Planting Seeds of Hope

In my darkest days, gardens have offered the promise of new life

A nurturing place brings the promise of new beginnings.

The day after schools and our three-year-old twins’ daycare centre closed, due to the Covid-19 outbreak, I sent the kids to their babysitter one final time – frantic for a couple hours to get a few things done before I turned myself over to motherhood, all day, every day, for the foreseeable future.

There were piles of laundry to do and a shopping list that needed tending, urgently. But I found myself drawn out into the garden, still covered with mulch for its wintry slumber. Poking around, I saw early signs of life; the rhubarb had poked its rippling, fuchsia crowns out of the earth, and the tiny frills of wild nettles were several centimetres high in the untended back corner. The chives, too, had suddenly shot up in the preceding days’ warmth. It seemed too early, I thought, running back in my mind over all my years of planting. But then, this was the winter that never was, the deep

freeze that never came. The unease has been around us for months now. The geese came home early, turtles are resting on logs already, the frogs out in the pond a full month ahead.

I wasn’t ready, but the earth was ready; the plants were telling me so. So I pulled my box of seeds from the kitchen shelf. In the shed out the back, I wrangled a sharply-tipped hoe from behind a mess of bikes and lawn chairs. In the garden, I knelt over a bed, pulled aside the browned grass clippings from the last mowing of autumn, made two shallow rows, and dropped seeds into the ground – tiny, almond-shaped lettuce seeds and those of kale and mustard greens, like burgundy poppy seeds.

It might be too early, I thought as I sprinkled the harbingers of life into place, but it’s worth a shot. Anything hopeful, right now, is worth a shot.

I should know. I’ve been here before, in another time, another life, it seems.

I WOKE THE MORNING af ter my mother took her last breath, on March 8, 2008, and I padded down the stairs of my childhood home in the weak late winter light. I was emptied out, exhausted, bewildered and totally unmoored. I was 21 years old. Before coffee, and without thinking, I reached for a packet of seeds; I’d ordered a whole season’s worth when I moved home to help my mother – who had pancreatic cancer – die, planning to revive the vegetable garden she’d tended when I was a kid.

The garden had sat, abandoned, in recent years, and had become overrun with weeds. I envisioned the cathartic pleasure of ripping all those invasive weeds out, turning old manure into the dirt, pushing all my fury and confusion back into the earth as if to purge myself of it.

That morning af ter her death, so many months sooner than we’d anticipated, I went through the broken screen door and onto the back steps where I’d stowed the gardening supplies. I emptied a few handfuls of cool, loamy potting soil into a plastic seed tray, and carried it back indoors. Gently, I pushed a pea seed, wrinkled and grey-green, into each compartment, then nudged a bit of soil over their tops. I took the tray to the kitchen, sprinkled the whole thing with water, and set it on a sunny windowsill.

The impulse had come from somewhere beneath consciousness, a desperate bid to catalyse new life in the immediate wake of death. Time had been frozen those past few weeks, as we spent idle, torturous days by my mum’s bedside, waiting for death to come for her and also desperate to keep it at bay.

Pushing seeds into soil, I felt myself calling down the spirits of time, begging them to bring me back into their folds: please, let me rejoin this life. I’m emptied out, but I’m not done.

Now, 12 years later, I can’t seem to

leave my garden. Something about the scene is so reminiscent of those days when we were awaiting my mother’s death – immediate family only, no one coming in, no one going out. Time was leaden, then, swimming as if through oil, distorted and heavy. Now, too, all of us, hold our breaths for the next death toll, the latest confirmation of encroaching shutdown and pending isolation.

I SCROLL AIMLESSLY and endlessly on my phone as the kids stack broken bricks in the yard, or watch too much TV, or whine for my attention. I hardly hear them. I should be present to my children, I want to be, I admonish myself. But I’m hanging on the edge of time, waiting for something definitive to happen. Nothing comes, of course. Only the expansion of fear and regulation, a looming mass of edgy uncertainty that’s taken all of us into its hungry maw.

In the garden, on another warm day, I straighten my body momentarily to ease the ache in my back. I’ve been shoving the garden fork into the cool soil to turn it up over itself for nearly an hour now. My fingers are caked in dirt, two knuckles broken open and bleeding. I relish the tiny hurt. The garden, now, is the only place I can find a pool of stillness, can channel something of reality.

My children run about the yard wielding sticks, suddenly feral with the dissolution of routine and socialisation. The dogs are delighted and surprised to have us home all day, and they leap about, pulling a toy back and forth between themselves and growling gustily.

I crouch again, pull at weeds, stomp a shovel into mulch, and turn earthworms into the compost pile. I need things here, in this garden, to hurry up and show themselves, to tell me we’re still moving forwards, somehow, in this sudden suspension of time. I need to believe it’s a pause, not a cessation. Come on, I seem to be saying to it all, come on. We’ve got mettle to prove. We’re not ready to go yet.

THE GARDEN, NOW, IS THE ONLY PLACE I CAN FIND A POOL OF STILLNESS