Contents of my backpack today:
pesticide (for mealybugs), paper towel, four squash balls.
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The following text is unedited from its original version, but for the fact that I divided the paragraphs to make it more web friendly. I don't know how to handle footnotes per se (ok, I do but I'm lazy right now) so the original footnotes are at the end. It's interesting to see how much my writing style has changed since then, but perhaps you won't notice.
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A Small History of a Lot
Behind the house where I live is a small rectangular lot. The law says the lot belongs to me. Despite this claim of ownership, I have never quite felt that the lot was mine. The lot was around long before I was, and notwithstanding the little fence round it, I still think of my lot as being an ancient participant the larger expanse of dirt that stretches round the entire planet. Before the crust of the planet cooled I suppose my lot was bubbling up and down in the magma, and before this I suppose it was probably a fiery aspect of the sun, or some space matter or something—but I don’t know anything about that (1) .
In the future, long after I’m gone, the fence may come down; I’m sure it will, and maybe eventually the planet will be pulverized, and then my little lot will skitter away as dust into the vacuum of space—but I’m not qualified to comment on this either. I can only tell you my own history, dull though it may be in comparison with the grander revolutions of the universe (2) .
My tale begins with what I was told. First in a lawyer’s office some place on Bay Street. “We’re obligated to inform you,” said the lawyer, leaning across his desk, “that there was a very serious domestic situation with the previous occupants of the house. Is this going to be a problem for you?”
“I don’t see why it would be.” I said.
“Well some people like to be informed about these things.”
The previous occupants, I later discovered, were a family of four. The father was a carpenter who had made all sorts of improvements to the place. He had built a deck in the back yard, and across the gravel roadway, in the lot, he had built a tree house on stilts for his two children. The mother, meanwhile, had filled the garden with flowers; irises, and tulips, wild roses, and dark purple morning glories. In the lot, beneath two fruit trees; a crab apple and a sour cherry, which one after the other in the early spring bloomed and then dropped their white petals onto the soft lawn, there grew raspberries, blackberries, rhubarb, and other delights.
Yet at the same time (as I learned gradually from my new neighbours) there had been nothing pleasurable about living in or around this house. The father had taken to drink. He beat his wife, and whenever she was away he would fill up the deck with obnoxious friends and young lovers. The parties would go on all night, every night. Finally the father disappeared, or was thrown out, the mother and children moved away, and I arrived.
The most land I had owned before my arrival was a single pot on a windowsill, which, though intended for my poor spider plant, also doubled as a pincushion for my incense and an alternate pee station for my cats. But this said, I did arrive on the land with the expectation that I would make something of it. My mother after all is a floral sorceress. Studied in both the Western and Japanese techniques of flower arrangement, she routinely used to win contests across the continent. My youth was spent ducking round stacks of cut flowers about the house, boxes of Oasis, bushels of eucalyptus, dogwood, and berried juniper.
My mother’s garden is the model of order; perfectly placed stones, finely trimmed bushes, tiny fountains, only the most tasteful of statuary; neo-classical cherubs, bronze toads, and fountains with Neptune spouting burbling water over his greening beard. And before my mother, her father, may he rest in peace, was most often represented in my memory as a man ambling up from his garden in the country, his thick hands black with mud, and a shovel over his shoulder. My father, meanwhile, while he probably has never grown anything in his life, certainly was and is an advocate of the square lawn, and in the city he was always out with the mower, in the country he was always out with the tractor. And together all these people, when I arrived on my lot, went on at length about how wonderful it was to have a little patch to work on, and how extensively they planned to contribute to the beautification of my yard.
It was the winter, though, when I arrived, and so any talk of what would happen to the lot, and to the front yard, and generally speaking to the house, were put on hold until the spring finally came around. My position was that I would prefer to wait, to see what the previous owners had left to pop out of the ground before I went ahead and cut the soil. I had come from hard times when I arrived; work in a dark basement where endlessly boxes fell down a black belt and bounced along until they came to the spot where I stood, and then I would lift them and stack them on a skid, and when the skid was full they would bring me another skid, and I would fill that one.
Each box looked exactly the same, yet contained something different; sometimes six in a row would be filled with cans of beans and I would nearly break my back lifting them. Then after the six heavy boxes there would suddenly be box filled with toilet paper and when I strained to lift it I would suddenly tumble over backwards—much to the amusement of my coworkers.
