We dug two gardens out front, and we restored and expanded Florence’s side garden, and we saved her Irises and replanted them. This one will be a struggle with the chickens, they will head right for it and dig and scratch for bugs and worms. This is part of living with free chickens, nothing much to do about it except plant fewer seeds and more perennials and taller plants. We hope to have a ring of color around the farmhouse. I used the tiller to open a stretch by the side gate so we can plant peas and Morning Glory’s, which will climb up the fences.
I was gripping the tiller all day, so typing on sore but determined fingers. I bet I will sleep nice and long tonight. Tomorrow, back at the gardens. I appreciate Spring and the opportunity it gives us to make the outside of the house ours. I never used to have much color in my life, not I am drunk on it.
“Seagulls sing your hearts away, ‘Cause while the sinners sin, the children play.”
Like everyone else, I am ready to leave the Boston Marathon bombings behind, return to my world, keep my feet on the ground, but a part of this awful thing isn’t quite ready to leave me. All week I was thinking of those many people killed, injured, frightened and traumatized by this monstrous butchery – I made sure to contribute to the funds raised for their insurance and care.Today, working in the garden, I thought of the face of this 19-year-old boy and the Army of trucks, teams, helicopters, trucks and soldiers and police officers he summoned out of his madness to gather and fight him and hunt him down.
I felt for the young officer gunned down in his patrol car, and grateful for the men who rushed into bullets and bombs to protect their communities. I hope I will have such courage if the time ever comes. There was much compassion for them, as there should have been.
But I felt for this man today, this suspect, this seemingly normal boy, but still, it seemed a boy, not too much more than a child who caused so much horror and provoked such a fearsome response. He is responsible for what he has done, and will, I am certain, be held accountable.
I was uneasy at the images of the streams of men with their big black guns in their trucks and armor and helmets – there were thousands of them, it seemed an image out of Orwell or some Dystopian film fantasy, not an American city. There seem to be more and more of them all the time, with newer and more powerful technologies, searches, cards, regulations, tools. I thought of this young and wasted life, whose soul was somehow so emptied of what it means to have a conscience or spirit.
I often fear that the awful damage these damaged humans do only begins with the dead and injured, but spirals and mushrooms into what it turns the rest of us into, a society that is increasingly armed, self-righteous, divided, fearful and angry. How ironic that it takes mass murderers to unite us and our only real heroes are the men in guns and trucks, heroic as they often are.
I watched some of the social media today – it seems a Frankenstein creation, bigger and more out of control all the time – including many of my “friends” on Facebook and saw this man called a monster, a fiend, inhuman, an animal, a devil. Everyone seems to want him dead, and as quickly as possible. In our culture, of course, he cannot ever die, he will be portrayed, visualized, examined and transformed into an iconic kind of hero from hell, a symbol of how in our culture one person can turn all of the rest of us upside down. He will live on in blogs, websites, videos, social media and the digital archive forever. His face will never go away, even as he withers alone in a cell in some super-prison, his only companions other fiends and monsters and mass murderers.
And I wonder what it is about our world that turns young men into creatures capable of unimaginable violence and brutality, more all the time. I don’t see too many stories about that in all of the cries for vengeance and more security.
I am not a Christian, but I am an admirer of Jesus Christ and I am always struck by how evoked and exploited he is but so little understood. He would have thought of this young man, I am sure, not as subhuman but as all too human, perhaps all the more deserving of mercy and compassion because of that. This young man has sentenced himself to Hell, he will never go free in this world, never have love and connection, he will listen to his own voice for the rest of his days, he almost surely will wish he had died in that boat. I thought of the farmer who left Simon to die in his awful pen, and wondered why no one felt any mercy and compassion for him, only for the animal he neglected and starved.
Mercy and compassion does not mean forgiveness. There are no excuses for Boston last Monday. Compassion is for us, it helps us. It means saving ourselves from being less human. It means understanding, and it calls for us to spare ourselves the corrosive nature of anger and vengeance. Is mercy and compassion, I wondered, only reserved for the good, for the innocent, for those we like and understand? For the law abiding? Or is true mercy and compassion for the other, the despised and reviled, those whose brutality is beyond our imagination? We are quick to seek vengeance, but it doesn’t seem to work all on its own.
