Laura Premack

Historian, writer, horticulture student

I Garden and Dream

It is my 45^th birthday today. A Friday, the last day of our fourth week with the children home. Last night they announced three more weeks of lockdown, which will bring us well into May, and warned this may continue into June. My father said yesterday, with tears in his eyes, that we are not to visit Massachusetts as planned in July. Even if the restrictions are lifted by then, he and my mother can’t risk having their immunity compromised by the disease vectors who are their grandchildren. It hasn’t rained in at least three weeks. I couldn’t get out of bed on Monday. My back hurts. For my birthday, I am giving myself two weeks of stepping back from most of my work commitments. Is it ‘annual leave’ when you are not going anywhere? Is it a ‘staycation’ when you are home anyway, keeping your children from going feral?

Last night, I dreamed I went for a walk down a favorite hillside track. I was on rollerblades. It was my first time on the road since the snow had melted, and it turns out there was no road, just a swath of felled trees with stumps like carrot peelings. As I made my way down, I saw something moving in the field to the left. Low and long, it was a crocodile, heading straight for me. I threw it a baby alligator I happened to have in my pocket and fled.

In the morning, my husband gave me a card with a clematis blossom sketched on the front; my five-year-old gave me a card with rainbows; and my two-year-old refused to hand over his drawing of a car. We went for a walk. They baked me a cake. How can it all be so idyllic and so terrible at the same time.

I have done very little gardening and no writing this week. Put ten zinnia seeds in five pots, waiting to see if they germinate. Watered the cornus. Continued to wait for the clouds to return so I can sow the wildflowers and poppies. Reviewed my seed packets, drew up a planting plan. Borrowed potting compost from a neighbor. Rounded up a few more yogurt containers to serve as makeshift seed trays, pulled up a few more dandelions. Watched the sun rediscover the back southeast corner of the garden as the neighbor’s tree surgeon sawed away and wondered if any wisteria will steal over the fence this year.

My gardening tutor sent us long emails yesterday. He says we should be done with pruning and moving onto weeding. We should be watering our hydrangeas, mulching them, applying slow-release fertilizer granules (of which I have none). The list goes on, and it overwhelms me. What we should be doing is spending our Thursdays together on ten acres of gardens that sit across from mountains, wearing steel-toed boots and sunhats, comparing secateurs, making bad jokes and arguing over the microwave. I haven’t memorized a list of plants since February. I am not learning the names of the trees and flowers blooming. I am not sweeping up the potting shed or pushing a wheelbarrow or forgetting the code to the members’ entrance or pinching a digestive from the Wednesday morning stash. The Lakeland Horticultural Society chairman sent an email this week announcing the death of a woman named Rosemary I’m sure I met but can’t recall. It was the virus. What is it all going to look like when this is over. If it’s over.

I avoid the think pieces in the papers. I don’t need predictions and hypotheticals, conclusions based on scanty evidence and correlation. I can imagine as well as any of them what this means for our systems and structures, for the things we hold as self-evident, for the fragility of the civilizations we have so boldly and naively presumed to be lasting. We were supposed to be living at history’s destination, not in a way station on the road to devastation. All the inequalities and presumptions sit now in the broad light of day.

It is too much to comprehend. We dream of crocodiles, clear-cut hillsides, long journeys alone. There is no safe time of day to check the news – it either interferes with your ability to work, your ability to parent, or your ability to sleep. I check all day long, and hate myself for it. Offline, the world continues its growing and emerging: lilies of the valley like under the maple in my childhood backyard; sycamore leaves larger than my daughter’s head; my grandmother’s favorite, lilacs. I have never felt so dispensable, so human, so inconsequential. I am one of the ants we watched in the garden when we pulled up the stepping stones from the bed I dug over – scurrying, working, doing their important jobs, hellbent on living their fragile, determined lives.

It is like someone has lifted the stone from on top of us. The sun shines down, untempered. It is unexpected and beyond our control We look up, we pause, and we look down again to continue the business of living as best we know how, as best we are able, as we wait for whatever happens next.

© Laura Premack