March 2009

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
--Isak Dinesen

We’ve been sleeping poorly, up on the hill. The dog naps all day, and her only exercise is sprinting out the back door to sniff, squat, bark at imaginary interlopers, and run back inside before her paws freeze—a trip that takes 30 seconds or less. Otherwise, she’s sleeping under the table in the breakfast nook, or between the pillows on the guest bed, or nestled against the arm of the blue sofa upstairs. By bedtime, she’s done with sleeping, and instead spends her time jumping from bed to floor and back again, her flapping ears and jingle-bell collar acting like miniature alarm clocks that sound every few minutes all night long.

I toss and turn from side to back to side to stomach till just before night gives way to day, then fall asleep long enough to feel completely groggy when the alarm goes off—the same disorienting feeling as stepping off a plane in the wrong time zone: daylight when your body knows it’s really night time. D, though, is as stalwart in sleeplessness as he is in his waking hours. He lies motionless, his shallow breathing the only conceit that gives lie to his performance. He told me recently that on those sleepless nights, he walks around our old house, room by room, remembering as many details as he can. It’s his version of counting sheep.

I have a similar tactic, but it revolves around my grandparents’ farm—not a working farm, but a weekend retreat where we spent most of my childhood weekends and a lot of holidays. I don’t take a room-by-room tour, as D does of our house in the city, but instead recollect all of the antics my cousins and I undertook: jumping from the hayloft into the un-baled hay below; catching salamanders and tadpoles in the stream and pond; building sailing ships from scavenged pieces of wood and empty Pepsi cans; complaining bitterly when asked to help with the vegetable garden’s endless chores.

In our reminiscences, we don’t remember the reality of these past moments in time. The intervening years have burnished off all of the rough edges, muted the discord, and left instead, a golden version of the past in its place. A past where every plaster wall in our old house was perfect, and where the roof never leaked. Where a campfire burned late into the summer evenings as my cousins and I got along perfectly. Although she doesn’t gloss over the trials and tribulations of her life in “Out of Africa,” Danish author Karen Blixen, writing as Isak Dinesen, casts that same golden glow over her years as the owner of a coffee plantation in Kenya. Her remembrances take on a mythic—almost epic—quality that I’m certain she didn’t feel when she was living through them.

Time and memory are like that: we tend to minimize the painful and ugly, the tedious and distasteful. What we’re left with, given enough time, is the sweet distillation of a life, like the syrupy sap of a maple, condensed by thousands of hours of enduring all sorts of nasty weather. The garden’s like that, too, although the time needed to forget all the disappointments and sore muscles is surprisingly short—less than a year, if D and I are any indication. Already forgotten are the dead plants, the calluses, and the endless hours of watering and weeding. In fact, we can barely wait to start it all again. Failure and exhaustion are distant memories. What remains is the longing to again nurture the earth around us. Earth that, for the moment, is still frozen iron, but that will, in just a few weeks, begin springing green.

Just a few, short weeks, and we can begin creating another year’s worth of gardening memories to carry us through future winters’ long sleepless nights.

A few, short weeks.