The Language of Plants

(Solomon's Seal- Clearly an appreciation for Judaism even in the garden.)

It's been raining the last few days, so I haven't had a chance to get out and take a photograph of the progress. Chris made headway with an uplifting (literally) set of stairs that encircle a willowy crepe myrtle.

I did run out and get some plants for the patio, including: Solomon's Seal, Japanese Painted Fern, Autumn Fern, Coral Bells, and hardy begonia. For outside of the patio, a few azaleas, white ones in particular that remind me of the bush that create outside my bedroom window as a girl. We'll see how they take to our little space. I need to get some humus to enrich and lighten the heavy clay soil. If only I were born with a green thumb, this wouldn't be Chinese.

Afterglow of a Patio

(Hardly hopscotch, more like a game of chess.)

It's funny to think about, but I lived in a space the size of this 500 sf patio in London. I was 23 and things like lumpy beds, shared kitchens, and cubbyhole-sized bathrooms did not phase me. I was too busy reading Oscar Wilde, feeling so glamorous in his words that I never noticed the shabbiness around me.

Five hundred square feet is a lot of space to fill with stone though. In this case, we hauled stone, shoveled dirt, and set stones with the help of three friends over the course of a weekend. Then on Sunday, when our shaky arms and legs could take no more, we declared the patio part of the project complete. It happened fast.

As I hunched over the earth collecting small stones to fill the gaps between larger ones, a rush of warmth, the kind I'd feel when my sister would brush my hair, came over me. On this very ground, all our closest friends and family would be gathering to celebrate our partnership.

I also thought, too, of the patio that inspired the patio I was standing on. The other I never had the opportunity to experience completed. When I left, it was only partially finished, surrounded with summer blooms and long grasses. It became a quiet metaphor for unrequited love and left a heavy mark on my heart and aspirations. I moved on, but still I dreamed of that patio.

Whether it is a job in a museum (got it) or bookstore (got it) or a piece of chocolate (got it many times over), my heart gets what it wants. I've always believed this and I believe it now even more than ever. It's the same with the patio, and although it took a little inspiration and cajoling on my part, Chris and I can stand on it at the end of the day and commend our work together.

Oddly, I have never addressed the patio space in the course of BPFASH, and I believe some background information on their history would be helpful. However, for now, I'm still soaking in the aftermath of completing something we set out to do, and recovering -- I'll admit -- from it.

A Gift For You, Dear Reader

Sadly, I put all of my poetry collection in a place only accessible with a chair. Perhaps, a most egregious error.

Fall always makes me think of Jack Gilbert and his earth-scented poems that recall the past. He often writes to his wife Michiko, who is now dead; but in particular, it is his poems about partnership, the kind driven by romance, that I adore.

So here, for a Thursday in fall is his poem, "The Great Fires":

The Great Fires

Love is apart from all things.
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.
What is not love provokes it.
What is not love quenches it.
Love lays hold of everything we know.
The passions which are called love
also change everything to a newness
at first. Passion is clearly the path
but does not bring us to love.
It opens the castle of our spirit
so that we might find the love which is
a mystery hidden there.
Love is one of many great fires.
Passion is a fire made of many woods,
each of which gives off its special odor
so we can know the many kinds
that are not love. Passion is the paper
and twigs that kindle the flames
but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes
because it tries to be love.
Love is eaten away by appetite.
Love does not last, but it is different
from the passions that do not last.
Love lasts by not lasting.
Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart.

Jack Gilbert

New Paths on Old Property

We retraced our steps from last summer, only this time there are less weeds and more dog paths twisting around the trees. (And there are more holes thanks to a pretty lemon beagle that likes to dig.) I spent the morning picking flag and stack stone to begin the first phase of the landscaping project. We decided on a mix of gray and brown to pick up the natural granite on the property and the red Georgia clay.


We want to create a few terraces throughout the property and envision our nuptials in the backmost part of the lot, in a grove that forms an almost perfect rectangle. I think we'll mulch the area just for the wedding, but that's a way off. We spent all afternoon a few months ago mulching the front lawn, and I ended up with blistered hands and a bright red sunburn. Trenching for the patio begins this weekend. I'll be wearing gloves.

