Monday, 9:00am

Mondays are for simple chores, reconnecting with the arboretum after the weekend. I zip around to have a look at the Magnolias on which I am running a mulching and watering experiment, trying to figure out the most effective way to keep the trees healthy during this drought. Then I’m off to tend to the handful of endowed properties that receive special weekly care. It’s easy work: a bit of weeding, extra fertilizer to keep the annuals blooming, a cut or two to keep the shrubs in proportion. There’s plenty of time to chat up the dead, like Captain Clark and his Lieutenant son, now resting under a mantel of sweet-smelling lantanas, or Thelma and Philip, the psychoanalyst and bioethicist couple I imagine still busily debating patients and ideas beneath the shade of their matching cherry trees. I am about to go tend to another grave across from the monument to World War Heroes when a couple flags my utility vehicle. They want to know if we could, perhaps, see if their son’s grave might be seeded with new grass because it’s a little bare and, well, it just doesn’t look very good… They don’t want to impose, but they saw me working, so they wonder…

They are a sweet couple, perhaps in their late 60s. I offer to walk over with them so they can show me, and now we’re standing at the grave, a parched rectangle of orange dirt on which patches of Bermuda grass creep. They’ve laid bright red carnations where the head stone should be, will be. We’re silent for a moment, we glance at each other. The man begins to talk. He tells me his son had an accident. He catches himself: «a drug accident… then he was in a quasi-coma for over a year… and finally, last month… He was 33 years old… His remains have been laid here, alongside his aunt’s and grandparents’… » He tells me all of this and I know, of course, that these are well rehearsed facts, a skeleton story, the bare bones of the last year-and-a-half of hell through which his family has traveled. He hands me these facts like black beads on a choker that has snapped and spilled, right here, on the grassless dirt. The grass I will seed, I understand, is to collect and cushion the beads, soften their landing. This father is tired and calm and resigned. His petite wife tells me she’d like to have a bench set here, to remember her parents and her son, a place to sit and remember. We make eye contact, and she has the most beautiful blue eyes. Though she also is tired and worn, I can just picture how gracious and sweet she was just a minute ago, a young woman with a kind smile fluttering just beneath the weary face. Here’s Emily Dickinson’s words upon walking in a cemetery: to think that «This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies and girls and boys…». We stand together for another minute, silent again, before I take my leave. « You’ve touched my heart, » I say, « I’ll do my best. » They nod at me sadly, gently. Only my eyes are full of tears.

Monday, 2:30pm

I’ve tackled the suckers on a pin oak to clear a sidewalk for construction work. I’ve stood on my tippy toes, pole saw in hand, cutting, cutting, cutting under the blazing sun. I’ve dragged all the cut branches into the bed of my tractor. I’ve dumped them all in our pile of debris that will become wood chips. I’ve rushed to help clear more vines at Nature’s Sanctuary. I’ve crawled under the mugwort, lopers in hand—chop, chop, chop. I’ve had both arms scratched raw by the mile-a-minute vine that I’ve coiled up like green barbed wire and thrown over the steep slope at the edge of the garden. It’s above 90 degrees and humid as hell but I’ve been going at it like my life depends on it, because in some ways it does.

But when my heart starts to pitter patter, when my head begins to spin, when I sit on the gravel path wondering where I left my water bottle, and then, when my head flops on the path and I feel a fly land on my arm and hear the crow caw its omen, the thought that flashes into my mind is «it’s been such a good summer and I’m so grateful!» —Also: «It being Nature’s Sanctuary, my friend and fellow gardener Marty can just dig a hole and push me in, easy-peasy.» But here he is nudging me into the shade with a bottle of water, a cold compress on the neck and a couple of mango popsicles. «Don’t die yet,» he says «there’s still weeding to do.» (he doesn’t really say that, but he could—-he knows I like my humor dark). Coolness, kindness, and sugar bring me back from the dead and I learn I have to know my edge, acknowledge my limits — Maybe.

Tuesday, 2:00am

After my episode of heat exhaustion I am off to bed with the chickens, then up wired and sleepless at 3:00am. I consider my options and decide to tiptoe downstairs for some water and a glance at the garden. Soon I am standing in the moonlight, breathing in the thick, sirupy air layered with cicada and cricket calls. How wonderfully busy, bursting with life, is this night world free of cars and phones, dog walkers and children. What a treat to get a glimpse at the world without us in it. I’ve always loved the night for the velvety blanket it drapes over wounds and wants. Even as a child I was not afraid of the dark. I loved to walk the places I knew well with my eyes closed, flying by instruments. Now in my garden I know where the milkweed stem bends under the weight of its flowers, where the lobelia stretches into the path to touch my naked toes. A huge moth brushes against my cheek. The bat that sleeps, during the day, behind our wooden shutters, makes its rounds above my head, ensuring no mosquito spoils this perfect moment. A million subtle sounds make night music in my garden, holding my heart steady into their beat.