Pop89: Desert Mother
Mine is not the kind of garden one admires. My rosemary is the same height it was when I planted it in my back yard four and a half months ago. Rosemary, like lavender, thrives on neglect, my green-thumbed siblings assure me. But they and their rosemary plants live in greener pastures, in valleys fecund and boastful of produce.
Granted, this year the prairie experienced a summer of relentless heat and drought, extreme even for this desert land. Still, my neighbours’ gardens are festooned with cheery tomatoes and writhe with herbs. The usual suspects foist zucchinis on the rest of us, maintaining the local ancient zucchini-foisting tradition. But I am not among the gifted when it comes to prairie gardening. My flowers do well, but my talents are limited to geraniums and sunflowers, both of which I thankfully adore.
For the most part, when I made the rounds with watering can and hose in the evenings, all I could think of were the stories of those first pioneering women, promised leafy groves, babbling brooks and lush valleys. How they laboured over pots and tiny plots of pansies and violets, tending, and feeding them like premature babies, only to wake in the morning to stumps where once were blooms. I admire their tenacity. In my play Mother’s Apron I wrote: “And those flowers you meant for the garden bed? Smote by wind and eaten by bugs, you stitched them on linen instead.” Those women made do or did without. They soldiered on, tempering their steel.
When your garden is a reflection and feeder of your soul and all you can muster is a few stumps of once-pansies you risk losing faith in everything. I thought a lot about gardens and greenery as I drove back home and away from the ferny forest floors and hundreds-years-old evergreens of Cortes Island, BC. My brother has a small farm there and I spent days pruning back wild roses and ivy that tumbled and wound their way around every stationary object seemingly overnight. I thought about bounty every time I pulled over and stopped and stood before the overflowing bins of apples, peaches, pears and plums of Okanagan fruit stands. As a teen growing up on the Okanagan Lake, I remember throwing seeds and pits over my shoulder and half-expecting a tree to pop up behind me.
Leaving Medicine Hat on the last leg of the return trip from the coast, I settled into the long drive home, at ease on a road empty and open and endless. As always, I felt an odd sense of grace descend: Here is a gentle drive through a harsh and unforgiving landscape, I thought. Here is a monotone ground swathed in sage and prickly brush and dried up sloughs leaving a trace of white and not much else. Here is home and yet why would I live here? Why would anyone live here? The question is not rhetorical but urgent, especially since I left behind me various versions of Paradise, dripping with fruit, and perfumed boughs petals.
I listened to an interview on my phone with the author William Atkins, an Englishman who wrote a best-selling book about the moors in England and now has one about deserts called The Immeasurable World. In the interview he says: “You cannot explain how it is that the desert can satisfy and even give peace. You cannot explain what you find there to those who don’t feel it. For most people it is just a howling wilderness.”
Those words actually come from a 19th century explorer, but they stand true for me today. Maybe that’s why the prairie desert moves me so: the grasslands that are home to cattle and ranches are virtually untampered with. They look like they looked thousands of years ago, when indigenous men and women roamed and lived in relationship with the world and each other.
In The Immeasurable World Atkins writes about the desert of the 3rd century Desert Mothers and Fathers, the first monks, who fled Roman persecution. In the desert they mediated in silence but also battled their inner demons,( which, in those days would have been seen as an outer devil.)
Author and Franciscan monk Richard Rohr writes about long forgotten Cardinal Virtues, qualities that sound completely counter to the goals of an acquisitive and consuming culture. The desert mothers and fathers believed in the four main virtues of temperance, tolerance, patience and prudence. Without their foundation love and faith would be impossible to maintain. The wilderness of the desert would have strengthened such virtues. In the desert we must temper our bodies before the heat gets to our souls; we must tolerate the endless wind, have patience with the turning of seasons and, above all, take care and be prudent with our uses of energy, water, food and drink.
The Cardinal Virtues sound like fun-spoiling admonishments, but what they do for us and did for the early pioneering women, as well as the desert-dwelling mystics, was to guild a reservoir of strength and an inner open space that allowed for a reliable joy in the small, simple, ever-present pleasures of living. Of making life worth living. Of staying alive.
By the time I pass through Cadillac I begin looking forward to getting home, going for a walk along the Frenchman, maybe even hike up the Butte now that the relentless heat has slackened off. All summer I yearned for a leisurely afternoon stroll, but the heat remained until the evening. I would watch campers head up to the park and suggest they take more water, or better yet, wait until dusk. “A man died of thirst up there two years ago,” I offered sagely to a mid-day hiker. I am a desert mother and have earned the right to waggle my finger and warn hapless souls.
At Newton Dam Rd. I can see the top of the elevator across from my abode. I stop asking myself “Why would anyone live here?” and began asking” Why would I ever leave?”