Never the ____________, Always the ____________

(The enchanted forest when men were boys.)

On more than one occasion I have said that if women spent as much time setting and achieving personal goals as we did planning our weddings, we'd be a lot happier. So here I am, planning a wedding, and of course there's a twist.

The short version of how we find ourselves here: A few weeks ago Chris took me to a favorite spot of ours - the enchanted bamboo forest - and he got down on one knee and asked me to spend the rest of my life with him. He dug up a split of champagne after I produced the requisite "yes" and we toasted to climbing the next plateau - because relationships are really less like a mountain and more an intense incline that levels for a while until the hike up. Being unapologetically sappy, it was dreamy and perfect. In our jeans, walking our dogs, taking a few minutes to salute our friendship.

We have been enjoying being engaged for the moment, but I couldn't help but think how and were we would say "I do" when it finally dawned on me that we must do it at home, and in our back yard, in particular. How quaint, you are thinking, but how practical, I was thinking. Instead of dumping all our resources and energy into a space I have little connection to - there are, after all, few places where we could be feasibly publicly marry that move me - why not prepare the house for our nuptials and invite all our friends to christen the new chapter of our lives together.

There's something else. According to a 1985 study entitled "Materialism in the Home: The Impact of Artifacts on Dyadic Communication", the objects in our home, e.g. the furniture and its arrangement, pictures we hang, plants we display, etc. are "messages about ourselves that we want to convey back to ourselves, and to the few intimates that we invite into our house." Identity, the study highlights, is "achieved through artifacts." But what about the abstract, say a wedding. The study identified the artifacts as being either historical, ancestral, fraternal, or developmental. A wedding would be all these things. Could a wedding become artifact?

The philosopher Marx W. Wartofsky would say yes. He distinguished a handful of types of artifacts, among them secondary artifacts, which is essentially a representation of actions embodied in socially shared practices. Heady, I know, but this view reinforces - and maybe reassures me - that the location is perfect. So join me as I explore our home in the context of of an impending marriage. It just might get messy...with dirt, of course.

If These Walls Could Talk

"If these walls could talk." You won't be hearing that phrase very much anymore.

When I was a little girl my father held up a coffee mug and announced that, in fact, the very mug in his hand was made up of the same molecules that made up me. It was a profound thought for my petite brain to comprehend, but the memory stays with me.

My father is a master of these odd and often whimsical pronouncements (though some would call them meanderings because he does tend towards rambling.) We spoke yesterday about houses and he delivered to me another observation, though this time hundreds of miles of away, that my fully matured brain - according to a story I heard on NPR our brains peak at 25 - understood.

"The problem with the housing market is that people started thinking about homes as a financial investment," he said, "rather than a place to raise a family." He reminded me that aside from Mary St. where I was conceived (I can't make this stuff up!), every one of the Warner brood grew up in the same tiny cinder block home. And now, my father pointed out, his granddaughter crawls along the same terrazzo floor we used to eat Cheerios.

My parent's house is nicer than it was when we grew up in it, mainly, my mom claims, because she "couldn't have anything nice because we were always breaking stuff." There are plantation shutters where we had vinyl blinds; a sparkly oven in place of the hot box that was better at heating the kitchen than baking a cake; and I heard they recently finished a bathroom renovation that's replete with natural stone glass full doors. And now the floor, my dad says, you can see your reflection in it.

I point out all these changes not to belabor the conditions in which I grew up - honestly, one bathroom was all I knew so I didn't care about it unless I was standing in line doing "the dance" behind two more of my siblings. Rather, I'm suggesting that our houses reflect a society that demands instant gratification, not works in progress whether they be websites, art, people, or the very fabric of society - relationships.

I'd almost say that my parents' house is a compelling mirror of their union. There were those years when my mom encouraged my dad not to spend so much time in the back yard, that instead he should spruce up the front yard, put in grass, hedges, flowers even, but often despite his best intentions, the grass would eventually die, the shrubs would get, well, shrubby, and my father would return to the backyard to tend the rambling garden he hid behind our home. My dad, you could say, is private and I now see how he treated marriage: it was an oasis, hidden from the prying world.

