“Some days, I really can feel her,” I said as I dug my hoe’s tines through the dirt, pulling morning glories from around the roots of the pea vines.
“Feel whom?” Glory asked, not
looking up from her own hoeing.
“Gaea. Remember when Dad said that
he could feel Gaea singing through the soil while he worked it?”
She exhaled loudly.
“No, I totally don’t remember that.
But he said a lot of things, especially when he was stoned.”
I chuckled.
“Don’t be mean. That wasn’t
anything like ‘Baximltr’.”
None of us were ever going to
forget the time we’d found those letter written on the kitchen wall one
morning, and Dad had come downstairs to find us looking at them, puzzled, and
he had looked at it and sighed in disappointment, and said, “Last night, it was
the secret of the Universe.”
None of us were ever going to
forget it, and much as we loved him, none of us were ever going to let him
forget it, either.
I gathered a large wad of morning
glory on my hoe and carried it to the compost bin, shook it off and rolled the
bin ahead of us to a new location.
“Really, though, sometimes, when I’m
working in the garden, when I’m on a roll in the work, I can feel it. I can
feel Gaea telling me how she wants it to go, and I work with her, and it goes
better.”
“For real?
“Definitely. I used to feel as
though our garden’s plants were Gaea’s stepchildren, and she was never going to
love them as much as her darling weeds, but if I negotiate with her, she likes
them better, and they live better.”
“Well, you do keep the gardens
better than anyone else.”
“Maybe it’s just a metaphor, the
way Mom says her tools aren’t really alive, but she’s still going to apologize
to them when she drops them, because if she treats them as though they have
feelings, she gets better performance out of them. I don’t suppose it matters.”
“No, it doesn’t. And it makes more
of a difference if we treat Gaea as if she were alive and has feelings.”
I gave a little sob.
“It sure does. God, I wish everyone
did.”
I gathered up another wad of
morning glory.
“C.S. Lewis,” I muttered.
“What about him?”
“Saying, ‘How can there be too many
babies? Like saying there are too many flowers.’ Yes, there can be too many
flowers!”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/556318
