Before kids, I used to garden in my come-hither see-through negligee. It wasn’t so much as gardening as it was pulling weeds in the morning when I let the dogs out the front door for a pee.
One Sunday morning I stepped into the sun just before 6 a.m to put a strangle hold on some rag weed. I wrestled with the yellow headed demon for almost two hours, sweat soaking through my barely-there nighty. It wasn’t long before the back of my neck was baked and I had to surrender to a flop straw hat worthy of a tea party with the Mad Hatter. And I was thirsty. It was too hot for milk so I opted for a tall can of cold Kilkenny, the red foam slopping over my fingers as I cracked the tab for breakfast. When I splashed the suds over the sink I discovered that my beau (who had been working away behind the house) had had the nerve to use our new cake mixer to mix grout, and he had left the gooey evidence in the sink. Balancing my straw hat, with my see-through negligee sticking in all the wrong places and juggling a cold bear in one hand and the dripping mixer in the other, I managed to open the door whereupon I charged out cursing after my beau.
It was at that pointed I was greeted by two well-dressed the missionaries. “Oh. I see you’re busy” the lady’s eyes looked to the beer and then the mixer and then my breasts and back to the beer. “We’ll just leave these booklets here. Come on Harold.”
I would have loved to have been in the backseat of their car as they drove off… just to hear what Harold thought I was busy doing at 8 in the morning, covered in dirt and practically naked except for a funny straw hat, a hand mixer, and a tall cold beer.
I don’t garden like that anymore. That was years ago…so much has changed now that we have kids; now I wear sunscreen.
And I rescue worms.
Our family spent the Labour Day weekend relocating the kids’ strawberry garden. We dug out a much-neglected rock garden, pulled back all of the evasive plants, and stripped the earth. We then scooped out the strawberry plants from the kids’ original strawberry garden. “But where will the worms live, Mommy? If we take their homes, where will they live?”
“I guess they could move to the new strawberry garden.”
“But how will they know how to get there?”
The shovels were silenced. No worms will split in two, succumbing to the wailing pick axe. Our family spent 2 days rescuing worms, carefully shuttling them from one side of the driveway to the other.
And I don’t know why but I couldn’t help thinking about Northrop Frye.
In high school our English class was treated with a visit from a UofT professor who was the biggest Northrop Frye groupie going. I don’t remember this groupie’s name but I do remember that he said that we had to forget every preconceived notion we had about CanLit and remember one thing: every good Canadian story is about man’s battle to overcome nature. He was convinced that the myths and patterns that Frye spoke of could be traced to that single theme. It was because, he had said, this is what we do in Canada – we battle the snow, we battle the sun, we battle the sea, we battle the drought, we battle and battle and battle our greatest adversary.
Our class had recently finished reading Surfacing. The visiting professor argued that Atwood’s Surfacing was not about the protagonist’s post-feminist angst following a reluctant abortion but about women not being able to control nature, including the natural occurrence of pregnancy.
I was a 15 year-old girl listening to a grown man trying to convince me that he was an expert on post-feminist angst. I remember struggling to keep a straight face. But we he on to something with that CanLit stuff? Was all CanLit really about our need to control nature? I wasn’t convinced. And as the theme popped up again and again over the years, I brushed it off. Phooey. No way was I gonna believe a Northrop Frye groupie with post-feminist angst.
And yet…more than 20 years later I spent two sunny days rescuing worms with Northrop Frye, trying to control nature.