True Dirt

a rose spirit

When a rose dies its petals fall to earth with a gentle sigh. The silken skin mottles, wilts, and crumbles into dust. The dust becomes another rose. Another garden. I think there may be a rose spirit that rises as its mortal flower falls. The inner eye of the gardener sees it. The gardener propagates and waters, dreams and waits for the bud to fatten and burst its plain container, spilling colors of blood and flame, sun and shadow, nacre and cloud in a swirled mandala of brief perfection. In the eye of the mandala is the spirit of the rose, a future rose, another May, a different garden.

My mother's spirit left her mortal frame today. A brilliant May day awash in the colors and scents of roses. She has tended her last rose and become one in this gardener's eye. A vivacious red and a sunny yellow rose. A wildly rampant rose. A thorny mildewed rose that refuses to give up. My sorrow at her leaving me, her petals at my feet, is great and deep as oceans. But I went out this morning to tend her garden, water the roses, watch the squirrels at play, listen to the birds sing. And for another brief eternity she blooms.

the preponderance of the small

There is the mustard seed and that straw that broke the camel's back. Small things can have great strength and moment. I walked out into the yard this morning and nearly tread on a small surprise; a brilliant yellow primrose blooming in the cement. As I sit at my table writing, a chirping commotion makes me look up. The Robin family has congregated on the next door neighbor's window ledge--Mom, Dad and the two kids begging for snacks. Out front, a few feet above the towering wands of grass I have refused to mow, hangs the snug sock of the Bush Tits' nest, a speckled wattle and daub affair no bigger than a size 10. It surprised me one day, standing over the white iris, scissor in hand. The ceanothus branch shuddered and the nest appeared at eye level, magically constructed while I blinked.

Loitering with a hose in hand, the hummingbird zooms close for a shower. Looking up at a familiar sound I see the flycatcher has returned for another summer. Perched on the plum branch he sits with his mouth agape. Two more of his kind appear and join him, their mouths agape too. Then the puzzle is solved. A fourth flycatcher swoops in with a mouthful of insects to feed the famished brood. I water my shoes in wonder.

White clouds drift in a turqoise sky. Sunlight illuminates an ant. The golden boss of a scarlet rose gleams within a fading bouquet. Splashes from the bathing Towhee. Insignificant moments that I soon forget. But these small pleasures of my garden are mighty in their power to soothe and soften the hard impress of life's great and heavy acts.

wonder and despair

Returning from New Orleans last week, after reports from family and friends that the week of our absence had been seasonally cool, it was a shock to wake up to an unseasonally warm and profusely blooming Bayview garden. All the roses had, in our six-day absence, commenced to burst their buds in a coordinated show of color, the mulleins had added a foot or so to their spires and popped out purple and yellow buttons to decorate them. The golden columbine sent shuttlecocks of bloom skyward, the Nigella was in mad production of both misty "love" and bushy "devils", and the regal lily towered, pagoda-like, over the blue saucers of tri-color Gilia and the bright yellow disks of Pt. Reyes meadow foam.

It seems ages ago (actually, March 19) that I had brought home the Gilia and Limnanthes (meadow foam), Phacelia and columbine (Aquilegia) from Annie's Annuals nursery in Richmond and planted them in ceaselessly falling rain. When the rain finally stopped in late April I thought the plants would be near ready to bloom but they just sat there, no bigger than when I planted them, as the snails and slugs threatened to reduce them to stubs. The weather continued rainless but grey and cold. The sweet peas were still no higher than six inches and I despaired of their ever reaching the bottom ends of the twine and wire trellis I had imagined them covering by now with fragrant flowers.

The fact is, this year's weather may not be so unusual or the ominous harbinger of imminent Global Warming (though I have my suspicions) and it is simply that in the larger, and longer, scheme of things it's just Nature in one of her countless guises and moods. What is unusual is how much my life, and others' lives have been affected by weather in the last eight months, from the half million residents of the city of New Orleans and Gulf coast residents hit by last September's hurricanes to my own month-long duty as basement bailer during the Bay Area's March "monsoon". Now startled New Englanders are watching the flood waters rise in places nobody alive has witnessed before.

