The Ordinary #3: Feral Garden Fairy

I practice the art of noticing by writing about small moments in everyday life. I explore the thoughts, feelings, and memories they awaken, and the words that give me the courage to write them. The Ordinary is rooted in a simple belief: even the most mundane moments can inspire a story.

“Did you see something green? If you did, you saw one of the few things left in the world that people cannot make.”¹

There are practical reasons to scatter crushed eggshells around my vegetable garden and massage the brittle fragments into the soil, but they don’t matter to the little girl in my soul. She comes out to play in the dirt, casting the shells around like it’s magic, smiling wide as the wind carries off the smallest pieces in a swirling dance. Nature does as it pleases, and she wants to be more like it.

The adult girl has to study crop rotation and soil chemistry to make the beds ready for this year’s vegetables and herbs. She buys soil testing kits and seed packets, checks the heated seed trays under the grow light in the garage, counts the Carolina reaper sprouts, then sends the little girl into the garden to plant peas where the nightshade crops grew last year.

I feel them playing together in the garden. The little girl places decorative trellises between berry bushes to make them more polite neighbors. The adult carefully stakes handwritten labels by the peas. I have to find a clean spot on my sleeves to rub the tears in my eyes. Could be allergies, could be dirt in the wind, could be shifting hormones, but I giggle and cry.

My hair is wild with curly, wispy new growth that absolutely nothing I’ve tried can tame or hide. There are chilled cabbage leaves in my bra. My sweat smells different or worse. I’ve felt like a walking pile of compost for weeks, pretending not to notice the gross parts that are supposed to be good for growth. Motherhood is beautiful and hideous and I’m afraid it will eat everything I’ve ever been before. Are the roots of the old me still there, invisible but alive? Or have I already been mulched?

I was afraid I already knew the answer until that giggle hit me. Being sweaty and dirty from working in the garden couldn’t make me feel any more disgusting. But a lovely little intrusive thought planted itself in my mind and made me feel cute, of all things.

Like a feral garden fairy with my absurd little cabbage bra and ground eggshell fairydust.

Attributions

1. Hope Jahren, Lab Girl (2016)