NS April 28th, 2008

Saturday was gorgeous. I don’t know what the temperature was but it must’ve been in the high 60s or maybe even low 70s because I was too warm with a light jacket on at 9am when I walked to the bakery to buy pastries. To celebrate, we sat outside (The Noble Husband, The Noble Child and I — and, by default, The Noble Fetus) and dined on apple danishes, a jam doughnut and a blueberry muffin. TNC and I drank milk, TNH his blow-your-head-off-strong French Roast coffee.

It was so sunny and warm that we decided to have our first proper Let’s Work In The Garden and Be All Suburban and Domesticated Day. Hey, we’re new homeowners, what can I say? So TNH got our little electric lawnmower out of the shed and cut the grass (quite beautifully, I might add) while I kept TNC from becoming entangled in the cord and being sucked to her untimely death underneath the whirring blades. After that was done, we set up the sandbox and a few toys underneath a parasol so TNC could play and TNH could relax while I tended to the plants and flowers growing down each side of our lawn.

Now, if you know me or even if you read this blog on a semi-regular basis, you’ll know or probably have guessed that I am a complete gardening novice. I’m talking no earthly clue how to keep a plant alive other than knowing that they need water and sunlight. Because the problem is that I have no idea how much water and sunlight these things need, nor do I have the first idea about soil, pruning, weeding, fertilizer, trimming, etc.. Hell, I can’t even identify but one plant out there (the hydrangea) and that’s only because I had some of that in my wedding bouquet and when you’re paying that much for a bunch of flowers wrapped in a friggin’ silk ribbon, you remember what kind they were as you write the enormous cheque. But I digress…

I donned my gardening gloves (newly purchased last month) and rolled up a blanket to protect my delicate little novice-gardener knees as I knelt alongside each plant/flower/bush and set to work clearing out dead leaves and branches and pulling out what I hope were weeds. I can only be sure about the dandelions and I hope I haven’t accidentally ripped out a lovely, prize-winning azalea bush but I suppose I’ll live with the credo ‘ignorance is bliss’ for now. At any rate, I didn’t care much what I was doing. The sun was in the sky, my tummy was full of doughnuts, a warm breeze caressed my bare arms and my gorgeous daughter and husband sat a few feet behind me playing in the sand, laughing as they created piles and tunnels with the plastic gardening tools my parents bought her for her birthday. As it was, I ended up borrowing a couple of her implements to get to some hard-to-reach leaves pressed up against the fence and to dig out a particularly stubborn unwanted growth in the soil. I’m sure if the neighbours happened to see me using a tiny blue plastic garden rake, all of 4 inches long, to collect leaves from the ground as my pregnant belly hung over my still-too-big maternity trousers and I attempted fruitlessly to hike them up every time I moved along the ground to prevent plumber’s crack dreaded cousin, gardener’s crack, from appearing, they would’ve gotten a good laugh and a most horrific view. Let’s hope they were watching telly or something.

After I was finished, I felt a real sense of achievement and at one with the earth. To mark the occasion, I performed a pagan ritual involving the eyelash of a goat, sage and beeswax while dancing to the beat of an indigenous drum. I bowed down and kissed the ground while reading poetry aloud to Mother Nature and hand-ground some wheat for the organic bread I was going to bake later in my solar-powered oven while teaching TNC to speak Sanskrit. What, you guys don’t do that on Saturdays too? Pfft.

Alas, the weather turned to shite yesterday as the temperature dropped by ten degrees Fahrenheit and it pissed with rain. And for good measure, the train service was running like it was 1899 and it took me more than two and a half hours to get home from my friend’s place that morning in what should’ve been an hour’s journey. Ahhhhh, that’s more like it. The Jolly Green Goddess went back into hibernation and the Noble Savage appeared once more with a THUD! BANG! CRASH! to reality. Cynicism had triumphed once again. Blast! But maybe — just maybe — the gardening goddess in me will return with the sunshine once more. Whenever that may be.

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