Sometimes the boxes would be filled with leaking bottles of industrial bleach and when I lifted them the bleach would burst through the cardboard and spill all over me, destroying my clothes.
The only thing that kept me alive in those days was the thought of my girlfriend, who worked the nightshift to my day shift, and whom I saw twice a day: once in the evening when I came home, usually as she was running out the door, and once in the middle of the night, when she came home, and dangled a few beer flavoured kisses onto me in my sleep.
But we did snatch a few happy moments out of all this misery, and it was enough to keep me sane. Apparently it was not enough to keep her sane, though, and after she ran away I cracked too, quit my job and lived on fifty cents a day, eating a single Danish and drinking tap water. At this point I inherited the house. I got a new job, I moved across town, and to help me pay the bills I rented out a portion of the house to a friend of mine. After this, things were pretty decent for a while. My friend and I discovered that we shared certain sensibilities about lawn care. He liked to mow the front, and we had the odd barbeque in the back, but other than this, nothing. No real gardening. I got a lot of lectures from my family about the joys of planting flowers, and I admit that I felt a few pangs of guilt about the matter, but I never did anything about it.
Eventually things turned bad with my tenant friend. He had always had a heart condition, and had undergone several operations to correct his condition, but in defiance of life he had always consumed alcohol like a maniac. Eventually this practice caught up with him and his body began to retain water; he swelled up to twice his usual size, and could not sleep lying down because he felt he would suffocate. Finally I, and some others, talked him to the hospital. He spent two months, first in the ICU, then in a ward.
When he was released he stayed sober for a week or two and then went back to the booze. He went in the hospital for another two months, and then again went back to the booze. About this time he began to bring all kind of people home with him in the night, bikers, maniacs, these people will fill the living room every night of the week, blasting loud music and stealing my personally property. Next my friend brought home a fifteen-year-old girl who had run away from home; the two apparently intended to live as lovers. I called children’s aid and had her removed, and then things turned bitter. The last straw came one night when I came down from my room and found an ambulance crew working on my friend on the living room floor. I told him after this that I loved him, and that we had been friends since childhood, but that he didn’t love himself, that he was driving me crazy, and that I wanted him to leave. He left, we never spoke again, and two years later he died.
Following this I rented the basement out to a woman with a two-year-old girl. I was hoping that a single mother would make a more stable tenant, but this was wrong. What she didn’t inform me before she moved in was that she was a smoker. The tobacco smoke wafted up day and night, and the house always smelled terrible. Not only this, but the woman cooked with nothing but Crisco and refused to open her windows so in addition to the tobacco, three or four times a day the stench of the oil will fill up the house.
Once again I began to unravel. The woman stayed home all day and watched the shopping network at full volume. Whenever I went down stairs I was dismayed to discover filthy plates everywhere, mountains of unwashed laundry, toys and endless shopping network paraphernalia strewn about on the floor. The breaking point came one day when she called me down to complain that there were mushrooms growing in her bathroom.
“You must be kidding, I said.” But she was serious. She wrote me a letter complaining that the carpet around the toilet was a breeding ground for mushrooms, and that I was a lousy landlord for letting them grow. Truth be told, there were mushrooms, I discovered; their stems began behind the toilet and stretched out (I kid you not, dear reader) three and a half feet into broad caps. Not that I don’t love mushrooms as much as anyone, but this was repulsive. I wrote my tenant a letter in response stating that had there not been a chest high mound of damp filthy laundry on the bathroom floor—including soiled diapers—there would not have been mushrooms growing around the toilet.
Later that night I heard my tenant screaming at the top of her lungs at her child that because she, the child, had not picked up her toys, Adam was now furious. The whole situation was getting very demented. I was beginning to suspect that perhaps I should have listened to my lawyer about concerns over serious domestic problems. I resolved then and there to use the only legal recourse open to me to unload a tenant: claiming that the space must be given up for an incoming member of one’s own family.
The only relative I had a remote chance of talking into cohabitation was my sister. She was tree planting at the time, and planned to take the money she made and take off to India for a while. “Why don’t you meet me over there?” She said. Ok. We ended up at a leper colony in the North and I ended up spending a whole lot of time up to my waist in a container full of cow manure, shovelling the shit into the back of a truck—but that’s another
story.
