Summer

has come a few hours here, a few there, but not this year all in one place, like a scattering of salt. So cool this year, some mornings outright cold, the corn asks if I’m kidding, crouches waist-high. And sunshine—not so much, a tonal phrasing I don’t hear in this place, and miss. Almost as much as I miss serious seasons, the sharply demarcated kind you can count on. More like eternal autumn. You start to think you deserve it, after awhile: Beautiful full summer yesterday, but we’re not to get two in succession, for our sins. Look, how did you get me started on the weather? Silly of you.  I repent. There are some benefits to living in a temperate zone. Warm enough for citrus trees to raise their flags all year long. The grapefruit on the one by our deck is the tastiest I ever expect to encounter, and we hold out hope for the lemon and the lime trees we planted by the driveway this year. Still, the jacket hangs always at the tip of its peg, kicking for attention. Eight years, and I haven’t grown used to it, continue to rage, rage against the waiting for the light, waiting impatiently for the predicted mellowness to kick in, my full-blossomed season reversed in the rear-view—now how did that happen? As they say right there in the prospectus, past performance is no guarantee of future returns, folks: You have to learn to endure or enjoy the world a day at a time, I suppose, as the path behind grows longer, the days shorter. Try each morning to be philosophical as you cast aside the curtain—that’s the spirit. As an editor of mine used to say, back when I sweated blood for a daily newspaper, “Some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you,” the right sentiment, brother, though my kids are suddenly as tall as the corn and it’s Shakespeare I keep mumbling like a prayer over the rosary beads of the days: “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date, Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”

Wu Wei

Often I find myself standing in the garden, or near it, the shovel or hoe or rake or spade in my hand, or by my feet, unaware that I’ve long stopped pulling out the couch grass roots as I’ve promised to do and have in fact been standing stock-still quite awhile meditating on the horizon, until my wife, patiently mulching between rows, asks, “What are you thinking about?” As marriage is a form of translation, what I take this to mean is, “Why are you standing there doing nothing while I patiently mulch between these rows?” This gets me to the title of this post, a term from Taoism that refers to action through non-action, to do by not doing. It has to do with not resisting, not striving against all obstacles but, rather, going with the flow of events, with the cycles of nature, which an ecologist like herself would appreciate. I’ve always been drawn to eastern philosophy; its general requirement in its Americanized version is to sit for long periods of time, its major piece of equipment a meditation cushion. A good example of wu wei as I understand it would be our tomatoes. I was reminded of this on reading a blog post by the good folks at gettin’ fresh who noted that it is always the tomatoes that get people excited about a garden, and it’s true that I never feel ours is successful until I see those plump beauties on the vine, which offer an aromatic pat on the back as I pass them. But the fact is that our best tomato crop occurred last year when two varieties surprised us by seeding themselves in the rose bushes where we (and by we, I mean my wife) had placed an arbitrary shovel-full of compost. Wu wei in action, or I suppose that would be in non-action. Still, I can see my wife’s point (as I’ve interpreted it). Like, I suspect, many others, I’m torn between two approaches to the world. One is the idea (though it could well be called a deeply ingrained prejudice) that incisive, carefully premeditated action is the way forward, that to go boldly—and this of course entails fiercely resisting all obstacles—will produce worthy results so long as your heart is in the right place. The other is the idea that non-resistance will ultimately, if counter-intuitively, get you where you want to go. That is, I am torn between the so-tempting idea that technology and force (perhaps those are redundant terms) used appropriately will result in a benign interplanetary Star Trek-like federation (which, frankly, seems to me to cut against ecology, which suggests that all actions have multiple unpredicted and often unwanted reactions) and the appeal of monk-like practicing at patience, which is the passive version of persistence (and which practiced inexpertly simply results in a guy growing gray on an increasingly unappealing cushion). Gardening, I’m coming to see, is a tangible example of the terribly difficult balance one must so often seek between these elements, is the point to which I’d followed my meandering thoughts when my wife speaks up, and I should thank her for drawing my attention back to the present on such a beautiful morning, or I suppose I could respond, Just wu wei-ing as quickly as I can, but already I’m on my knees in the damp earth, reabsorbed, hacking after every persistent runner, this one, that one, not so fast, little ones, get off my piece of planet, resistance is futile.

