The garden in my mind vs. the dirt in my backyard

Tycho would be a natural at being the Easter Bunny....

If birds were made out of chocolate.

So I've just spent a most luxurious morning eating Special K and reading the newspaper.... there is something decidedly adult about spending the morning in a bathrobe with the paper, curled up and absorbed until your fingers are inky-black and you look up blearily at the clock to realize that it's almost 1pm already... I am only slightly embittered that because of my women's lit exam I've been anchored at Woodward for the long weekend, eating spaghetti and cavorting with T-Bone instead of gorging on ham and chocolate and homemade bread at the family 'do in Elmvale... okay, well, maybe i AM gorging on chocolate (a little) but it's not the same when I'm not sandwiched between Juling and a troop of Thompson cousins on the old green-striped couch in grams' sunny living room. WHICH I have a picture of, from when Tycho came with me to visit his great-grandma...



To soothe my homesickness (or perpetuate it), I found a picture of my little grams out in her garden... There are so many things in this picture that get to me... the stakes and binder-twine row markers, which I imagine still rolled up and stored in the earthy-smelling cement basement right now, waiting for their yearly purpose... the fencerail behind her, which leads to the right towards the giant swing set my uncle built us when I was little, and to the left towards the barnyard... even the dandelions at the bottom of the picture, which inspire images of mowed lawns, picnics, bare feet, bumble bees, dog turds...

...not like our Woodward front lawn, which is just a big mound of dirt. I'm worried that I will never cut it as a gardener! I mean, I tried to garden while I was here, grams even gave me an old hose, and mom came and helped me dig and plant, and true, we did get a meager but proud little pumpkin this year for Halloween... but I'm worried that I just don't have it in me. Same with cooking. Gardening and cooking fall into the same categories for me - nothing, really, to do with gender roles or tradition, and everything to do with basic skills and know-how, both of which are severely deficient where this kid lives. I have this image in my head of my future little country home, cottage-like, with potted plants in every window and a big kitchen garden all summer with basil and tomatoes and cucumbers and fruit, and scrumptious meals being prepared for my favourite guests who brave the dirt roads in their honda civics to come and see me... but somehow I see all of this horticultural and culinary success happening through no effort of my own. I will sit in the back of my garden on a little wrought-iron chair with a sailor-striped cushion on the seat, typing a novel on my vintage typewriter which squats on a matching wrought-iron table under a little sun umbrella, and somehow while I do this a beautiful, well-manicured garden will spring up around me and delicious smells will drift from the kitchen window by the mere tilt of my head. It's easy to explain away these domestic miracles by adding a diligent and loving husband to the mix, but I'm determined not to fall back on such unstable explanations. I want my country cottage and kitchen garden through my own doing! Or rather, through my own not-doing by some divine miracle. There's this scene in Love Actually (don't laugh) where Colin Firth goes to live on his own in this little cottagey home in the South of France for the winter, and he spends his days with a typewriter in the a little gazebo at the edge of a lake - THAT is what I picture. Going to the South of France for that seems a little extreme, but who knows what heavy doors Montreal will shoulder open. In any case I think the city is not my ultimate future - how can it be when the sight of dandelions on a country lawn makes me tearful? I know there are dandelions in the city too, but they are hardy dandelions, built against the sprays and shovels and weed-whackers of city dwellers bent on expelling shame from their lives by having a feathery green lawn, 2.5 inches of grass and not a fleck of yellow to be seen. I want the delicate, rogue weeds of the country, the stray wheat along the fencerail, the thistles, the sprawling gardens. Again, I hit my fatal snag - how to have a sprawling garden without actually doing any of the gardening and favouring, instead, only the sprawling?

Maybe I can start small... maybe the Woodward garden was too ambitious, too prone to failure for such an amateur as me. Maybe I'll live in a little second-story walk-up in Montreal where I can cultivate a small patch of earth in a box on my balcony. Have a houseplant and not let it die this time. Grow a tomato on the windowsill and eat it with a salad one night, tasting the seedy bursts of success. Maybe Montreal will teach me a lot of things - it might be easier to learn to cook when I have my own private kitchen, no witnesses to my improvisation, no one to judge my do-overs and take-twos. Maybe by the time the first of you come out to visit me I'll have graduated from Cooking Without Mom to The Professional Chef. Whatever happens, baguette will be served, fresh from the boulangerie which, in my imagination, is just down the street from my montreal apartment-to-be, tucked between the friendly french pub (where they know my name and teach me to knot cherry stems with my tongue) and the used bookshop (where I do amateur readings with my Concordia friends).

On an absolutely different note - there is a book review of Amanda Boyden's Pretty Little Dirty in the G&M this week. I woke up this morning and just lay in bed for a good ten minutes staring at my stack of books to read first this summer... less than a week to go and my time will be 100% mine again, instead of 50% mine and 50% school... thinking about all of that reading, sitting on my Bayfield balcony with Tycho and a glass of lemonade for an entire day, makes me so excited.......