When we got back to Canada she moved into my basement. The carpets had to be pulled up because I discovered after my old tenant left that she had been locking the bathroom door and not allowing her daughter to use it. The little girl had been peeing on the bedroom carpet instead. This was an unpleasant discovery, to say the least. Things got better after my sister arrived. She had more of a hand for the garden than I did, and she filled the soil with herbs and flowers, generally under the tutelage of my mother. My sister’s friends began to come and help her plant. They began to have garden parties where people sat on the grass and ate picnic food, and let their children roam about, they played the drums, and generally it was a good atmosphere. Things were a lot better in the house at this time. People took crayons and drew butterflies on the walls, and some of the neighbours even began to speak to me again. All in all it was pretty nice.
The neighbours and I had not always seen eye to eye on the issue of gardening and home care. I suppose the worst case of disagreement came with a husband and wife who lived two doors down. The husband used to ignore me entirely, and the wife used to scowl when I walked by—which at least was some acknowledgement of my existence. One time one of their children, who, as I usually leave my doors wide open when the weather is nice, had been inviting herself into my house and hiding in my cupboards with her friends, told me that she had been told by her mother that she wasn’t allowed to come over anymore because I was a monster who ate children.
That same summer I found the husband standing on my front lawn (which I never mow) with his mower. He didn’t have the mower on, of course, he was just standing there glaring at me. “What is your problem?” He yelled at me. I wasn’t sure I knew which problem of mine he wished me to identify. “Why don’t you do you’re share and mow your goddamn lawn?” I shrugged and kept going.
Since then the other half of my lawn—the half belonging to the C. family has been mowed, but my remains untouched. The C. family have been much more tolerant than I deserve. Especially considering that they shared, for a couple of months, a semi-detached home with the worlds greatest/worst Death Metal Band—the name better left out of this story—and considering that they bear the brunt of my madness, they complain very little.
On the other side of my house is V. A woman from Tennessee, who listens full blast to country music, and who always has a very large dog barrelling round the flagpole replete with American flag in her back yard. V. claims that she keeps the dogs because she once caught a man peeping over her back fence from the rail tracks. It seems reasonable to me. V. also has a perfect lawn, and she keeps those black face lawn jockeys on it. She’s mad right now because the city is building housing for native families one street over from us, and she mourns the fact that the neighbourhood will now be filled with “drunken Indians”.
In spite of all her questionable views on this life—she keeps telling me, for example, that she’s just waiting for the socialists to ruin everything for Canada, and then she’ll move back to the USA. Her definition of a socialist is Mike Harris, “he’s too soft on those bums, she’ll say”—but in spite of her views on life, she is the only person on the street who was ever supported me in my totally out of control gardening habits, my penchant for loud obnoxious music, and my latest adventures in lawn decoration—but I’ll return to all of this.
It’s a coin toss, I suppose. Some people may have views that I simply could never hold myself, but I still have to live with them, and if they offer me friendship then I wonder where I, needing friends, should stand morally. I personally feel that the entire Canadian and American military should be disarmed and transformed into a giant disaster relief force, ready at a moment’s notice to fly all over the world and dig people out of all the natural catastrophes that we should expect shortly. I also snuck on the Downsview Air Force base recently and spray painted peace signs on the tanks (quite an adventure), but when I tell V. about such things (I admit I didn’t tell her about the tanks) she gets very upset and frustrated with me. I can’t say who is right or wrong about life. Right now, though, my conscience feels ok.
Back to the story though: The neighbour my sister liked least was J., who lives in the other half of the house from the husband and wife who seem to believe I am some sort of demon. J., ignoring the fact that my sister’s name is Alexandra, insisted on calling her Dina. I often tried to correct him, but he would get mad at me and say I was lying, claiming that my sister had told him that her name was Dina. Dina, I mean Alexandra, denies the conversation to this day.
I like J., he seems like a peaceful guy to me. He grows vegetables in his yard, and various sorts of flowers, and on the odd occasion that I have stuck my fingers into the sod he has been there with useful advice. He talks a lot about living in Italy as a youth and having a cherry orchard. I have one cherry tree in my yard, and he always gets mad that the birds take more of the cherries than I do. I don’t like cherries that much. I tell J. he can have them, I don’t know if he takes any, but the birds take a lot. My sister claims that she caught J. peeping in her window one time when she was making out with her boyfriend on her bed. She thinks he’s creepy. J. has a wife and he seems to have three or four daughters and sons, all of whom are in their middle to late teens. He invites me up on his front porch to drink wine with him sometimes, but I haven’t yet accepted.
