Vegetables and Ironies. Kinda.

This isn’t the entry I had intended to write. What I was going to write is a reflection on a particular irony that I enjoyed: while I should have wanted to work in my garden, there was too much dirt around, and this made me not want to. The dirt came from the city ripping up the streets and sidewalks where I live, and along with them, considerable chunks of my yard. It was sad, and looked like hell. Then, after months of inactivity, the workers came back to finish the job, and the concrete sidewalks they poured made me want to garden. Concrete makes me want to garden; dirt makes me want not to. So much for creating a natural environment.

But that isn’t this blog. After immediate and impressive progress upon the return of the workers, the project once again ground to a halt. They replaced the sidewalk but ripped out the street, piled the chunks up around my property, and stopped. More dirt had been piled up, more gravel. More gnashing of teeth. More people stood around whenever I ventured out to do something. Then came the night of the rain, followed by the dark morning of the long trek to the car through the sinking in mud. In my nice school clothes. In the rain.

This is how that post was to have started:

A few weeks ago, I was excited by the return of the workers.

Saturday morning, I was cleaning the filter on the aeration pump in the fountain, a foam affair that fits over the submerged pump’s intake and gunks up every few days. I had recently talked to the city engineer, the galoot, and had been expecting the concrete guys. They wasted no time getting started.

This is how that post was to have ended:

Concrete and vegetables. I hadn’t expected how the arrival of one would lead to an appreciation of the other. But I like the irony.

Looking back, I see that the irony is illusory. It’s not the concrete or the dirt. It’s the dirt where there is supposed to be concrete, and the concrete where there is supposed to be dirt. This isn’t a ‘time to every purpose under heaven’ moment. It’s the fact that whatever illusion of nature I make in the yard, the concrete is never that distant and illusions are short on substance. It’s noise and dust and mud where I want sounds and sunlight and loam. It’s holding a garden trowel and kneeling on a root watching a man sitting in an air conditioned cabin running a backhoe, the helplessness of planting a flower while acres of pavement are hauled off.

And the fact that it’s still not done doesn’t help, either.