Still Life with Monarch on Dog Shit

The plants are confused.  It’s mid October in Minnesota and they should be happily dying back into the ground right now, sleepy and content to wait it out while we all endure yet another grueling and much-too-long winter.  But there’s a hot wind blowin’ through these parts.  We are breaking records, with temps soaring into the 80s and my garden babies are thinking it must be time to try again...

This oriental poppy bud should make me happy.  I fucking love to garden!!!  But I resent the poppy for blooming like this in October.  I resent the anxiety it creates....what if the frost comes quickly and the confused plant doesn’t have time to die back and it dies altogether and all the time I spent nursing it and creating compost for it is wasted and I have to start all over again??  I would like to be taking a fall hike or going to the apple orchard, but I am compelled, I simply MUST keep this poppy watered, because look at it, all optimistic and ready to create, bloom, exist!!!!

Damn it.  

And how about this Cardinal Flower, acting like it’s time to pop out of the ground when I just bought it at the Farmer’s Market a couple weeks ago and it was supposed to wither away, thank you, and come back strong NEXT year.  

Excuse me, plant life.  I think we missed something here.  It’s called WINTER!

Don’t get me wrong.  You KNOW how much I love summer.  But the thing is, for an avid gardener, we need a break.  We can’t keep this momentum going all year round.  We have to have that moment when we say, “Screw it!” - I’m DONE.  I will NOT deadhead another marigold.  I will NOT mix up another container of Miracle Gro.  I will NOT water that Dogwood (that was half eaten by the Japanese Beatles, anyway) even one more time.  I won’t!!!  As much as we love it all, we have to give it up at some point.  Surrender.  It is part of the process.  It’s a relief!!  Why else do we live in this godforsaken climate if we can’t have a little break once in a while???

But here we all are this October, watering, clipping, harvesting, trying to keep the “will to garden” going.  We need massive quantities of bug spray, because even though it hasn’t rained for weeks and our National Park areas are burning up with wildfire from the drought, the mosquitos have evidently found a watery place to continue hatching.  We are hot, and we should be wearing long pants and shirts to protect us from the thistles and nettles that have overtaken the garden, but we are hoping for that last little bit of color on our skin so we take risks with tank tops and shorts and end up with rashes and scrapes and bites of all kinds.  We pick ourselves up off the couch again the next day with our sore backs and head outside, preparing the gardens for next year, knowing we’ll be glad next spring, when we again have the energy and interest for all of this.

It’s funny, isn’t it?  Remember last February, when the Burpee Garden Catalog came in the mail and we paged through it expectantly?  Remember when we started drawing out the plans for the garden and ordered up more plants and seeds that we needed or could have possibly used?  Remember when we scrolled through our garden photos from past years, desperate to remember it all, as the arctic air whistled through our storm windows and we huddled by the fireplace with our coffee?  Remember when we paid extravagant prices for tulips at the grocery store, just so we could have a little piece of that garden on our kitchen table??

My neighbor pulled up to the garden on her riding mower as I was collecting what was left of the rotten, stinking tomatoes to put in the compost.  She commented about how much they had enjoyed the tomatoes we had shared with them and I told her I was sorry that I couldn’t keep the plants going any longer but I am DONE!  She suggested that maybe next year I don’t need to plant quite so many tomatoes.  I started stammering some explanation of how I really do love it, I like making spaghetti sauce and of course I have to plant 16 tomato plants and soon I realized that I really just should stop talking because I have gone beyond any sense of reason with my garden and I promptly changed the subject.  And she, not being a gardener, will surely think I’ve gone completely off my rocker when she sees me head out next spring, yet again, to do it all over.

There was a “Hail Mary” moment over the weekend, mind you.  A last little we-will-keep-enjoying-this-massive-high-maintenance-hobby-of-a-yard-we-created moment.  Our friends from down the street came over.  We fed them bruschetta with jalapenos and cherry tomatoes from the garden.  We mixed them Mojitos with fresh mint from the garden.  We drank the wine they brought that had something to do with Minnesota that I can’t remember because I had quite a bit of it.  We fantasized about cleaning up and weeding the community entrance to our neighborhood, which has been let go since the association is defunct (Sasha and I will actually do this next year when I can think about it, but right now, I throw up a little in my mouth when I drive by there, just looking at it...).  We momentarily basked in the glory of all that we have tried to create, in the name of community and fresh and organic and locally grown goodness.  

But still.

So I walked outside this morning, having mustered up the energy to water the newest of the 190 trees we have planted since moving to suburbia.  A monarch caught my eye, perched on a giant pile of Lola’s dog shit.  Let’s face it, dog shit in the yard is not beautiful.  It conjures up visions of scraping it out from the 1st grader’s shoe after he smashed his foot into it and walked through the house, because of course he didn’t notice the smell or the mess.  It causes resentment...who was supposed to pick it up and looked the other way?  Who mowed the lawn last?  A person could go on and on, really.

But, the butterfly!  Oh, the gorgeous, peaceful and gentle butterfly.  I do love the butterfly.  And perhaps the monarch on this dog shit is my reminder that I need to keep finding the beauty in it all.  The confused plants, the dried up lawn, the stinking tomato innards that splattered on my leg when I stepped in the wrong spot, hell - even the dog shit.  All beautiful.  All part of life.

And now, can we please get some cool temps and rain, already?