Easter

It is one of those days when, on the face of things, it makes no sense that I should be sad. And I am alright, I really am. But my heart is heavy and I am a little teary. I am such a sensitive register, the “Highly Sensitive Person,” and it is not about being on or off medication, it simply is who I have been since I was a very young child. But there are reasons.

To begin with some of these things are simply stage of life things. When you get older, when you are alone, when children have their own families and their own lives, and even though you love each other dearly and are close things are different. This is Easter week, and it always hits me.

When I was young, because I was raised Catholic, Easter was both a holy day, a time of transformation, the darkness followed by the light, and the miracle that was Easter was deeply celebrated both in the church and in our home with Easter baskets full of candy and colored eggs, Easter egg hunts, and all the rest. As an adult when my husband and I were raising our children we were not churchy types but the Easter Bunny surely came and we had so much fun. My husband made wooden Easter baskets with bunnies on the ends with the kids names on them. They still have those Easter baskets today. And in the years when our vegetarian family did not eat eggs we painted wooden eggs that my husband cut out. And most of all, a favorite memory I think, was when we lived on 20 acres in the mountains and our dear friends came over with their children and the 6 of them, theirs and ours, set out running in the field below the house doing “confetti eggs.” Lord those were glorious! You tapped a hole in the end of eggs, drained them and let them dry out and then colored the shells. Then you filled the shells half way with confetti and closed the ends with a glue stick and colored tissue paper. On Easter the kids would chase each other around and bash eggs on one another and as the eggs burst the air was filled with clouds of colored confetti, the kids screaming and laughing and racing around with glee. Oh what happy days those were.

But the years went along, the kids grew up, married, moved hither and yon, and had their own families. And not being churchy folks the little ones get their Easter baskets but it is not what it once was. And families don’t get together as we once did, and I am alone on the day. We get together for many holidays and birthdays and such but Easter isn’t one of them. This is Easter week, and I am feeling it. I am feeling melancholy and wistful, I am remembering the years of children running in the meadow below our mountain home, the air filled with confetti. It makes my heart ache.

And then there is spring itself. Such a beautiful, glorious season. I have always looked so forward to spring because I lived in the garden. This time of year would find me knee deep in mud, planting seeds and bulbs, roses and bushes of all sorts, tucking perennial plants in here and there. There was no time to be sad, I was creating whole new worlds in the garden, wherever I lived the first thing I did was start a garden. And then came the fire 4 years ago, and the garden was decimated. Run over by firemen who had to do what they had to do to put out the fire, then more than 8 months of the garden not being tended, several of those months over a very long hot summer which here goes from late spring into fall, and as they rebuilt the house all of the garden areas around the house were tromped on, building materials were piled up in garden beds, all manner of pots and garden art were smashed, and in the heavy coastal rains weeds ran amok through everything. When I got home finally I was so horrified and heartbroken over the state of the garden I stopped going out there at all.

In the spring of 2016 for a few months the house was on the market. There was still garden art everywhere, little glass houses and life-sized whimsical animals, garden tools leaned against trees, the wheelbarrow stood in the middle of the yard, what had once been magical was now a barren landscape and with all of the garden art it reminded me of an amusement park that had closed down. No happy children rode the rides, no one was having any fun, the rides stood still, it was deathly silent. This is what my garden reminded me of. At one point it looked like the house could sell quickly and in a panic I hired a crew of guys to come remove everything so I wouldn’t have to deal with getting it out if the place sold. The head of the crew asked me, “How much do you want us to take?” I said, “I want it to look like no one ever gardened here.” And they took every single bit of everything down to the tools (Which I later wished I’d saved.), all of the garden art, the wheelbarrow, you name it. And except for the roses that remain in a tangle of weeds and not really blooming hardly at all, and a handful of bulbs that valiantly come up here and there (I had planted bulbs in the thousands in my first years here.), there is nothing but weeds.

Last year I worked for a month cutting back weeds around the roses, pruning them, and feeding them, and they bloomed a little. And I bought quite a number of seed packets with a hopeful heart, but the weeds, which had had a heyday since the fire, quickly took over. It was a losing battle. The ground was too hard, the weeds too thick and deep, and there was no way I could get the ground in planting condition. I gave up. It broke my heart all over again. Once upon a time I would have hired people to come in and help me, to remove all of the weeds and make good beds for planting, but I’ve no money to hire the help, and it is beyond what I can do on my own. And there was so much more that was lost, not the least of which was the majestic Magic Ship that I have written about so often. There once was a magical garden here. It doesn’t exist anymore and I don’t know how to get it back. I don’t know how to do spring without being able to garden, and gardening is beyond my ken at this point.

So it is Easter week and it is the time of the making of gardens and I don’t know what to do with myself. I feel too young to give up and too old to know how to start over without the resources that I’ve always counted on. I want so much to step outside into nature again but the natural world around me now overwhelms and frightens me. How does one begin again?

This is what I am asking myself today, amidst memories of confetti eggs and gardens that once were. I haven’t even been able to draw today but I will, eventually. I will make it through this week and I will find my way. I’m not sure what to do about Easter, I will have my own private celebration here, and somehow, some way, some day maybe I will be able to make a garden again. I can’t imagine it now, but I hope the day will come.