It really changes my feeling of being in the world, putting my hands into dough and soil. I can't explain it, exactly, but it's profound. Like when I was walking up to campus from the Hill Street parking lot the other day, I was interacting with every landscape choice actively, looking at the plants, their maintenance and care, the selection, their health. . .
I haven't felt this way since I lived in my cottage in Austin, and had a garden of native plants I propagated there.
My dreams of the lakeside gardens here grow greater and more vivid. They involve a massive vegetable garden full of squash, kale, beets, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, garlic, peppers, chard, rhubarb, and everything I can think of; lilacs, scarlet runner beans, thornless blackberry vines, and everbearing raspberries, heavy with fruit, covering every inch of ugly chain-link fence; a goat, a sheep, and perhaps a cow taking the place of the inept gardening service for trimming back the anemic lawn; lilies, bleeding hearts, delicate ferns (like maidenhair and dryopteris), and oyster mushrooms encircling the trees and crawling the hillside down to the lake; window boxes bursting with red geraniums; containers filled with jade and Mexican sage surrounding a wrought-iron table and chairs on the deck overlooking the water; and California poppies, Texas bluebonnets, zinnias, columbine, and phlox exploding with blooms in the beds beneath my neighbor's rock garden laced with succulents.
I can't wait to have a real job, to be able to settle down for real . . . .
In the meantime, though, my yogurt from yesterday is glorious with muesli for breakfast. Yes, breakfast at 3 pm. It is summer, after all.