My Mother is an Onion

My mother is not an onion. Let me make that clear immediately. When I arrived here, I was given ownership of a huge existing introductory creative writing course, taught by a team of instructors.  That first year, I inherited materials already sent out to students. Those materials included an exercise prompt in which budding poets were meant to write in response to the sentence “My mother is an onion.” After a flood of similar responses that left instructors in, er, tears, I was challenged at some point by one of them to write my own response. The resulting poem appeared in the NZ journal Bravado and is in my new collection of poetry, A History of Glass. Given the garden theme and to celebrate the release of the book, I thought I’d share it:

My Mother is an Onion

I spend the day reading student poems
with this title. One student’s mother
leaves a bad taste in his mouth; another’s
gives the soup of her life its savor;
a third discovers layer by layer within
herself, as she ages, the seeds of her mother’s
own frustrated desires; and one mother
brings her son so often to tears that he must
keep her in the dark of a psychological
root cellar. I’m supposed to assign grades
but put it off, gaze through the window
by my desk as shadows stretch in the yard,
light blossoms behind the oak. I feel
I should instruct them to learn something
about the onion. I should tell them
Egyptians once worshipped it for markings
of eternity in its spherical shape,
its concentric rings, which are so much like
the circles we travel: my sister and I
around our mother, my daughter
and I around hers, my own around
my grandmother, a month in the earth,
my mother ten thousand miles away
in the privacy of her mourning. I wonder
what she is doing now. Probably,
she has been asleep for hours on the other side
of the world. Probably she’s wondered why
I haven’t written a poem about her lately,
about the care with which she has tended the year’s
vegetable garden. She would want me to be
true, as she always has, to the observed world:
sweat in the folds of her neck, dirt
beneath her nails, but she would want me
to move beyond such descriptions,
not to suggest that she, too, has come through
the darkness, a moderate freeze or two,
but to find in the world some corollary
for how we all want to be compared
with what is pure, beautiful, rare,
to suggest we, too, are worthy
of worship, the kind our children offer
before taking it away. What I know
of my own mother seems suddenly
tendril, for there is no vegetable garden
to sow, only houseplants on the balcony,
hanging like questions.
Yet I think my mother would allow it,
would say, you are still young, it is not too late,
and though I have no more idea than you do
what she means or to what spectral shed
she returns tools she does not own,
I promise you she picks them up from the grass,
and before leaving the poem for the dream,
of the future or the past, from which I have
so selfishly summoned her, she stares now
with me toward that unreachable distance
into which the day goes to seed after seed.

Note: Examples are invented. You have our promise here at The Lazy Gardener that no student work was harmed in the writing of this poem.

Married to permaculture

is a title my wife suggested for a blog entry, and I am if nothing else an obedient spouse.  “Sure thing,” I called from the couch, muting the commercial.  My wife is an ecologist. Permaculture has to do with ecologically sustainable gardening, and one aspect of said approach is to design gardens such that elements work to sustain one another, everything becomes a self-sustaining system, and nothing is without a function. The idea is waste not, want not. I realize this is a terrible thing to admit, but I sometimes have an almost irresistible urge to throw something away. I mean in the garbage. Not a big thing. Not, for instance, a plastic bottle. I mean just a little, tiny thing. Like, say, a napkin (turns out , it can be composted). We throw so little out, our garbage bags have half-lives. Plastic bags are rinsed. Paper bags and old boxes are used to help mulch the garden to suppress weeds.  Those little plastic circles that break off from the milk bottle top?  There’s an art place in town that takes those. I was recently reading the novel White Noise, written in the 80s, and there’s a kitchen scene that mentions a trash compactor. A trash compactor. Remember those? Remember when the idea was to get as much garbage into the landfill as you could? But back to my point. An example: I’ve taken on sweeping the kitchen floor each evening after the kids are asleep and it’s clear they have finished testing gravity with every conceivable item of food matter (I’ve suggested that no amount of such testing will prove the theory, as it can only be falsified, but they do their own thing). Back in the day (before chickens), I would dump the little swept piles into the rubbish bin. Alas, such days are behind me. “Give it to the chickens,” says my wife. So into the little old plastic ice cream container go the little particles and out they go to the chickens who, as promised, eat the stuff. That we re-use an old ice cream container says a lot, too, as does the fact that it sits next to a different plastic ice cream container filled with items for the compost. Weeds get drowned until they, too, are compost.  Eggshells go into the compost, which helps to grow the garden vegetables, which we eat, except for the scraps, which go to the chickens, who lay eggs. The circle of life. And this is pretty much what I think my wife meant when she suggested “married to permaculture” as a blog post, though after I heard the back door close and her footsteps move toward the garden, it did occur to me to wonder which of us she was talking about and whether she’d actually said perma-coucher.