My sister stayed for a year or two, throwing parties on the solstices, and building mosaic tabletops out of the plates my mother gave her as a housewarming present. During this period I returned to University to finish a degree I had given up on in the early nineties when I ran away to India to become a sitar master. University has been good to me, but the
studies left me with little time to bother with the garden. After my sister left things began to grow a little wild again in the back. Unwanted weeds began to overpower the wild strawberries, the creeping vines she had planted began to curl up the back steps of the deck and wind round the patio furniture. The wild roses began to spread into impossible thickets and from out of their canopy maple and oak trees pullulated into the sun.
Things got ugly with the neighbours again. Sometimes I would find J. in my back yard trimming things for me, Mr. C. next door caught me one time in the back and suggested that the best way to clear up all the weeds would be to pour buckets of bleach over everything. “Then you’ll just have nice flat dirt back there.” He advised. I admit that I did feel a little guilty about letting everything go, but I was also super lazy, and preoccupied with schoolwork, and I never got around to anything.
At the same time I began to notice something a little different about the yard as I let it go. It wasn’t just that V. had doubled the size of her back fence so that she did not have to see my mess anymore—she said it was to keep the dog in (and maybe this is true, as that dog was always hopping the fence and running amok), but I still took it as a bit of a slight. “I would never tell anyone how to live their life,” She said, “if a person wants to keep their yard wild that’s their business.” This at least was some kind of a positive response. But, as I said, things seemed a little different.
When I went back there now and then to poke around I started to notice a new energy to the place. I don’t know how to define it, but it felt strong, and it felt pleasant to be there. It was a little bit like walking in a forest; maybe the sense that I could discover things there that were a little unknown, a little untouched by human intervention. Mind you this sensation was often muted a little by passing freight trains, the unique rhythm of hammers on wood, children screaming, and people blasting their radios.
In the winter this sensation was somewhat muted by the scraping of shovels against the cold cement, but it was still there. I began to find curiosities in my yard: in the summer a pair of quails bobbing through the underbrush, in the winter a fox who bounced away through the back fence as I crunched towards it. And I must say my cats never complained about the new state of the yard. I knew when I called them that they would be found lounging in the shade under the tangled rose bushes.
Still, my mother’s garden was on the Toronto Garden Club’s official tour of beautiful gardens of the city, and perhaps I still harboured dreams of having the ladies over for tea one day in the garden, chattering about azaleas, clematis, boxwoods, and seeded junipers, but my mother, looking at my mess, didn’t like my chances.
I had visions of finally taking command of my yard, building stone path with exotic thymes and Scottish mosses softening the spaces between the stones. I dreamed of a rock garden with Greek oregano cascading down, and sage bursting upwards. I thought of the wild flower gardens I would have liked with tiger lilies and nasturtium blossoms, and marigolds changing its colours throughout the year, but knowing me it didn’t see like it was going to happen.
About this time, for reasons that I cannot now possibly explain, I was swept away ay reading I was doing about the Neolithic Age in Europe—not just the Neolithic age, and the whole concept of the original agricultural revolution, but with the archaeologists, or anthropologists, or perhaps simply flakes, who dressed up in pseudo-Neolithic clothing and attempted to reconstruct the live of the first farmers, using reconstructions of their original stone tools. I found the idea of attempting to clear massive untouched forests with small, sharpened, rocks to be oddly compelling. I looked at my yard, and I thought of my tea-sipping dream, and I wondered if the two fantasies could not somehow be merged into a reality that would somehow suit my particular worldview.
It was also the summer and I was out of school and unemployed, and I thought that regressing 25, 000 years would be a lot more fun than pounding on doors with an armload of resumes. The first task was to fashion a hand axe. I didn’t want to bother with all the stone chipping, and plus the flakes say chipping is not nearly as simple as it looks, so I went to Canadian Tire and bought a small hatchet. It was about the same size as a stone axe and I imagined that it would do pretty much he same job in pretty much the same way. Armed with my hatchet I ventured out into the bush and began to flail indiscriminately and every growing thing in sight.