As I move away from this week, I am getting clearer about my own feelings. I see the way forward for myself. It is okay for me to feel badly about this man and his life. I will permit myself to feel compassion for his awful choices, his awful fate, for another young life cut so short. It is liberating for me. I cannot suggest that course for anyone else, nor can I imagine how I would feel if my child was killed that day, or my legs blown off on a beautiful Spring day.
But I hope I don’t end up living in one of those countries that becomes less human and more brutal every time something inhuman is done to it, that slowly evolves into the very things it hates without ever quite realizing it. If the dead and maimed are sad and deserving of mercy, and they surely are, so is this sorry man. If I can’t forgive what he did, perhaps I can try and understand him as a fellow human being. He cannot be inhuman, he is a human.
Photographer’s light is different for everyone. For me, it occurs mostly in the late afternoon, in the minutes before the sun sets over the hills, when the sun is almost at a sideways angle, when the sun is out, when there is some color in the ground, or failing that, in the sides of barns and houses, when the air is clear and crisp, when there is a wind. It came today as we were heading out to dinner, and I said to Maria, I just have to grab a camera and catch this light on the greening grass, the yellow fields, the blue sky. It is sweet and spiritual light, and Fanny and Simon walked right into my photo, to share in this light.
Photography’s list occurs to show us what is beautiful in the world, and my job is to help try and capture that.
The Tillerman is sore and happy. We dug four new gardens at our farm, one on either side of the front door, one by the side of the house where the chickens and cats sun themselves, one over by the pasture fence where Florence planted some flowers of her own. That one is for her. I thought running the tiller would be easy, it was not. It bucked, stalled, gripped and slid all day, much like wrestling a small horse. Every part of me is sore, I am one giant ache. We went to Momma’s because I was way too tired to make a pizza and Maria is getting a fire going in the living room.
It was a great day. Ignoring much advice and many warnings, we picked a rainy, windy, cloudy day. We planted wildflowers, daffodils, we transplanted Florence’s daffodils and peonies, and I took a half dozen packets of seeds and dug small ditches for them and covered them up. The chickens will love them if they find them, scratching the dirt. The chickens will also eat beetles and other things that bother flowers. Nature takes its own course.
Tomorrow, we will set out in search of some perennials. My attitude about gardens irritates Maria a bit, she is more patient than I am, more nurturing and can wait. I have become a warrior for color, an addict, photography has done this to me and I want flowers now, or if not tomorrow then at the earliest possible time. Things are looking up. I love my gardens and took a vow today to water and weed them faithfully, and to photography the hell out of them.
Finished the first of four gardens amidst a barrage of creative challenges – cold weather, early morning rain, a tiller that wouldn’t fit in the car, and the usual unsolicited advice, in this case from gardeners. Giving advice, I am learning, is addictive. People can’t help it, and of course, hearing all the reasons why I should wait made me absolutely determined to go ahead. At the hardware store, they advised against still damp soil, something about the “tilth” evaporating in the air. A planter warned that it was too early, somebody else said I needed a complex plan to tell weeds from flowers, the tiller itself was complex, moved in herky-jerky ways. I had to wrestle with it.
Somebody else said the damp soil would clump (is this bad, I thought.” I am not a precision gardener.
A lot of stuff goes in, a lot of stuff comes up. Some flowers will make it, some won’t, it will be a glorious riot. We’ll figure it out as we go. The minute it stopped raining, the hardware store delivered the tiller and said they would pick it up. After an hour of wrestling with gears, chokes and starter pulls, I figured it out. We started tilling.
The soil seemed to love being tilled, and I have finished the first of four planned gardens. Two in the front, on either side of the porch, one in the back, one along the front fence, where we will plant pleas and morning glories. Maria is a killer with a shovel, I am good now with the tiller, complex like Florence’s old mower. Break for lunch, back out. Lenore and Red are accompanying us.
