My father introduced me to the spiritual world by taking me to dark, incensed, wooden churches on Sunday afternoons, where we'd light candles in blue and red glasses. But my mother introduced me to gardening.
I have a small photograph of her when she was three years old, standing in her Maspeth, Queens backyard. She's wearing a little girl's collared cape, standing on a brick path alongside a narrow curbed garden. There are terracotta pots containing vine-y plants trailing along a wire fence behind her. When my family left the Bronx apartment in 1953 for life in the suburbs, there was a back yard where she started her own gardens along the edge of the new white post and plank fence.
Long Island had provided Manhattan with its potatoes since the early 1800's, and when the land was transformed into suburbia in the late 1940's, it seems the top soil was taken away, a pebble-y, sandy soil left behind. It was out of that pretty useless stuff that my mother grew some rather amazing, lightly fragranced, red climbing roses; brilliantly colored, lacquer-petaled portulaca (which does best in sand); purple iris, and whatever Mothers Day plants were to be had in those days.
One afternoon when I was eight, I found myself kneeling on the grass, helping her to transplant a Columbine from a clay pot. It wasn't blooming at the time, but I thought the Italian Parsley-like leaves to be attractive, all the more so when the rain beaded, acting like magnifying glasses, affording me a deeper look. Sometimes the drops lined up along the leaf edges or puddled in the center where the new, lighter green leaves, were taking shape.
My ancestry report says the ancient relatives on my paternal side, were 17% Scottish, English and Welsh, and 50% Irish—from Ulster, Tyron, Londonderry, Antrim and Roscommon. So, I'm a Celt, and the Celts believed the Columbine to be a protection against evil and that it stood at the portal to the world of dreams and visions.
I think there are experiences in our lives, if even frozen moments, that somehow portend the future. I've been protected against alcoholism, depression and suicide. I've been kept alive and safe from the invasion of a parish priest who exploited and further weakened our family, abusing me and another of my siblings. And out of that experience, and long, garden-like inner tending, a vision and dream of personal salvation has emerged. Not an eternal rest in a cloudy neverland of heavenly delights, but the salvation and new vision for myself of sanity, evolution and creativity, with my spirit-world intact.
But these themes are often fragile, like the Columbine, which is particularly susceptible to the ruinous leaf-miner. And so, I plant a new one every spring, solicitous of its vulnerability and always grateful.
One afternoon when I was eight, I found myself kneeling on the grass, helping her to transplant a Columbine from a clay pot. It wasn't blooming at the time, but I thought the Italian Parsley-like leaves to be attractive, all the more so when the rain beaded, acting like magnifying glasses, affording me a deeper look. Sometimes the drops lined up along the leaf edges or puddled in the center where the new, lighter green leaves, were taking shape.
My ancestry report says the ancient relatives on my paternal side, were 17% Scottish, English and Welsh, and 50% Irish—from Ulster, Tyron, Londonderry, Antrim and Roscommon. So, I'm a Celt, and the Celts believed the Columbine to be a protection against evil and that it stood at the portal to the world of dreams and visions.
I think there are experiences in our lives, if even frozen moments, that somehow portend the future. I've been protected against alcoholism, depression and suicide. I've been kept alive and safe from the invasion of a parish priest who exploited and further weakened our family, abusing me and another of my siblings. And out of that experience, and long, garden-like inner tending, a vision and dream of personal salvation has emerged. Not an eternal rest in a cloudy neverland of heavenly delights, but the salvation and new vision for myself of sanity, evolution and creativity, with my spirit-world intact.
