She had felled the entire garden. She had then abandoned the scene of the crime.
I flipped out. And I flipped. And flipped. And I kept right on flipping. I’m Irish and Scottish and German. It happens.
I don’t remember the flipping part. It’s not like I DID anything. I was just pissed and ranting on the phone and being a little wrath monkey.
The Gummer came home from visiting my brother. Her friend was with her. It was not a good time to discuss the family farm. Oh well. I started flippin' around in the front yard. The Gummer's friend made a hasty exit.
The Gummer looked confused. No, she said, she had not committed tomatocide. 23 baby tomatoes and a kazillion blossoms, I reported. Flip, flip.
“Oh, bullshit!” She left. She never wins by throwing the bullshit card. She never knows when to throw it.
In retrospect, I think maybe she was trying to fuck with me, but she didn’t mean to fuck me over. She just meant to trim the tomatoes a little (and, though she would never admit it, to sort of keep me in check and exert her dominance in the Gummer Kingdom). She didn’t realize it had gotten out of control. It’s not like she can see through a black trash bag.
Whatever. All this flipping was exhausting. It was too late for the damn tomatoes and too much of an investment to believe that I couldn’t trust her. I pulled my garden out of the trash can and plucked 23 little tomatoes off of the vines. They looked like those little round balls of bait that remind me of rubbery balls of bread. I set twenty-three little, teeny-tiny tomato fetuses on the kitchen window sill as though just a little more time in the sun could undo the travesty which had been committed unto them.
And then I laughed.
Louis CK does a little stand-up bit about family and how to make it work. At the bottom line, he says, the secret to making it work is a simple philosophy: “Fuck it. Just…fuck it.”
So this brings us back to last month’s spring cleaning crusade:
"Mom, you've been complaining about the basement and the yard barn for two years, You might want to let me focus on the basement and the yard barn. I'm really hungry and really crabby."
"Ok, but help be lift that trash can first."
“This is potting soil. Why are you throwing away soil?”
“You aren’t going to be able to lift that”.
I roll the trash can closer to the 7 x 2 + 1 sq. ft. area that was my garden. “I'm going to do it the same way I do everything: with “Fuck it. This is what I’m doing.” I scoop little piles into The Garden That Was, carefully avoiding the few errant sprouts that have risen like foolish little phoenixes. The rain would level the soil out gradually, anyway. I went inside.
I wasn't inside for long before I got that weird "Where's the baby?" feeling. I went back outside..
The Gummer was in the “garden” with a shovel levelling out my little soil piles. She looked like she had been caught in the cookie jar. Interesting.
“Mom, what are you doing?”
Imbedded in the three words of her response was a dog whistle of an apology, a nod of acknowledgement of my endless effort to connect with her, a font of gratitude for that grandbaby, and all the affection that I see normal mothers expressing with, like, words and stuff.
“Mom, what are you doing?”
“Killing your garden.”
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