As I became more proficient I began to actually aim at the stalks of certain plants trying to fell them. Some plants had become trees a couple of inches thick, and though I could eventually bring them down, I discovered that the hatchet was little use for removing their roots from the ground and so I returned to Canadian Tire to find something that approximated a stone that could be used for digging. The staff there suggested that digging stones had been out of stock for some time, but that I might try a trowel. It was close enough, but even with the trowel and the hatchet I was still making poor progress bringing down the thickest areas of growth. Plus, while the hatchet worked well on thicker stalks, it was no good on all the thinner, more thickly allocated growth—particularly the wild rose bushes, which had been leaving stinging spines in my hands every time I attacked them.
The original cave farmers had used a kind of curved stick into which they placed small stone teeth with sharpened edges thus creating the original scythe. I went back to Canadian Tire, but they didn’t have scythes. They said they would have plastic ones come Halloween, if I wanted to dress as death, but no real ones. I called my friend Jennifer, who lives in the country, if she knew where I could get a scythe but she denied that she knew. She said they were using some kind of machine now to cut hay. It might have just been her concern for my sudden interest in scythes that stopped her from assisting me, but what do I know? I went back to Canadian Tire and bought a kind of thing on a pole with a hoe on one side and a forkey thingy on the other. This tool turned out to be really good. The hoe side was great for slashing down big sections of the bushes, and the forkey thingy allowed me to claw them away without getting stabbed by the thorns (as much). And so in this way the land began to be cleared.
A funny thing began to happen as I worked away in my yard. Suddenly my neighbours began to stop and converse with me. They expressed interest in my plans for the garden and offered to give me all kinds of help. They’re really not such bad people, I thought. I mean if I’m sitting in my house all day with the blinds drawn, and I only emerge after nine at night to return at six in the morning, of course they are going to accuse me of wanting to boil their children alive, but hell, out here in the sunshine, everything is beautiful.
I was becoming a part of the neighbourhood again. J. started offering to give me tomato shoots to plant in the dirt next spring, and the C.s next door stopped talking about pouring bleach all over my plants. Soon, after a lot of sweat, and chopping at root systems under the ground, and discovering fifty five thousand new varieties of insect, I had a section of yard that was essentially ready mud. The rest of the yard, everything past archway of the cherry tree and the crab-apple tree, I left as it was: wild and shaded. The thickets had not grown up there because of the heavy shade, I guess, and so that part of the yard was a little like a forest clearing: just low growing plants, and the odd twisted branch that had fallen down from the oak. I never had any intention of messing with this area. I began to think of it as a little sacred, actually. I had visions of making it into a religious space and inviting young witch girls over to dance with me round a mad bonfire—but I haven’t worked out all the details of this one yet. The main problem being large open fires in the city—apparently they are illegal , but I digress (3).
So I had this mud, and now I wanted to build a rock garden. The problem was that I didn’t have any rocks. Where did people go to find rocks in the Stone Age? This wasn’t a good solution. They certainly didn’t go to Humber Nurseries, where medium size rocks go for sixty-five bucks each.
I went to the Sun-Yat Sen Gardens in Vancouver, and there they had rocks that they had dredged up from the bottom of some lake in China and shipped over to Canada, because only those rocks would do. They also had to get a special licence to import some super rare type of wood over to build the posts of some of the buildings inside the garden. My friend Anthony used to walk around the outside wall of the garden and take pictures of the crack-heads scrounging around on the pavement. In a way it isn’t all so different from some gated Disney community down in Florida, but in another way I thought of the large Hindu temples I had seen, and I liked the idea that one could make a big stone wall and shut the outside world out, that one could create a little but of meditative solitude in the middle of a lot of madness.
As I said, I felt a little something sacred about my space and I would have loved to build a wall, but I thought I should start with something modest and create a rock garden instead. If things got complicated later then the vines from my rock garden could climb up the new wall and dangle deliciously out into the outside world, but first I needed to find the rocks. The most budget conscious solution (as I refused to pay for rocks) was to go down to the Leslie Spit, where the constructions companies dump all their broken concrete on the beach and collect a whole lot of that stuff to take back to my garden. It quickly became clear, though, as I picked about on the beach, that I wasn’t going to be able to carry much concrete in one go, and anyhow it was a forty minute walk back to my house, all up hill, and it was one hell of a muggy day.
The obvious solution to this, of course, was to take a shopping cart from Loblaws, fill it up with concrete, and push that back up to my house. It occurred to me as I began to heave the cart along the bicycle trail by the lakeshore that a shopping cart full of concrete is quite a bit heavier than I had anticipated. Another problem was that no small number of uber-fit bottled water sucking roller blade people were flings sarcasms at me as I advanced, like Sisyphus, my shoulder against the cart, and I was not yet off of the flatter part of the journey.
