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Issue 2 Autumn 2004 Douglas Carlson Essay:
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An excerpt
from the essay My grandfather on my father’s side was a gardener—by vocation. After emigrating from Sweden around 1900, he cared for a series of modest estates from Massachusetts to Vermont to southwestern New York. When the estate gardener gave way in the 1950s to “landscape firms”—seasonal help employed to do the mowing and trimming and digging and weeding, all under a supervisor’s eye—he became a gardener for a company that produced metal office furniture. What a factory gardener did is anyone’s melancholy guess; I suspect he mowed the strips of the lawn around the buildings and put in occasional flower beds—hand-me-downs from the times of factory towns when landscaped space, that escaped remnant of the natural world, was planned into workers’ daily lives. Whatever he did, when winter turned soil to ice, he went inside and worked on the line. And when soil became stone as the green spaces were paved over, he went inside to work for good. "But it was definitely too much for a twelve year old who already had learned an appreciation of the Swedish art of restraint." Yet his passion for gardening remained, taking root around his home. An ordinary, small front yard like the rest on the street, an ordinary house, an ordinary driveway alongside leading to the garage—those predictable squares and rectangles could not disclose the back. What was undoubtedly once a simple, rectangular lawn that sloped up slightly from the house had been transformed into two flat semicircles. The lower was connected to the upper by a set of stone stairs under a rose trellis. Each lawn was bordered by beds of columbine, peonies, and hollyhocks and by a honeysuckle hedge that closed it off completely from the neighbors’ view. At the far end of the upper lawn, almost entirely hidden in the low branches of a pair of arbor vitae, was a lawn swing. In 1953 my grandfather had a severe heart attack. And, as was the case in those benighted days, he was told to rest completely—first in the hospital, then in a hospital bed in the living room. After months, he improved to the point where he was allowed to sit up, then stand, then take a few steps. In March of the next year, probably feeling the “green fuse” of spring, he asked my grandmother to get his shovel and rake from the garage. In his living room, among the doilies and old photographs and overstuffed chairs, he pretended to dig up and rake out a flower bed. The he got back into the hospital bed and died. It became my first task after he died to mow his lawn—something I both loved and feared. The dread came from my grandmother, whose mourning over him apparently continued throughout the many years she survived him. Often when I came into the house for a drink of water or to use the bathroom, I would surprise her at full-throated grieving. Worse, after each mowing, I was obligated to eat fancy cookies while sitting at the dining room table in front of a lace place mat and delicate plate. She, always on the verge of tears, would sit and try to talk with me—of him, of what, I have no recollection. But it was definitely too much for a twelve year old who already had learned an appreciation of the Swedish art of restraint. The joy came from the gardens. I would allot myself a certain number of circuits with the push mower, then sit for a while on the lawn swing, then mow, then sit. Of course, I had seen such gardens in pictures, but now, as a mower of lawns, I possessed one. A passion like my grandfather’s becomes legacy. So when my father returned to his hometown and bought land, he became a gardener too, but of a different type. He was a teacher and a physicist. His gardens were made to be eaten: work converted to food converted to energy. His gardens were of rows, angles, and order. He gardened and my mother canned. Rows of beets, beans, and peas became rows of jars of beets, beans, and peas. Teachers didn’t make much then; his becoming a vegetable gardener who grew flowers only as time permitted was probably by necessity. But whether by necessity or design, two gardeners raised two quite different gardens. While at my grandfather’s house, I relished the magic of the step up under the trellis into a private space with scent and color and imagination; at my father’s I sullenly hoed beans in the sun. Not that his garden wasn’t a beautiful thing in its way. Each spring an acre was plowed and dragged. At the northwest corner, my father began a path with his rake. With great care, he described a perfect square within the larger rectangle of the garden. Within the square, the smaller vegetables grew; the larger, expansive ones—potatoes, corn, and tomatoes—were relegated to the outside. To anyone else, this was the logical garden. I knew better; actually my father had made a baseball diamond. The careful pathway he raked became the base paths; carrots, lettuce, beets, and spinach made up the infield; the outfield stretched away to the corn. Imagine my emotions when forty years later I watched Ray Kinsella’s dead father emerge from a cornfield onto a ball field in the film Field of Dreams. After supper, I would gather round stones into piles in that northwest corner, which became home plate to me. One by one, I would toss them up and belt them with a crude bat I had turned on a lathe in wood shop: screaming line drives into the potato bed, long home runs over the corn. The rules were simple, and I was honor-bound to follow them: an out was any stone I popped up or overspun into the small vegetables; a double reached the potatoes, a home run went where home runs always go. But here, I must confess. This was not entirely a lonely kid making up summer games to amuse himself. I remember clearly a certain pleasure when an occasional stone would dip down and rip through a row of beets or Swiss chard—never on purpose because of the rules of the game—but I apparently found some perverse joy in damaging the plants. Clearly I saw my father’s control over his garden as more evidence of a world out to control me. I fought back as any kid would. But a third-generation gardener was bound to emerge with his own garden on his terms. The years 1969-1975, what we’re now calling the Vietnam years, I was married with a son, trying to teach freshman comp with honor, facing every professor’s dilemma then: should I be responsible for changing my male students’ status from II-S to I-A just because they can’t write complete sentences? "We’ll call that place, for the time being, home." We bought a house. We were middle-class poor—teachers still didn’t get paid much. I entered into an agreement with an elderly neighbor to work his vegetable garden in exchange for a share of the food. He was at least eighty-five and had gardened his entire life. His gardens were my father’s gardens—but without the baseball diamond. It didn’t work. He drove me crazy. No matter how I prepared the soil, dug the holes, fertilized, watered, planted—it wasn’t right. Of course it wasn’t. Imagine my grandfather from his living room bed: don’t push the shovel down that way, you’ll hurt your back; don’t dig that rake in so deep; turn it over so the tines are up to smooth the soil. My neighbor and I tried for a couple years. Then I retreated to my own small backyard, by now abandoned to the demands of two sons who needed space for Wiffle ball, touch football, and Frisbee. So I mowed. Like a flying stone slashing a lettuce patch, I mowed through peonies, hydrangeas, iris, and lupines that the former owner had planted. I put up fences around the property and mowed to within four feet of them, letting the land grow into a border of feral columbine, evasive goldenrod, grasses, sumac shoots, and brambles. Beyond this barrier, events were happening that repeatedly brought us to tears of rage and sadness. Within this boundary, I created a place where my sons could play and that, once a week, I could shred into submission. This was a garden too, and gardens are, after all, about control. "This was a garden too, and gardens are, after all, about control."
Lawns are
about total control—without imagination. I can look back now
and remember mowing my father’s lawn. With friends, he was building his
own house the summer I was eleven. Since the land had been cleared to the dirt
and he hadn’t much time or money to make a proper lawn, he decided
simply let the grasses grow back and keep them mowed. One of my daily jobs
was to
bring his lunch up a long path from the house we had rented for the summer,
through an abandoned pasture, to the building site. On the way I was to fill
a bag with clover seed that I scattered each day on the lawn. For years I
pushed a mower through a confusion of sweet smells and honeybees. Editor’s note: Carlson's essay is an edited version of his longer work published in its entirety in When We Say We’re Home: A Quartet of Place & Memory (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999). |
