I am a Bad God

It's a scandal--our yard.  It's clear we're not good at this--this edge-of-country life.  The fence line has grown up in willy-nilly volunteer trees--weedy Hackberry, undisciplined Locust and the sneakiest weed of the tree family--Maple with it's baby-haired pistils raining "helicopter" seeds that sprout in the gutters, weighing them near a breaking point.  I don't mind....much.  I am an Émigré to the green.

This is a semi-country life is somewhere between "All Creatures Great and Small" and "Winter's Bone"--neither simply idyllic nor only brutal but, somehow, both.


Through my view to the west I see an expanse of green that backs up to the 600 sq. foot domicile of my next door neighbor to the East, Mrs. Beal.  On the East side of the house, 1/2 acre of woods buffer between our driveway and our "next door" neighbors.  Strewn about beneath that tangled canopy of sycamore and hickory draped heavy with wild grape vines--thick as a carpenter's arm-- are old car parts, empty cans, even a bathroom mirror and a rusted remnant of long forlorn vehicle.

Warren is my neighbor to the back--across a steep ravine valley--and owner of the creek and cows that meander at the bottom of my "back yard."  He says the kids with little to eat once gobbled the onion-like Ramp plant; its aroma permeated the children's bodies so pungently that the schools tried to prohibit Ramp eating.  Now Ramps are a delicacy in East Coast Nouveau Cuisine. In our valley today, it's Ramp Creek that's flooded and whooshing with the sound of distant applause, swollen with rains that topped off and left sloshing my garden pond. The frogs and goldfish nudge curiously at new contours.

I am a Bad God.

I create the world and it languishes—so loved ,

yet so rampant,  overblown.  The bees in the Comfrey

startle me—swarming and furious in their work.

Even waters befuddle:  How much muck is good—

sheltering the tadpoles, lending humus

to the water lily?   How much is dreck—

forcing fish from depths to sun scald, tannins toughing

silken pools to murked burlap?

As a gardener I may be a bad god, but, as a resident,  I am a refugee. Landscapes are languages we live in--their features become articulations of our psyches...or do our psyches become articulations of our landscapes?  I fled the insistent debate and clipped diction of city life and now I am mouthing my way into my version of heaven.  A patois of greens--emerald to chartreuse, khaki to olive to lime--splay across my living room view. Still parched for this even after 18 years,  I gulp in the vision:  Tight furls of fern nestle among last autumn's fallen gold and the Redbuds blink fuchsia through verdant tangles of verging wild raspberry.  Ivory Dogwood's petal heart shaped hands open to misted air. Goldfish flicker and glint in the cool pond depths while the scarlet of the Cardinal startles out from the fence brush.  Jorge Luis Borges once told me that he preferred English to his native tongue: "There are so many more words," he marveled wistfully, "so many more choices because of all the conquerors, conquests and immigrants it has adopted."

The language of this land is my retreat, my hospital, my home. After failing abysmally to grow anything in the ruin of city soil, over-shaded by ancient mulberries and mined with the detritus of a century's worth of peeled paint, cinders, broken glass and household pourings, here I am an overwhelmed amateur in a buoyant garden nearly overrun by gangling woods.

I don’t weed well;  I prune even worse. 

Raspberry threatens renegade action, Maple

seedlings are insurgent, even the butterfly bush 

becomes woody and indelicate.

My neighbors were flabbergasted when I took down a perfectly good chain link fence that stretched across the front yard.  Their notion of tidy is a bit slash and burn, which--I admit--might improve my odds against immanent honeysuckle takeover.  They've been amused by my Tibetan prayer flags, too--one young teen even asking if they were some sort of new Nascar thing or what?

Across the street Manny's girlfriend before last, the second (or was it third?) one after his wife left, asked shyly about my sunflowers. She looked a bit startled when I said they were volunteers sprouting from the fallen seed from the bird feeder.  The next spring they had a few out front as well and I felt an oddly worried pleasure--did I start something?  And, if so, what? 

Is it cruel to feed the chickadee and goldfinch?

 For the hawk shadow thrills me--above

like a benediction

before the kill.   

I have two garden ponds.  The first I put in simultaneously along with digging up two-thirds of the 25 foot wide x 200 foot long front swath of yard.  My second husband--a new resident of the house--called it Mom's Folly.  It was a seething mud-pit for over a month until I could haul in pea gravel for paths, gather the humus to sculpt mounds for planting (unamended soil is so clay-laden we can make pots of it). It looked pretty tidy, nearly British, for that first year.

Now the paths have been overtaken by an array of greenery and the gardened part is a riot of surprise perennials, the encroaching sprawl of Rose-of-Sharon, other invasive. That's probably when I crossed the good ol' girl line in the neighbors' view, when I dug holes in the ground, lined them with rubber, water and goldfish and let the rest of it go pretty much the way it wants. It appears that holding back the wilderness takes a level of force I'm not skilled at or keen on--chainsaws, burnings, chemicals.  We don't even rake.  

