On Furlough

Rain came to our part of the world last week. I’m so out of touch with the news that I don’t even know how widely the gift was spread. I do know that grass still yellow with winter and the drought lay tight to the ground in the field outside my front gate. Wildflower foliage that normally pokes out its head by mid February was nowhere to be seen. With the rain, rose bushes are bursting with new growth after a severe pruning, and the first blooms from Old Blush and Cramoisi Superieur are official. Although my labors are modest by the standards of previous years, I’ve done the best I intend to give for now. Likely, there will be no early spring wildflowers.

I’m on furlough from gardening. Eighteen days, 94 bags of mulch, $200 in hired labor, and personal hours—well, as the MasterCard commercial goes, “priceless”. Far from well groomed, this landscape, like me, looks a little worse for the wear. If the land and that which grows from it could talk, just what would they say? For me, I just had a few more sunspots frozen off my balding head. They keep coming back, which is their nature, even though I faithfully wear a hat. I’ve visited the local chiropractor a half dozen times. What 10 sessions in physical therapy didn’t do for my chronic back pain, body adjusting seems to help. Engaged in an ongoing battle of attrition, with the hot, dry Texas summers raising their clinched fist in champion posture, my garden continues to slowly lose that which made it lush for a while. Like my body, which can no longer spring from the ground to the tailgate of a truck, my garden is having to accept that less is more. I like to think that all of this is a choice, although I’m not sure that it’s so much a choice as it is a concession. Whenever I sit or recline, I try to calm my mind with palms upturned or forefinger and thumb joined and resting on my knees—“one…come…”, breathe in, breathe out.

Interesting how we can problem solve for others with so much ease, especially compared to our own situations. Last spring a friend asked my opinion on developing the large lot on which she and her husband live in the city. A side garden is lush with color. I remember lots of rich blue Delphiniums from last year, but there was more. The expanse outside this small, intimate garden is dotted with trees and some blooming shrubs, including roses, all suited for prospering at 7000 feet. What should she do to add more interest, she asked. Nothing, I answered definitively. Just leave it natural. That’s no expert opinion, I admit. It’s as much an answer to my own prospects here where central Texas meets East Texas, where there are expectations of grassy lawns, where cattle graze nearby because that’s what happens in a rural county where grass can be plentiful and grazing occurs naturally, except in years of drought.

My visit to my home in Texas is at the halfway mark. The next few weeks will likely pass quickly, as I prepare for the other responsibilities of this stay. I will try to remember to sit in the garden come late afternoon, where I can listen for the water tumbling gently over the sides of a large Mexican jar into the livestock trough below, where I can marvel at the vocal strength of a northern cardinal tucked away somewhere in the branches of a Post Oak—come Sunday mornings, my own efforts at song should be so robust—where I can watch spring do its early work, miraculously fleshing out the canvas in which I live, while here. The Mountain Laurel has begun with a few modest lavender clusters, the Crossvine an orange carpet draped across the fence, the Amaryllis just on the brink of dotting the garden with red, and everywhere green, green.

On Furlough—Normangee, Texas (March 18, 2009)
R. Harold Hollis