I finished Elizabeth Gilbert's book Committed, and while I know some readers are perplexed by her writing, I took away from it a better understanding of the rules of engagement, namely, there aren't any. It is, rather, this prying world or the one we are trying to impress that labels "works in progress" as somehow unworthy. If this is true, then we are all unworthy because not a one of us is perfect.

Neither are our homes. Twenty-eight years later, the lawn remains mostly brown but my dad has these rich memories of all six of his kids making an effort to help him pull weeds, scatter seeds, or rake the autumn leaves. There was a triple homicide just up the block from my parents' house a few weeks ago, a testament to the despair the neighborhood (but not my parent's freshly painted house) has fallen into over the years. A wave of homeowners left and rented to people whose respect for the idea of a home is dwarfed by the chromed out idols (read cars) they park on their over grown lawns. But my parents won't leave their "investment" because to them a price could never be put on the memories they have from creating a life together within those humble walls.

You Get What You Need

(It's 3 am so it must be time to be creative, she said.)

It's well past my bedtime but for you I write. I am not even sure who "you" these days, save for my dear friends who asked when I would put my fingers to work again. They are working, I want to protest, only instead they are directing emails to that person and the next, rarely moving to form the paragraphs that mean something to me.

I've just started reading Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage. [Full Disclosure: I assisted Gilbert with her book signing when Eat Pray Love was out in paperback. Second Full Disclosure: While I was delighted by Gilbert - she's charming, sincere, poised - I was no so taken with her acclaimed book. In fact, I was a fan of her previous writing, the more "masculine" stuff she calls it in Committed.] At any rate, I've begun Committed and already my head is spinning in a million different directions. My house, if you haven't already figured out is on hold. I exist on takeaway or leftovers, move like an exhausted being at the end of the day from front door to dinner table to bed and hit repeat, and now, having just read 1/20 of Gilbert's book, I've become wildly energetic. I love this book and how that in so little time, I've been awakened by words.

It's funny that even though I have a room full of books I still have to go to the library to get what I need. There are at least a hundred books on my shelf that I know I have not read, yet I am certain that one day I will come upon The Book at that particular moment. For now, it's Committed even if it doesn't belong on my shelf, but rather a kind of universal shelf. My mind has been racing in a million different directions lately, and one of the things it's been racing towards is marriage. It was an utter coincidence that Committed became available the day after my father texted (yes, texted) Chris to say that he gave Chris his blessing to ask me to marry him. This after a week-long deliberation on my father's part, I might add.

Chris was, as one might expect, annoyed by the delay. Why, he asked, does your dad have to make this difficult. I feel like I'm being judged, he pleaded. I was also annoyed that when a guy who I professed to loving, and more importantly he professed to loving me finally got to the next step, my dad stalled. In the last few years, in jest or maybe not, he had on at least one occasion reminded that I was no spring chicken. (I'll be 30 in a few months.) I was galled by his display, hurt by this seemingly unnecessary road block. My thoughts of a father who might proclaim as Winona Ryder's character in "How to Make an American Quilt" did, "Take her, she eats too much," were replaced with the image of father who, according to Chris, referred to me as "his most precious treasure." Isn't that weird, he asked.

If I am getting a little uncomfortable for a few of you I apologize. I don't think that's weird. I do, in my sweetest of moments call my father "daddy", whereas my mother is always "mom." I love my father and the effort he put forth in life to honor and protect me. They call it daddy's girl for a reason. In the same way, my dad wanted to be sure that I would always be Chris' girl. The fact that he wasn't hoisting me over to Chris and proclaiming that I eat too much was somehow reassuring. My dad, I think, wanted Chris to work for it.

Now where does this leave us with Committed? I'm still early on in the book, but I feel it's important to examine these seemingly obvious moments, to reconsider them much like we should reconsider marriage. I don't think Gilbert is asking us to give up on it, rather, I think she is asking us to see it from a new perspective.