“Drawn into the perennial chrysanthemum clusters, their buds about to burst burnt orange petals with golden centers, I feel something about my future, something ethereal, which is what plants do best, for humans. Flanked by old junipers, a gangly, forgotten smoke bush, enormous soldiers of arborvitae, clumps of yarrow, host to a ground wasp nest. I’m one sting down, scratched into an enflamed mass on the back of my arm, but hardly noteworthy. The new client isn’t feeling well either, and she’s sent her husband out, to explain her absence. I love them, already. He, a bit shy, with owlish glasses, part Clark Kent, part hipster tech mogul. Maybe in another life, we huddled by fires on the Tibetan plateau, stirring yak butter contemplatively into our tea, under a mountain of stars. But now, we’re modern, we’re unknown to each other, and I’m renovating their sprawling garden over-planted by the previous owners, who sold wreaths and cut flowers. Here, in the middle of verdant, Vermont farm country, surrounded by hayfields and a maze of increasingly obscure dead end roads, these “transplants” are clearly rooting into their soil. Over the length of a day, I’m comparing their “Cub Cadet” to more familiar Kubotas and John Deere Gators, bumping past my new client’s inert but classic MGM roadster, past abandoned green houses, and a vast field of weeds I know I must someday tame. As with all my jobs, I feel ecstatic, comfortable to a point, oddly off put or like a factory worker, depending on the sophistication of the art appreciation of my employer. Some clients get that I can paint their garden into a mysterious frenzy of color, form & texture, given enough slack, like a dog on a good leash. Others don’t use gardens to do anything special; they just want things to look “neat”. Well, guess which jobs I will ultimately inhabit with all of my being and artistry. And as the nights pull in more quickly, and inkily, saturating the massive landscape of my drives home, over gaps and ridges, usually an hour or more, I feel like the sponge of God. No longer conscious of my truck as separate, we flow through the river cut passages, on wings of rubber. Warm house lights going on, the sad beauty of hanging pots on porches, so fully at their peak, about to be killed. Passing the same beloved farmhouse dormers, the piles of junk “for sale” on lawns, the vacant lumber mills, plastic makers & green marble slag piles behind chained link. Where there is food for me, or a welcome, I’m never sure. No one will be home waiting for me; no fires kindled or porch lights on. How the world can be filled with so many kind and deeply inspired fellow travelers, yet none who truly align with the resonance of my spirit, will be the ultimate Chinese puzzle of my lifetime. The contradiction that drives the ache, that lights the green fuse, that powers up the universe, with my unrequited passion. That same alt reality that spews out intolerable, hypocritical, uneducated thought police who would be better at selling greeting cards. Oh, dearly beloved world I live in. Please take heed. I’ll be available at my office tomorrow between the winterberry and the forsythia. I always travel with an extra rake, an extra shovel and more things on my to-do list than can possibly be accomplished in a day. Let’s shut off the dripping spigot of drivel, and distrust. Let’s walk in the light of what still breaks over the eastern cliffs. And hold fast to it. “When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie” Yevgeny Yevtushenko.”
