized flower almost overnight from a tiny, tightly-rolled bud, bright and bold and beautiful, daring the world to ignore it.