When I surveyed the heat-scorched borders this Sunday in my mother's garden where I had so excitedly installed exotically colored poppies in late March I wasn't prepared for the scene. Amid the fading clumps of moulting Iris leaves, finished for the season, only the plant tags remained of the poppies I had planted: "Persian Princess", "Drama Queen", and "Poppy of Troy" were no more than names on yellow plastic stuck in dry dirt and surrounded by empty snail shells. It's not The Grapes of Wrath, I admit, but a gardener's heart can break at such a sight.

return to post-Katrina New Orleans

I've just come back from our annual trek to New Orleans to visit friends and go to Jazz Fest. It's a major miracle that Fest exists this year, and also that our friends are back in their undamaged house in Uptown and working. That said, New Orleans is a changed place, probably forever, and our friends were quite obviously in a sort of grief depression despite their good fortune.

Miles and miles of neighborhoods--not just the infamous Lower Ninth near the levee breaks--are ghost towns. This includes poor, rich, and middle class streets of bungalows, mansions, and restored vintage houses that stand but are empty of people and possessions. Some have been gutted and await the insurance check, the FEMA flood map, or a government loan to be repaired to livability. Others were left as is after Hurricane Katrina, standing amid piles of debris and demolished roof parts, broken yard furniture, drowned cars, downed tree limbs. All are marked on the front with spraypaint: an "X", a date, a record of what was left for dead or removed. Every door or house front in New Orleans bears this mark except the few that have been painted over by returning residents. One thinks of the plague where medieval houses of the sick were marked as a warning to others.

A faint brown line traced on clapboards and brick, windows and parked cars--straight as a laser beam level across the city--marks the flood line. The peculiar sight of shrubbery top green, bottom brown is another reminder of the brackish water that rose so high and stood for so long that twenty-foot magnolia trees turned brown, lost their big glossy green leaves, and died in the swampy goo. Most of New Orleans' gardens died too, unable to withstand the weeks of inundation, half-salty water, and swirling bits of junk. Palm trees stand decapitated on the remains of front lawns, now just sandy dirt. Hibiscus and jasmine, tea plants, begonias, berginia, camellia and gardenia are all missing or dead.

The survivors are the natives, of course. The southern oaks that line the boulevards and cast their gnarled, ferny and mossed limbs across the city in a layered canopy, simply dropped their leaves in the maelstrom and are now pushing out new ones. A few succumbed to the waters and fell, unearthed giants laid on their sides in broken heaps. But the deep green ceiling of old New Orleans will live on. Some thrived after the waters receded. The native cyprus trees are brilliant chartreuse with new growth, firmly rooted and wondrous apparitions amid the grey-brown wastes.

In the islands of slightly higher ground, among them the French Quarter and downtown, the Garden District, and Uptown, New Orleans gardens are in the full flush of an exuberant spring. Flowering roses, gardenias, ginger, and hibiscus create a delirious swirl of color and scent walking the lanes of Uptown where only the occasional blue tarp covers a roof and the ubiquitous white rectangle of FEMA trailers is a rare sight. The tree canopy has been severely diminished, however. By chainsaw-wielding clean-up crews with a mandate to clear any limb within four feet of a telephone wire. In a random patchwork, large trees fell--often on roofs--and have been removed. In my friends' garden the disappearance of several large sycamore trees in the neighbor's yard has flooded their small bricked courtyard with sunlight. The bromeliads and staghorn fern are thriving.

I kept thinking about another, closer disaster as I toured the devastated streets of post-Katrina New Orleans, now eight months after the flood. I thought about the Oakland Hills firestorm of twelve years ago and how completely the monster waves of flame consumed an old and architecturally-layered, densely vegetated neighborhood of over 2,000 homes. Today the fire zone is a largely treeless, strangely homogenous district of McMansions packed property-line to property-line, expensively landscaped with "fire-safe" shrubbery and inhabited by people too rich or too busy to spend their Saturdays tending the front flower border, or pulling weeds and talking to the next door neighbor. One is hard pressed to find a door, or a neighbor among the walled compounds.

The people of New Orleans are waiting. For decisions by the politicians in Baton Rouge and Washington D.C., for insurance companies to settle their claims, for the Army Corps of Engineers to finish their levee repairs, for the new flood zone boundaries to be redrawn, for hurricane season to begin again. They wait in tiny FEMA trailers, and friends' spare bedrooms, in Houston, Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles to see if they can come home again. And the gardens of New Orleans wait too, the ones barely hanging on in deserted neighborhoods and the ones that exist only in the imaginations of the gardeners who created them and for whom they are never entirely gone.