I love gardening.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Gardening 1864
watercolor on paper
Design for a small panel in John Pollard Seddon's "King René's Honeymoon” cabinet
Stone Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne

It's that time of the year again, the coming of spring. Hope. Time to clean up the gardens. I've been gardening since I was a young girl when I tended to my momma's petunias on the patio of my childhood home. That was my little job. My momma loved petunias, so did her mother, and I am quite sentimental about them. I just love gardening. Of course, this year, I have a great deal of anxiety because of the pipeline incident. To refresh the memory for this post, in December, the week before Christmas, the main waterline that runs from the house to the street collapsed in two places and I had to replace the entire pipe. It was a great expense for me, but not only in money, but in gardening landscaping. A trench two feet wide and at least two and half feet deep or more was dug through my lawn, including a major flowerbed and a rocked pathway. Before that, they had searched for the pipe for two days. Because it had rained for nearly 10 days prior, they were working in a water saturated yard and they were just digging around trying to find the pipe where they could see the most water. I lost plants in that area, too. I think I was too stunned to react until it was all over and then I did get very emotional about what had happened. (Add the unexpected cold and snow in February, and I have lost major plants all over the lawn. Expensive and dearly loved ones.)

I even lost a patio canopy that collapsed under ice and broke. 

Now, I am facing added expense and lots of personal work to clean up what the men and their machines did to my lawn and garden. I hardly know where to begin. Today I had to assess and decide. One has to start somewhere. And it's messy and looks awful and it's hard labor to do this. Most will be on me. It was not an easy day. Another day of acceptance and yes, determination to rebuild. But some things are lost forever.

I think gardening teaches us about acceptance as much as it does hope. One cannot be a true gardener without hope because planting something, anything can mean failure and loss. A gardener must learn to hope for the best and expect the worse as the old saying goes, because nature is a savage garden. And things are always beginning and ending.

I gave away my Daddy's golf cart today.  He died over fourteen years ago. I had always  held on to his golf cart despite the fact that many people offered to buy it from me. I could not part with it. I suppose it's Freudian and somehow I associated the golf cart with Daddy. Today, because my son and I were cleaning up some things around the house, I gave the golf cart away. And I cried. I was really crying over Daddy, over all the people and things I have lost since Daddy died. Over the impermanence of  everything.  It reminded me of what Daddy said about acceptance. I still remember that day...that sad day we talked about how we must accept some things. Loss and impermanence are the harshest things.

But a garden teaches you that. You see the cycles of life, you see things die. That all things that exist pass away into nothingness...

It's almost "Buddha like," being in a garden. Because we learn the most important moment is now. Plants are like that. The best full blooms are really about a day and then the blooms start to fade.

We all fade.