The glaciers forgot or could not defeat the trunk

of bedrock beneath this local land.  Elsewhere--

rolling fields east and west, loose black soil north;

fertility beckoned and, like the aboriginal

of every invaded land, the trees fell quickly

and forever,  Corn and soybean geometried

sheared lands.  Not here.

The benefit of my land management pacifism is that we are surrounded by creatures--Red-wing and Cooper's hawks drift in the updraft, goldfinch, chickadee, nuthatch and titmouse flash from feeder to bush to branch.  Deer meander through now and again along with raccoon, wild turkey, fox, rabbit, coyote. There are pairs of cardinals, robins, and mourning doves I swear I recognize along with the summer hummingbirds with their scarlet neckerchiefs, musketeer dueling amongst throaty blooms.

Don’t get me wrong; I know all this nature will kill me.  The hawks picked off my chickens one by one and the coyotes snatched my neighbor Huck’s prize rabbits, angering him enough that he learned a coyote call.  One night he drove up and down the road, unworldly warbles emanating from his truck, a rifle in his lap. My home will disintegrate soon if we don’t root out the damp, cut disruptive roof-line lilac, bolster the tilted retaining wall.  As natural as is spring profusion so is the inevitability of decay.  Rust never sleeps.

Here the horizon heaves with Paw-Paw, Black Walnut,

Hickory, Persimmon, Wild grape snaking through it all--

the Celtic knot upon the letter of the limb.  Across each

acre, ravines and rock surprise us, resist us.  Here

we scrabble for a living.  The land does not easily yield.

Nevertheless as an immigrant, an asylum-seeker--I am a nature patriot.  When I first moved here, I would wander into the woods and perch on a rock for hours.  Even with the junkyard remnant in sight, I would marvel.  I was a woman rescued from a desert trek that had collapsed, parched and dying.  In the middle of Indy, both of my young children gasped, dependent on the the asthma nebulizers to keep their airways open. We had a bullet hole in our ceiling and even my Impatiens died from lack of light in the shadows of close-set houses.

We were "urban camping" as my husband put it--and that meant waking up to drunks on the porch on Sunday mornings and possums sneaking through the unsound roofing, along with soot-stained rain. I'm not sure when or how I came to a decision point to move away, but when I did it felt like an act of will and it took everyone in our lives helping us to move from city chaos to country chaos.  But now here, I'm not sure if I'll ever belong...or should.

The Reverend Billy Talen street activist and teacher from The Church of After Shopping says this about the "wilderness" and the Western European conquest of it: Our "gods" were...

"...supposed to defeat Appalachia, and the Ohio Valley after that, and the Mississippi and the Great Plains and Rockies and the Golden State and the Moon, but the Promised Land receded into the distance like a white whale the size of pixel. The pillar of fire that was supposed to get us home – the GPS was on the fritz. And then our Eden caught us from behind. It turned out to our surprise that the Promised Land was never in front of us. The Promised Land caught us from behind because it was an inside job, the seeds and eggs and screaming birds. There is an Eden inside us, and we know there is."

When I first moved to Sanders, my neighbor through the west wood was a mother of triplets, daughter of the farmer behind us.  This edge of country living had long lost any appeal for her; she dreamed of quick trips to the grocery and houses with no hidden wildlife scurrying in the eaves.  We would take walks up and down the road and over to her father's farm, attempting to trim our shape, share book reading lists and commiserate on child-rearing.  We could sympathize in so many ways except how we felt about living here on our road.  As a native--born in a house that didn't have running water 'til later, trudging to the local school full of ramp-scented country-kids--she seemed tired, longing. And me?  I was smitten.   


Even so, I love

it all with the eye of a mother who

only sees the original child, 

with the heart of a lover who only  knows

that she loves, not how to, or why.

My neighbor did move into town and I'm still here, years later. Ambivalently fluent in country, she quickly acquired the syllables of a small city life. Ambivalently fluent in city, I still clumsily cobble together my pidgen translation of these woods, despite their cavalier treatment of my yard. Right now, night has misted in, mercifully blurring my homesteading neglect, allowing cool breath through the windows. Peepers have begun to trill, their waltzing vibrato punctuated with the banjo bwonk of bullfrog and the occasional shusssh of late home-comer's tires on rain soaked road.  Perhaps I'll never be good at this--always speaking country with an accent--but for now, I'll revel in this Promised Land's creole sounds within me,  "belonging" in my own temporary way.

There is still some mystery here:

the peculiar moaning of the wind, even

on a still night, the yipping of coyotes

said to appear in ghostly gatherings

silhouetted against the neighbor’s open

field.

This rock is rooted to a time when only

the wind evolved and coyotes were just a dream within

the wind’s dark eyes and we were but a phantasm,

a haunting beyond even the wind’s imagination.

 Photos by Mark Beebe



"I am a Bad God" and "Bloomington, Indiana--Thanksgiving Night" by Julia Heimer Dadds
Reverend Billy's Easter Sermon: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/note.php?note_id=10150171825821912  uploaded April 24, 2011