Chickens

It  was around this time last year that library books began to appear in house. What they had in common was a chicken in the title (e.g. “Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance”). My wife was in intensive research mode. It had been several years since our last hen died, and hard-hearted of me as it might be, I didn’t miss them. Not their noisy reminders to be fed, their pooing on the deck, the chasing of them back to the run, the way they pecked to death any of their number who became ill and weak. Without the chickens, I had a lot more time to sit on the deck and contemplate the weeds, to wonder just how tall nature would let them grow.

But now she wanted to bring them back. Given the relative failure of our veggie patch, on the side yard, we had determined to create a new vegetable garden out of the large bed at the back of the property because it gets all day sun. A constant weedy eyesore, it is filled with couch grass, which stubbornly grows via a series of long runners under the earth and refuses to be tamed. Round Up would do the trick, or so we have been told many times, but we are committed to organic gardening.  Here’s a recent conversation:

Friend, surveying tree-like weeds:  You’re going to need RoundUp.
Me: My wife is committed to organic gardening.
Friend: But it’s couch grass.
Me: Well, she’s pretty tough.
Friend: So is couch grass.

But according to my wife’s research, the chickens would help to weed the garden by scratching patches bare. We’d swoop in after.

So the babes are back, three hens (Orpingtons) purchased from a friend in Ashhurst. To house them, we bought a moveable chicken coop/run on Trade Me (NZ’s version of Ebay) that we could shift through the garden as weeds gave way to soil, a device of pine and chicken wire that required assembly. The seller claimed it would take 15 minutes to assemble. I mentioned this to another friend. He immediately got the picture: “Six arguments and four hours later…” Exactly. But eventually up it went, in went the chickens—whom my daughter dubbed Katie, Molly, and Pecker—and, as planned, there go the weeds, square by square. The garden is 36 square meters of territory: We’ve tamed nearly half of it, and planted sunflowers, strawberries, lettuce, corn, pumpkins, carrots, tomatoes, beans, cauliflowers and broccoli. Each time we move the coop to another grassy patch, we let the chickens have a free run in the yard, which worries my daughter terribly, as she fears they won’t return. Maybe she senses my own hopes. Or maybe it didn’t help that once or twice I could be found over the fence chasing one or another of the hens through the neighbor’s paddock, dodging cows and cursing, not always under my breath, the busybody authors of influential chicken books who could otherwise be using their powers for good.

Summer Southerly

Autumn, usually, when this wind comes in like a lion and slaughters the lambs. But this is late January, deep into summer (think July in the Northern hemisphere), the lettuces in the garden plump and overly abundant. Yet in comes the wind and pounding rain last night, a little gift from Antarctica, which is closer than you think. A wind with its own special name—southerly, a sound you learn living here to hate on your tongue, a little taste of winter to savor mid-summer. The temperature dropped to below 7 Celsius, 44 degrees F.  Snow on the southern Alps.  A Pacific island? Please.  One might be pressed to choose the cruelest month. Winter is always lurking here. It beckons in the empty spot in the old chicken coop in the corner of the yard, where the five cords of firewood yet to be ordered are late already in getting stacked. It waits in the uninsulated walls, the no-central-heat, the gappy old timber windows we’ve promised ourselves to fill because the southerly reaches through to rattle the bedroom doors. It lurks in all the remaining single glazed windows.  And in the summer garden, of course. Isn’t that what it is to garden? To never be only here when you are but always looking ahead, not just a month but two and three? To be cruelly aware of the transient nature of all happy heat? Your days as a guitar-plucking grasshopper are behind you. Me and my wife, in our salad days, side by side yesterday planting brassiccas.

Arriving

Two weeks after arriving in New Zealand eight years ago this month, so that I could take a university position teaching creative writing, my wife and I found ourselves housesitting. It was what they call here a lifestyle block–an old character house (built circa 1910)  sitting on a couple of acres, surrounded by paddocks, the running water from a rain tank. We ended up living with the owner, who became a friend, for two months. But for those first couple of weeks our job was to keep the place going. Within a few days, I found myself spending two hours on a ride-on mower. An unusually rainy January (summer here),  and I found myself trying to push a heavy ride-on out of the mud. I stopped, looked at the cows in the neighboring paddock looking back at me, and thought, “Now, how did I get here?”

Eight years and two kids later, it’s a question I still ask myself. This blog is about being an American poet and fiction writer (and city/suburb boy) living in NZ. Life here has been about many things, but one consistent thing is adapting to a more rural, hands-on lifestyle–living nose to nose with sheep and cows, keeping chickens, dealing with a recalcitrant vegetable garden, stripping paint and oiling timber in our own character house, stacking blue gum, relying on a woodburner for heat.  If there is one thing living in NZ has done in getting me out of the familiar grooves of my life is reveal character. And there is one thing about my character that I’ve learned for sure. I’m one lazy gardener.