Rocks, Thistles, and the Work

A buck fifty for a spackle bucket full of rocks or thistles seemed like big money back in 1986.

Our new home stood on what had once been a field full of feed corn for one of the last herds of cows in our town. The completion of the interstate would open up this rural spot in New Jersey to rapid development and (on the other side of town) McMansions a-plenty. Our home was a 1980s style box, all square and without character to speak of, a mother-daughter sort of house surrounded by rocks and thistles in an unforgiving clay that dyed playclothes a vague sort of orange-y brown.

We felt like homesteaders on the frontier. This town had no sidewalks or community pool. WHAT?

My parents, in an effort to tame some of the front of our acre and a half of property, paid us kids to gather rocks and thistles. It was hard work, but gratifying—and a buck fifty could purchase a soft vanilla cone with rainbow sprinkles at the local ice cream place.  Eventually grass took hold.

By the early 90s we had grass and a tree in our back yard!

My parents planted a vegetable garden and some trees, mostly flowering pears (before we knew that they fall down eventually) and fast growing willows in the swampy back yard. One summer my dad built a retaining wall along the driveway to give the weird slope some structure against the inevitability of erosion.

Dad's wall today

I moved out, went to college, got married, had a kid, and realized that our one bedroom apartment could fit multiple times inside that giant rectangle of the small side of my parents’ house, so we moved in. We never thought it would be permanent, but the real estate market in Jersey in the 90s was insane, so I planted flowers in pots at the base of the deck stairs that led to our door in the rear of the house, and tried to cover some of the gravelly ugh that persisted despite my parents’ years of work.

Eventually we decided to make some improvements to our half of the rectangle, once we decided moving would be financially irresponsible…and then G got sick (literally the day after we started work on turning the garage under our apartment into a playroom/office—we said hello to the contractor as we left on our first trip to Philadelphia).

For several years after G’s diagnosis, I dealt with stress by moving rocks in our yard.  I moved several tons of decorative rocks to cover the ugly construction gravel under our deck. I dug one garden, then another, then another, hacking away at the clay with a pickax, spending all my angst and despair working the earth. We added good dirt to the clay until things would grow. I built a patio (with some digging help from my brother), placing each paver in a tetris-like pattern until I felt it looked right. I planted perennials, then spread the plants once they matured.

All my black-eyed Susans came from 

one original plant.

I dug holes for trees to try and give us some shade against the western exposure’s heat. I worked and worked. The ugly slope in the back of the house I turned into a rock garden, digging out the overgrown weeds and those immortal thistles, lugging rocks to create little burms.

I built a fire pit out of stone, again finding peace in the heavy lifting.

My spouse, too, works the yard. His is more a work of pruning the overgrowth, saving baby trees in the once-field behind our property by clearing out around them so they can grow. He mulches and shapes and plants, too, in a different way than I do, but he will spend hours and hours outside, doing the things. And now we pay our burly firstborn to dig the holes for new trees.

The tidy mulched areas around plantings are Dave's work

We don’t always work together—our style of working/ways of seeing are very different, and it is way less zen to move rocks when someone is saying, “wait, why are you putting that there?”. I move things and then hope he likes where they end up once he notices.

My parents upgraded their garden fence (we have so many hungry deer and bunnies and groundhogs), and put a patio in the front yard surrounded by flowers and shrubs. “Drinks on the veranda” is what we all call the lovely hours we now sit out there.

34 years after our rectangle went up on that barren scrabble of rocks and thistles and some old trees, our yard is gorgeous. It took so much work, some successes and failures, but now, it is gorgeous.

Panoramic of my yard this afternoon--the same space as the first picture. 

We need to do this in America, too.

After the news of the Dayton shooting, so close on the heels of the El Paso shooting, I went and sat on my patio, surrounded by plants and butterflies and hummingbirds. I just needed to sit in the peace of my garden. And I started thinking about the rocks and thistles and ugh of years ago, and how we had to work and work to make it better.

We need to do this in America. We need to work to make things better. Can we fix all the problems? No. Is there a simple solution? No—but there are steps we can take, quickly, buckets of rocks we can fill to prepare the nation’s figurative soil for improvement. We have the angst and pain right now, we MUST USE IT.

I try not to be political here, and I truly don’t mean this to be a political post. It is a human post, a heart post.  We have to look out for each other. Universal background checks seem like a pretty easy bucket of rocks to carry out. Banning weapons that can kill 9 people in under 30 seconds seems like a pretty obvious pile of prickly thistles to rip out. Will this make the nation perfect and peaceful overnight? Of course not—but just like in my yard, we have to start SOMEWHERE.  

Old ladies should be able to go run errands on Saturday morning safely. Soccer teams should be able to fundraise without worrying that their table is in the immediate line of fire for a shooter coming through the door. Parents should not have to die in a freaking Walmart while trying  to protect their infant. Folks out to enjoy a summer night should not have to wear a bullet proof vest just in case.

When I was a kid, we did not worry about these things. When I first started teaching, we did not need to do lockdown drills or active shooter drills. We did NOT.  

I am a historian. This is NOT what America was supposed to be in the minds of those who founded the nation. It's not. We have to work on this garden and get our plantings in order. It hurts my soul to see this happening again and again.

We may need to try some things to see what works. We may find that certain ways of doing things still bug us (I frequently tease my spouse about how he likes to landscape the woods—like, WHY ARE YOU MULCHING IN A SMALL FOREST??? WE HAVE A HUGE YARD? GOD PUT THOSE LEAVES THERE! My poor tidy spouse likes order so much). But we have to do SOMETHING.

We have to stop actively planting or nurturing weeds of horrible rhetoric, or overlooking when elected officials do—words matter, words matter so very much, and like weeds, poisonous words spread. We have to start somewhere.

I believe in the power of prayer, I also believe God wants us to do what we can do.  Thoughts and prayers are a good first step, but if I just think about the rocks in my yard and pray for the weeds to go away, that is not enough. Action on my part is required. Action on all our parts is required to make any kind of substantive change.

If we work together, and work consistently, and vote responsibly, over time things will grow better.  I have to hope that they will. 

I still find thistles in my gardens, and I think I let my Joe Pye weed get a little too out of control (but the butterflies and bumblebees love it, so I feel little regret), but I can deal with smaller problems when they pop up now that we’ve been working this soil for years. Why on earth can we not do that in America? DO SOMETHING!  We can preserve our second amendment rights AND protect our citizenry (which is what the second amendment was originally designed to do—not to facilitate a free for all in terms of weaponry).  We just have to start somewhere and do something.

Ultimately, I can’t hide in my garden forever. I have a responsibility as a human being to move rocks and thistles beyond my own yard. Please, please can’t we do this together? The reward is so, so much greater than a buck fifty.  Let’s plant peace. Let’s plant mutual respect. Let’s plant listening and hearing and helping.  Let’s do the work, one rock or thistle at a time, towards an America where we can all just be in peace.

All are welcome to come sit in my garden with me. Anytime.