My cart, which had once runneth over, now began to shed stones along the way. My breaks of exhaustion began to increase and I lurched forward under the sun. More fearsome than the sun, I discovered, as I began to ascend up Coxwell Avenue, past the donught shops, and the hair salons, and the bingo halls, the heads of patrons turning as though they were soldiers turning up from their shaving and their tin plated meals to watch an enemy stride boldly down the centre of their camp, more fearsome than the sun was the difficulty I had crossing curbs.
The cart, which of course had a bad wheel and always veered to the left no matter how hard I tried to control it, was not easy to manage over the edges of curbs, and I had terrible visions of the thing flipping and the contents spilling out into the street just as a car came round the corner. How would I ever explain what I was doing to the police? Somehow, though, I made it back to my yard, collapsing in the mud with only eight concrete stones to show for it—all the rest having been dropped en route—and I never did go back for more, and I never did get that rock garden going.
I also never got back to gardening again, and the next year the mud sprouted all new sorts of weeds, grew unmanageable and my neighbours stopped talking to me again. I’ve had a few roommates since this time. Sahar, who didn’t seem to care much for gardening, but who parked her car in my back lot. Sahar brought a lot of good energy to the house, though. Larry and Anthony who used to fence with pop bottles on the front lawn, and who drove the neighbours nuts, and lastly Evan, who lives here now, and who is the only roommate I’ve ever had who shares my passion for houseplants. Ok, maybe he isn’t as bad as me—I’ve set up grow lights under my stairs so I can grow lavender and basil under my stairs in the wintertime—it refreshes the air and it makes the place smell great.
I got the idea from my mother, who told me that the worst thing about flying was the recycled air on the long international flights. If they would just put a bed of moss in the bottom of each of the drink carts enough oxygen would be produced to keep the people on the plane breathing fresh air. I don’t know about you reader, but I hate flying and I’d like my senses to be as dull as possible when I’m up there, but I must return to my point, as I’m drifting again.
I was planning to clean up the garden again next year, but I think that I won’t bother. I liked it best when it was wild, and if anything has changed for me it is that where once I might have listened to the people who complained about the way the place was kept, now I feel comfortable about letting it keep itself. It’s not any kind of revelation that has brought me to this pass; it is more like a gradual accumulation of life experiences. When I was a little kid I used to have to walk past this one house in North Toronto that had the strangest yard—they had all kinds of home made statues in there, and wild bushes growing up around them, the house was painted in magnificent colours, and to be frank the place terrified me.
Truth be told I’m getting to be a little dotty that way myself now. I’ve recently started hanging up pieces of scrap metal, and forks and bits of electrical equipment in the front of the house for reasons that I don’t really think I can explain. I don’t feel bad about it, I just can’t explain it. I was sitting and having dinner with my father this evening, and he was listing all the ways that he thought I did things differently from everyone else—this is a favourite topic of his. The manifestations of my yard were high on his list. He asked me what ever happened to the lawnmower he bought me.
“It’s sitting in a shed on top of the other lawnmower I already had.” I told him, “why, did you want it back?”
I asked my father if he’d ever done any gardening. “To be fair,” I told him, “I wrote that you didn’t garden and I want to make sure I was telling the truth.” It wasn’t true though. He reminded me that back in the 1950s he had planted a tree in Edmonton in his back yard. He took me to Edmonton a couple of years back and he was pleased to see that the tree was still growing. As far as I know he drives by and visits it every time he goes out West. “I don’t garden, but I do trees.” He said. So maybe his philosophy and mine aren’t so different after all. I’m not putting any seed in the ground, but I think I might just let my little lot go and see where it takes me (4).
***
footnotes:
(1) This is kind of a frivolous addition, but I started thinking about the expanse of time when I read Rachel Carson’s ‘The Gray Beginnings’. I have to say that I included my section on Neolithic farming as a reference to the long history of the world, as well. Obviously I was purposely mixing up some of the actual facts about the Neolithic for the sake of fun, but I still want to give some impression of the expanse of human history no matter how demented it may seem on paper.
