I have a tendency to keep dead things alive.
Say what? Yes, that’s what I mean. It’s usually plants. Like most gardeners I dread the practice of thinning, the pinching off of perfectly good seedlings because they’re too close to other perfectly good seedlings. But yielding to the temptation to let them all grow and battle their way through close quarters never results in strong, healthy plants with good yields.
My worst gardening habit, which shows up in other areas of my life, is to spend way too much time nursing some free, half dead thing along when I should just cut bait – this is The Hubs’ most frequently used dad-ism – and move on to something else. With the time I spent resuscitating things, if I were to go get a job and then just buy new not-dead plants with that money and put them in the ground… so goes the logic in our fast paced consumer society, right?
But it’s not just about saving money, because I actually like fussing over plants. I learn things. I observe the natural world. I get dirt and twigs stuck in my hair. In short, it is more than just fussing. I see our recently widowed neighbor more often. I say hello to our other neighbor, returning home bleary eyed from his ten hour night shift. The boys help me, in their ways, and I stumble upon them in their own communion with nature. Today when I looked up from digging holes, Junior Jr was splayed flat on his belly on the sidewalk, head in the flower bed, delicately sampling crumbs of black earth with his thumb and forefinger. I promptly intervened, using my own forefinger to scrape the thick mud from his mouth, at which point he smiled happily and bit me. Also he insists on trampling the garlic shoots that are only a few inches high; in fact it is with great glee that he finds them and stomps down his tiny shoe. So some of the dead plants I am trying to rescue have been helped along to their current state by my offspring.
I wonder – do I have relationships I should let die? Is there the same degree of value in patiently nursing a relationship back to health, or should you just go out and get a new one? I suppose people are a little more complicated than plants. A bit harder to replace.
I lost a friend this past year to… well, I’m not sure what. They became different and I stayed the same. That’s not actually true, because none of us are ever staying the same, but I just didn’t know what to make of it. I have never moved, I am still thinking. I am right here. But the friendship is basically done. There might be a new relationship growing out of the stump of the old but it is spindly and unrecognizable. I had to let the old friendship die, and grieve it fully, but I sure tried to make it live for a long time before I got to that point.
My sister gifted me a sourdough starter. It smells amazing. I am faithfully feeding it but the temperature is freezing cold on our counter. If I put it on top of the fridge like the included literature recommends I will forget completely about it. I had it in the oven with the oven light on but the light burned out and even though I managed to locate the oven manual – in a box labeled by the previous owners “Manuels” – it has been on the car floorboard for almost two weeks and we still aren’t much closer to remembering to replace the bulb. (Is anyone else’s life like this?) I think, unfortunately, that I should let the sourdough starter die. It’s basically like having a third child: I have to constantly feed it and clean up after it when it barfs over the top of its container, because for the life of me I cannot figure out when it is ready to be baked. But most likely, I’ll hobble along, continuing to feed the starter, continuing to bake bread that is tasty but flat and strange, somehow beloved by my carb-starved menfolk who would put butter and honey on just about any grain-based food. And all of this because hope seems to be an ingrained survival skill: I just can’t let it die.