Editor’s Note: This is Erin Donovan’s final column for the Bangor Daily News. We wish her the best with all her future endeavors.
A note from Erin:
This is the first piece to have been printed for the Bangor Daily News, three years ago. As I sent this, my final column, in, I was struck by how much time has passed while not passing at all. It has been a pleasure to bring my humor stories to you readers each week. No matter how many of us turn our face down to the news and opinion pieces that shoot across our phones, there is something so indescribably satisfying about the never-ending hum and tangible result of a daily newspaper. I will always be grateful to have been a part of that engine. You can find me at a new blog soon called Should I Cut Bangs? and at the Huffington Post.
Green thumb, greenhorn
“You should really do something with these garden beds,” my friend called over her shoulder as she buckled her kids into their carseats. I waved and gave a perfunctory nod the way a person would if their mother told them to get more sleep. I stepped to the edge of our front porch and peered over the railing at the fallow plots of land.
“It would be therapeutic,” she yelled out the window as her car reversed out of the driveway.
I wasn’t convinced there was any mental health modality that included dirty knees and unflattering hats, but cultivating a hobby, as well as my front lawn, seemed like something I should make space for. The problem was that I hadn’t the faintest notion how to go about establishing a garden. The closest I’d ever come to tending flora was unsheathing roses from the plastic before plunking them into a vase. Truth be told, I rarely succeeded at even finding a vase, allowing the bouquet to wither inside a beer stein. I grew up in Arizona where the majority of people I know don’t garden. No one empties a watering can onto the desiccated ground because they’re too busy pouring it over their sweating heads. The decade I’d spent in New York City certainly hadn’t helped to connect me to my agrarian side since the only greenery I regularly interacted with served as the toilet to our dog.
I thought about who I could bring in to help me on my quest for self-fertilization. My social network was starkly devoid of famers, florists, landscapers and Native Americans. I stared despondently across the lawn, my gaze settling on our neighbor’s well-tended property when it occurred to me that they would be the perfect instructors. The two of them logged more time outside in one summer day than I would in my entire life. They have shrubs, and flowers, a pond, and vegetables poking through the soil; It’s a veritable biosphere just over the fence. They’re always digging and pruning and poking at things with medieval looking instruments, and they comfortably use words like “till” and “nitrogen” in conversation.
They led me through their gardens with the ease of a tenured curator. We crouched before low-lying bushes and studied the blossoms and the girth of their roots. They pointed out each plant’s preference for sunlight, water and proximity to other plants, the way a restaurant manager would when hosting a teenage celebrity client. I nodded knowingly despite feeling like one of those inner-city kids who incorrectly identifies a canine as a goat on a standardized test. Ahh, so that’s grass? And these come from seeds?
They stopped the tutorial several times to gently inquire if I needed to write anything down. I shook my head vehemently, certain that my thumb had become too green to even manipulate a pen, confident I had internalized everything I needed to know to grow a lush utopia. I was sent on my way with the types of hardy perennials that would endure even the most neglectful of conditions. I recited the names as I drove to the local greenhouse: Hosta, Phlox, Catmint … Hosta, Phlox, Catmint.
Intoxicated by the ambrosial aromas capering around my nostrils as I strolled the colorful lanes of the garden store, I lost all recollection of what I had come for. I plucked buckets of brightly colored, exotic flowers and tubs of broad-leafed shrubs. I seized plant after plant, figuring they all had to be cheap as dirt because — well — they derived from the dirt. A clerk asked if I needed any help. I desperately tried to recall the fail-safe plants my neighbors had stressed. I began to sweat in inconvenient places, as I am prone to do when confronted with a stressor. I stammered, “They sound like Hasselhoff, dental floss, and catnip.”
As I struggled to heave the buckets into the back of my car, I glanced at the receipt that had been tucked among the leaves. Dumbstruck by the high cost of something that I could have stolen from the side of a highway, I realized that my friend was right. Gardening is therapeutic. In fact it’s exactly like therapy: It’s going to take a lot of time, a lot of money, and in the end, there will be very little growth.