(2) Epiphany is a pretty strong word, but a couple of recent discoveries inspired not only this story, but also the way that I plan to approach my back yard in the future. The first, Lawn and Order, inspired me by showing me that there were diverse ways in which one’s yards could be kept, and that people were comfortable in their diversity. I would try in my own life to be more tolerant than many of the people in the film were to the ways that my neighbours kept their lawns, but in return I would like them to be tolerant of the way I kept mine. I’m the odd one out though because as it stands now—as I say at the end of this tale—my yard is turning into quite a spectacle. Nevertheless Lawn and Order made me realize that there were other people out there simply living as they chose, and it made me feel good. It made me feel like what I was doing was not unnatural (even if it was anti-social), and in its way this movie meant a lot to me.
The sensation was further cemented, I would say, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s The Faithful Gardiner. There were two concepts in this book that stood out for me: first, the idea that the land can have a memory and that the people on the land can have a memory of the land. I have tried to convey something of this in my story. That this place doesn’t just have a static history, but that as the faces that live over this land changes the face of the land changes. The two parts are inexorably linked. I believe that there can be a strong connection to a certain place. Even though I love to travel, I get a certain sentimental twang when I return to Ontario and I see the landscape here—the black mud that I miss so very much when I am in Asia, even more so perhaps the pink granite walls on each side of the highway in Northern Ontario. I don’t know why but these elements of place mean a great deal to me. I think that it is possible to fall in love with a new place, but that as one does so the new place must grow towards the person as much as the person grows towards the place. I believe that only after six years of my living on this spot of land have I, and the land really come to understand what it is that we want from each other. A flight of fancy perhaps, but for the first time ever I feel completely comfortable with the way that I live. Even if I’ve been rejected by the neighbourhood, I feel like I’ve been accepted by my lawn. This brings me to my second point about The Faithful Gardiner, I loved the idea that a plot of land could be left to grow and become whatever it decided to. I want to say that the land can be left to its own devices, but my current roommate, Evan, has trouble with “devices” he says that land doesn’t have devices, that it just is. Of course, his opinion shouldn’t matter to my story, since it’s my story, and it’s ostensibly about me getting comfortable with my own worldview, but I’m taking his advice anyhow and merely saying that the land being left to grow without my (or anyone else’s if I can help it) intervention is a beautiful thing. The Faithful Gardiner with all it’s optimism about the world makes the untended patch of land transform into a luxurious forest, and all I’ve been getting thus far is a lot of weeds and bushes, but I’m still very happy with the result.
(3) Goats, apparently, are illegal to keep in the city, too, which is too bad because I really wanted a goat.
(4) David Abram, in ‘The Ecology of Magic’ discusses the fact that we can never truly understand the thoughts and feelings of another form. Everndon, in The Natural Alien, expresses this too in his discussion of the worldview of a woodtick. I get a couple of things from this, first that it should be noted that even between humans we can not exactly understand the worldview of another. I live next door to V. and so in terms of environment and influence there is little that divides us, yet we couldn’t possibly see the world in a way that is more different.
The same thing applies to my father. Essentially we are of the same genetic stock, and I spent my entire life being exposed to him and his views (about mowing the lawn, and other things) yet we have come to vastly different conclusions about the way that life should be lived. He says to me that this is not just a matter of viewpoint, but also of time, and that when I arrive at his age I may well see the world as he does. It is quite possible. Nevertheless, I don’t think he saw the world I do now when he was my age, so how can I possibly respond to his claim? Time will tell I guess. The second point is—and this comes out more in Everndon—though the passage about feeding ants (I know I mention it a lot, but ants fascinate me) on the plantation in Bali in Abram is also apt—is that humans being are a part of their environment, as much as everything else. We contribute, and we are indivisible from the whole. I truly feel that the yard and I are coming to some kind of an understanding about things. Whether the yard had this understanding when the other people lived here I don’t know. The abusive husband who used to live in this house came back to visit one day when I was out, according to J., and when he saw the condition of the back yard he was disgusted. All of the work he had put into it was gone, swallowed up by my apathy for/ resolve not to engage in yard work. So that was too bad for him. The yard had moved on and become something else for somebody else. I would rather try to live as a decent person (whatever that is) and have a messy yard then be a wife beater and keep a neatly trimmed garden, but this is hardly the point. The point is that the land isn’t anything and we aren’t anything—we mould it and it moulds us, we are part of the same larger entity and the changes of the universe are reflected in us both.
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