On Beauty
By Sonya Spillmann
@sonyaspillmann
My son and daughter stand with hands open in front of me. We’re in our backyard. I rip open a seed packet. In the bottom, small black dots cluster together. I pour half into one child’s palm, half into the other’s. The kids turn around, step forward, and walk into the dirt. Then each child pinches, reaches, and sprinkles, as if they’re salting the earth.
***
When we moved to our house ten years ago, a patch of backyard grew unruly at the base of a diseased tree. Once the tree was gone, I claimed the large rectangle as my first-ever vegetable garden. Never having any outdoor space of my own, I’d read just enough about gardening to be intimidated and brazen. I walked into the local nursery and asked for manure and humus, then came home and amended the soil, even rototilled the ground, myself.
The tomato plants that first year grew taller than my head. I bought wood stakes for support and used cut panty hose (gentler on the stalks than twine) to tie them up. I didn’t yet know it would take all summer for a single tomato to ripen, nor how often squirrels steal fresh produce off the vine.
Year after year, I planted: cucumbers in sun, peppers in the front, tomatoes three feet apart. The garden didn’t yield all that much the subsequent summers, but I ate what little I grew with a deep sense of pride.
As the years passed, by mid-July, the humidity sapped my enthusiasm and flesh-hungry mosquitoes dissuaded me from standing outside to water. And by August, just before tomatoes turn red, I’d lose interest altogether and my husband, Chris, would have to take over. He’d walk in after watering with a handful of cherry tomatoes and a cucumber the size of this thumb.
Yet every May, I’d plant. It’s what I did. Determined. Resolute.
Then two years ago, in the middle of a global pandemic and a cancer diagnosis, I half-heartedly plopped four tomato plants into the ground and left the watering completely up to Chris. I can’t say we grew one single tomato.
And last summer, the garden sat completely abandoned.
This spring, I asked Chris, “Can we dig it up?” referring to all the overgrown grass and weeds.
“As in, no more garden?” he asks.
“As in, maybe something else,” I say, dreaming of flowers and color.
One afternoon, I grab a shovel. I walk to the garden and start to dig, start to sweat, start to turn over the ground one blade full at a time. I tire quickly, and leave the dirt lumpy and coarse. The next weekend, while I am inside the house, I hear a high pitched shrill in the backyard. Chris tills the dirt, adding to my efforts, leaving the ground freshly even and smooth.
It takes six more weeks until I stand here, in the back yard, with my two youngest kids. Not an hour earlier, I’d rummaged through the house collecting the flower seed packs I’d bought through the years on a whim. Each one had been set down, on the counter, until finding their way into a junk drawer, a bin in the basement labeled “summer,” or outside in the garage tucked in next to my gardening tools. I can’t explain why I’d never planted these seeds before. Why I kept them around. Available, but unused.
Instead, they’d hovered in the periphery of my attention, as if I was comforted by possessing the potential for beauty, but never quite ready to fully embrace it.
Sunflowers, dahlias, poppies, lupine.
Impractical. Gorgeous. Delightful.
Is cultivating beauty an indulgence? Or is it, in this world, a necessity?
***
After the kids seed the poppies, I open the sunflower seeds. “Put those in the back,” I say. “If the squirrels don’t get them, they’ll be the tallest.” In the middle, the lupine. The kids return to me again and again for more. My son presses his lips together, a tell that he’s concentrating. My daughter practically counts the inches between each seed she places, a meticulous precision of care. I stay crouched low, watch them pinch and drop, pinch and drop, pinch and drop. My mind wanders to the future bouquets I might someday place on my table, might leave on a porch for a neighbor or a friend.
“Here,” I say, opening marigold seeds. “Put these near the front.” They look like miniature golden feathers.
At last, I tear open the envelope of wildflowers. These are the ones I’m most looking forward to. I want to see what might bloom. “Throw these anywhere in the middle.” The kids scatter and fling.
When we’re finished, I comb the dirt with a rake. The kids run off to play. I pull the hose over to water and as I stand there, wonder: are these seeds are too old to grow? And then, as it so often does, my fear asks, What if nothing blooms?
But I keep watering, day after day, because what if something does?
Two weeks later, from our bedroom window, I see a green haze over the brown ground, like peach fuzz on the earth’s bare skin. It’s as if they sprouted overnight. I have the urge to run my fingers over the leaves, the way I’d caress the cheek of one of my children.
A few days after that, my husband wakes me up with a shake. “The garden’s been dug up.” Mmmhmmm, I mumble, imagining a few holes left by a squirrel. “No, it’s dug up,” his added emphasis, in my mind, only impling slightly bigger holes. A racoon? A fox? Our dog?
I get out of bed and look out the window. “Oh my goodness—” The garden is dug up. The entire thing turned over—as if it had been done on purpose. My heart feels like water, cupped in my hand, now sliding out between my fingers.
Instantly, I’m in my head, thinking about awkwardly asking my neighbors, “By any chance did you, maybe, um, happen to dig in our garden?” I envision explaining how those weren’t actually weeds, but wildflowers. And when I imagine myself saying, “I just wanted to plant something beautiful!” an unexpected lump forms in my throat.
I have been very tired. I have been stretched so thin. I have collected unused seeds for so long and thought what if so often, but have always ended up stashing the idea of their blossoms away—for later. Another, better, time.
But later when? And later why?
I walk from the bedroom to sit down at the breakfast table with my oldest son. He shovels cereal into his ever growing body and I stare at his face, no longer a boy. Over my cup of coffee, I suddenly think to ask, “By any chance,” I start, “did you dig up the garden?”
His spoon stops mid-air. Blue eyes look up into my brown. And then he says, “Yep,” drops his head, and goes back to eating. I’m so relieved I laugh. But then frustrated heat rushes to my ears.
“Why?”
“I was looking for worms,” he says with a shrug.
“You dug up the whole garden for worms?” I take a long deep breath, and with it, blow away my wish for life to look exactly the way I want it to.
Maybe, for now, while my children are still growing, this is simply a season of intention. A season to listen to my longings, to pay attention, even try. Maybe something tangible will come of it, but maybe not.
What I don’t know yet is that in another month, the brown dirt will again turn green. And a few weeks after that, magenta and yellow blooms will rise on the far edge. I don’t know what will grow in this space yet. But I will wait, patiently, to see what lifts its head and decides to smile.
Sonya Spillmann lives in the DC area with her husband and four kids. She is a staff writer for Coffee + Crumbs and also writes on her blog. You can sign up for her newsletter and listen to her and Adrienne on the Exhale podcast every month.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.