My mother’s garden is the whole Earth…within this sacred space my roots join the roots of every growing thing, my arms and fingers stretch to reach the moon, the leaves are talismans, and sap runs warm as blood.
As we celebrate Earth Day this week and Mother’s Day approaches in this glorious spring weather, my heart aches. I think about how my mother and I spent every single Mother’s Day together from the time I was born until she died in 2007.
We celebrated by searching plant nurseries for unusual blooms to plant together. We attended organic gardening presentations in Half Moon Bay and marveled at orchid shows in Monterey.
Our last trip to a nursery together was to the Begonia Gardens in Capitola where we each bought a butterfly plant. The one she bought that day, which literally brings many butterflies of blue, gold, orange and white to my yard every spring, is deeply rooted in my own back yard now.
While going through her things, I found a box of, well…empty boxes. My mother had intended to reuse them.
“You must have giggled some at the finding of a ‘box of boxes,’ local teacher (and mom of two sons) Janice Krahenbuhl said when I told her.
She told me about her mother, who was also careful to save resources.
“When I was helping my mother pack as she (to use a midwest term) ‘broke up housekeeping,’ I told her I’d read in my favorite midwest newspaper about a woman who was cleaning up her mother’s home and found a box labeled, ‘Pieces of String too Short to Use.’ I was standing on a ladder in her pantry. Mother, who was standing on the floor right beside me, promptly pointed up to an old canister, and said, ‘Mine is right there.’ And, sure enough, inside were little stubby leftover strings – too short to use!”
Not being wasteful was a lifestyle for our moms long before the environmental movement gained ground. They were frugal with their resources, their money, their clothes, their food and even their water.
My mother never owned a dishwasher in her lifetime. All our dishes were done in one pan of dishwater, with a pan for rinsing off soap that was half full. It came from the days when she and her mom had to carry the water they used all the way to the house from the well on their farm, heat it on a wood stove, and then use it to wash dishes and do their laundry by hand. They also only used one bathtub of water for all three of them to bathe each Saturday. Now that’s conserving!
My Japanese mother-in-law, Marjorie, never wasted a thing. Old toast, KFC Styrofoam containers, coffee cans, pie tins and pickle jars –everything was reusable. After her experience of living in an internment camp in WWII where she did without so many things we take for granted, her pantry was always filled with baggies, brown paper sacks, rubber bands, take-out containers and rewashed squares of foil.
But when she would send her homemade teriyaki chicken home with me in one of those containers, I couldn’t complain. She always sent me home with goodies, fruit and often fresh-cut flowers from her yard. She shared everything she had.
My friend Sandra Marlowe’s mom, Rose Dean, who still sings with a band of senior musicians and has a valid driver’s license, will turn 95 this year. In raising her three daughters, she passed along her appreciation for conserving Mother Earth’s resources.
“My mom still saves and reuses plastic bread bags again and again,” Marlowe said of her mom. “She saves even a few dribs of leftovers in a little dish, recycles her clothes and buys things second hand, including her car.”
“‘Green’ everything is all the rage,” Marlowe added. “It’s in vogue now to ‘save the planet.’”
“But what younger people don’t always appreciate is that their grandparents’ generation was taught to be more conservative with resources and protective of the planet. Being ‘green’ is nothing new.”
I know my mother was teaching me to be green before anyone had coined that term. Her family had lived through the hardships of the Depression and WWII. She always grew her own fruits and vegetables; she kept a compost area in the backyard, and she recycled everything. She taught me to have an appreciation for the wonders of nature on this beautiful orb traveling through space that is so uniquely our Mother Earth.
In my mother’s garden I sit among the trees until I become her: roots in the earth, branches opened to infinity. I listen closely to her heartbeat—and I hear my own. -Annie Woods
