Farm : Garden :: Stadium Supergroup Concert : Local Bar Band

Maybe winter is a time for looking in; it’s taken me until now to put these things together.

I remember in the summer a friend coming over and hanging out. I was showing off my garden, and he said something along the lines of, ‘you’ve made this a real nice part of your yard over here.’

I thought he was wack. We were standing with the mosquitoes between two raised beds. The peas were nice; instead of cooking or weeding, I stand by the garden and eat them off the vine, shelling the older ones. The peas were also messy and over grown. So were the collards. And the beans were looking to be. The onions don’t really get over grown, but they had needed thinning and I hadn’t had time to cook. The place was a mess, not a scenic outdoor destination; it was neither sacred nor profane, just a place. It wasn’t a place I’d go to.

When I was over there, why I went over there in the first place, I would pull a few weeds, look and see what had grown, pull a few more weeds, tie a piece of jute or strip from an old pillowcase around something. In between each of these, I would eat a few peas. A week after that conversation I would eat a few peas and a few young carrots, too. Then not so young carrots. Eventually, I started thinking about it. I did go to this place. Every day I went to this place. I spent a good portion of my time outside there, as the multiple piles of pea shells demonstrated.

So I became enamored of this little space.

It made me revise – I won’t say rethink – my ideas about the sacredness of nature. They became more expansive. A priest, Father Ed of the Iowa City Newman Catholic Student Center, told me once that all things were sacred, having been made by the hand of God. He wasn’t giving me the answer that I wanted.

I wanted him to afford something special to cemeteries and ancient holy spots, and he was having none of it. Cemeteries, a thousand years later, the bones aren’t even dust any more, but the dirt and the flowers and the nature probably still would be. He admitted that some places were sacred to individuals for idiosyncratic reasons, but that everywhere was sacred to God; the bones had nothing to do with it. Of course, I suppose this means that quicksand is sacred, too. But still.

So, I’ve been looking inward. Trying to find the meanings I associate with my idiosyncratic spaces. I like to sit on the other side of the yard. The fish are more fun to watch than the plants. They do more. But I don’t so much like to sit outside. It’s not like I usually work in the garden; I usually fart around, and it’s difficult to fart around on a grand scale .