I’m not much of a gardener. Don’t know the practical difference between a shovel and a spade. Can’t figure out what to do with a hoe – seems like after I use one, my back aches, and while I use one, I look like I should be strapped into a straightjacket and sent to a loony bin. Maybe there’d be some nice gardens there.
But I want to be a good gardener. I want a pile of red beets and carrots, buckets of cucumbers and zucchini to give away, tomatoes, leeks, rows of chard and kale that last into the fall – and pumpkins. I want a bevy of pumpkins to look out over in October from my kitchen. Happy spots of orange on a field of brown dirt. I just think that would be marvelous.
But I’m a city girl – or worse, raised in the suburbs where the local policeman moonlighted to keep your lawn looking like velvet and occasionally cut back a shrub. At least in New York, I grew petunias on the fire escape. Pink, my passion. Very pink.
It is one-third of the way through spring today, and I’ve done nothing in my garden except pick up dead wood and rake some leaves. I read up on what to look for in a hoe (unlike mine, the blade should be parallel to the ground when comfortably held in your hands) and I located the four packs of pumpkin seeds I bought last year but never planted. The nice man at Johnny’s Selected Seeds (the mail-order company in Maine) told me over the phone that the seeds are good for four years.
Today’s as perfect a gardening day as ever. I have that leisure of Sunday time, the weather is inviting, and nothing hurts too much to prevent me from bursting out there. And yet, I hang back in bed wondering, of all things, what to wear!
My sand-colored Old Navy jeans that fit great and allow optimal mobility while providing some protection from twigs and thorns would be great, but they are my only pair of jeans I ever wear out, and I’d hate to get grass stains and mud on the knees. There are my week’s worth of yoga pants, but the cotton/spandex is a little cold for this time of year, and cross-referencing them to another activity seems disrespectful to the holiness of my yoga studio.
Which leaves summer khakis too tight around my winter middle, or my Dumptique blue jeans so frayed on the bottom they are now too short – but I can’t move in them anyway – and a pair of denim overalls, a memento from a television commercial I styled in 1978, that are now worn paper thin. And that’s only the bottoms!
On top, we have the same dilemma. My everyday long-sleeved tees are a precious commodity; I don’t have enough of them to make it to the next laundry day. And it’s too cold to break out my short-sleeved tees. My sweatshirts are for the beach and too baggy for work. Sweaters are too warm and harder to wash.
I long for a gardener’s wardrobe of Carhartt pants, a supply of comfortable, long-sleeved T-shirts in bright cheerful colors, and a pair of boots with some arch support, ankle support, and a toe box agile enough to uproot weeds in fine dirt. But I’m not much of a gardener, and buying clothes just to garden in when it is mulch and fertilizer and compost I need – well, I’ve lived in New England long enough not to be able to justify that.
So first I’ll think about breakfast and maybe I’ll go for a walk, and maybe once I’m out, it won’t matter what I wear. Though more than likely, I’ll wait till it’s warmer and start out early one morning in my nightclothes. Somehow dirt and dreams can wear the same cloth.
