STUFF I CAN’T GROW IN A PLACE I DON’T LIVE

Five maple leaves, regulation autumn orange, hang in a plastic bag from a magnet on the fridge. These were collected last week by my daughter Gus, as proof. While we were in Boston visiting our other daughter Coco, the one who just started college in that part of the world, the leaves were doing their northeastern thing, but Gus knew no one would  believe it in Texas. The only reason I believe it is that I went to boarding school not far from Boston, and saw trees change overnight there in October. Like everything else from my childhood–the sight of authentically deciduous trees, the smell of old leaves decomposing under feet walking in the woods, twilight approaching in a uniquely stern and Yankee way–it is all weirdly familiar, especially considering that every news story I read in this morning’s paper has all but left my head. (I remember the economy is collapsing, but that’s about it.) Now my 18-year-old daughter lives in this place, with its four definable seasons. It hasn’t been a seamless transition and sometimes she is lonely. More often, she is just plain cold. As a mother, I feel the opposite of omnipotent. Nullipotent? All I can do is promise a pair of Ugg boots for her birthday and, if I can find the right sort of botanica, a bar of magical cold-and-lonely-begone soap that scrubs away discomfort and washes it into the municipal water system.

My distraction in Boston was this:

Cortland apples, with flesh so white as to be nearly light green. So crisp as to snap your bridgework right out of your face. The only living thing that really deserves the world “bittersweet.” We made a special trip out into the country to pick more giant apples than we could possibly cram into the overhead compartment. The farm looked like this:

It looked like a farm from the kind of children’s books I read growing up in the city. Deep green grass set off deep blue sky and Puritan work ethic seeped out of the bark of the trees. 100 years before the battle of Lexington, some tough family had grubbed enough stones out of the soil to make miles and miles of Robert-Frostian stone walls. The work didn’t end there, and it still hasn’t, and don’t you forget it. It’s no picnic milking cows at midnight when it’s twenty below.

No one on the farm gave me this vibe–in fact, the farmer was damn near as friendly as a Texan–so I had to make it up out of my own horticultural neuroses. It was easy, much easier than battling the four seasons of the northeast or trying to forge an iron will for myself this late in a life of indolence and hedonism.

What does this have to do with gardening? You tell me. All I’ve done since I got home is dig and dig and dig, dragging all kinds of artifacts out of the depths of the ground. Today, for instance, I saw two earthworms tied in a kama-sutra-like knot. I don’t have time for a bigger vegetable garden and I should be writing something marketable instead of empire-building. But I feel unusually comfortable out in Mother’s Day Farm, and I’ve always been a sucker for that.

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