Gardening Day

This is a daydream, and in this daydream there is a garden.

The garden lays in a lawn, sprawling with green, with oaks and maples scattered round the edges. An orchard of plum, apple, and cherry trees bloom in fall and spring. A lemon tree buds in a glass greenhouse nearby. In front of this garden there is a house, large in size, plentiful in rooms. A house where nights are warm and days calm. A house near the water, where the ocean is deep and blue waves roll to mimic the hills on land. This house is mine and on days when the breeze sways the tall linen curtains, I sit by an open window and let it dance into my breath.

In the garden there is a table. It sits under a pergola lined with vines that sometimes flower when the season is right. It’s a picnic table; long, wide, and wooden with benches on either side. Above, a rustic lamp dangles, brass and weathered, glowing long after the sun has set. A pale, beige gravel lies below, lining pathways to square beds filled with blossoms and stems, waiting patiently for their water to come.

This is a daydream.

In this garden, I invite my mother to plant. She arrives to the big house by the sea early in the day, just as the mist has begun to lift from the leaves. The sky has turned blue, but hues of pink still linger below puffy white clouds. My mother clicks the sturdy metal doorknob and pushes the heavy wood door open to find me in the kitchen, waiting with steaming mugs in hand. Here, we sip green tea and eat the blueberry scones she brought in her basket, freshly baked this morning by my father in a kitchen 40 minutes away.

When the cups are empty and the crumbs have been cleaned, we leave the house and drive to a garden center in town. We buy bunches of flowers, in pink and orange and yellow and blue, and pick packets of seeds to sprout from the dirt when the ground goes warm. We spend the morning here, smelling and placing each plant into our cart until we have no room left to fill.

“This is good for now,” we say.

This will be our garden, in the lawn rolling with grassy hills. We kneel on the ground, pillows beneath our knees, and we sow the seeds in an afternoon sun. This will be our garden, with the flowers we chose and vegetables we grew. The strawberries will go in our rhubarb pies, the tomatoes in our salads. The tulips will color our tables in spring, the hydrangeas in summer. This is gardening day and it comes once a year, when the sun is bright and the earth has thawed.

When the afternoon cools, the way it often does on a spring day by the sea, we put our pots aside for tea. This time, cups are sipped at the table under the pergola and lemon shortbread cookies replace the blueberry scones. The sky is still blue, but the pink hues have returned in long wisps that trace the tracks of the wind across the clouds. While we sip, a mourning dove coos a low and mellow song and we stop speaking to listen while it sings. We take our last sips and tidy our tools. We remove our rakes and roll up bags of soil. We empty the watering cans and dust off our gloves. Our garden has been planted and now it begins to grow.

As the afternoon turns orange, we go back to the house, to the kitchen where our day began amid the dew. We boil long strands of pasta and simmer tomato sauce sprinkled with basil. We toss salad in a large wooden bowl and layer slices of yellow and green heirloom tomatoes over mozzarella and more leaves of basil. We’ll drizzle lemon juice on chicken spiced with flecks of crushed red pepper and grill it over hot coals till the skin has charred.

When the food is ready and family has arrived, my parents and in-laws and husband and I gather in the garden under the leafy pergola vines. The rusted lamp is lit and the sun takes its leave. Dusk settles in the garden and fireflies flicker while we clink glasses of deep red wine in cheers and pass plates for seconds. We tell jokes while we eat and our cheeks turn pink when we laugh. We talk of weather and how good it feels to be here, in the garden, on a night like this. The first of its kind.

This is gardening day at the house by the sea. A yearly tradition, a memory yet to be. With flowers and sunshine and bowls of fresh food, this is a day filled with all that is good.

This is a daydream.