Nostalgia

I out-waited the gnats tonight. I went outside at 8:30PM and commenced pulling weeds and deadheading my gigantically overgrown rose bushes. I found myself thinking about a conversation I had with Lindy this afternoon as I drove her to the airport. She helped me tremendously, I mean, help doesn’t even really qualify as an appropriate word for what she did for me—she actually unpacked my entire house and put together the most incredible nursery. Ocean’s room really does look like something out of a magazine; it’s beyond anything I could have dreamed of.

Lindy and I talked about a lot of things in the ten days that she was here, many of them old subjects which had been graced numerous times, yet which we are reluctant to give up, for there may be a new way of approaching them if we keep at it. Out of this bunch of topics, being a new home owner and an expectant mother came to the forefront. She mentioned how this—my life—would seem surreal; almost as if I am living someone else’s for some time to come… I was unaware how obvious it was that I am still floored by the path my life has taken.

Perhaps all these new things in my life, and the easing in that I am doing to the realization that these things are indeed pieces of my own life, not someone else’s, are causing me to become rather nostalgic. I found myself at my rosebushes tonight—as I had mentioned earlier—really giving it to them good with my handy dandy clippers. It seemed like they had never seen a pair of clippers in their lives; but that is all beside the point. For a minute, I felt that I was in my parent’s garden at our Malibu house. I can remember the long days of weed pulling culminating with my mother watering her gigantic birds nest ferns which had been strategically placed in front of the “real” front door, to usher approaching visitors to the left and in through the sliding glass doors.

My father made the planters these ferns inhabited, and I did not realize how lucky my mother was to have someone with the ability to go to his little shop in downtown Inglewood and come home with something that would cost a fortune to buy in the store. Her garden was beautiful, so tropical, and so a part of them—together. It was established, older, well loved—it was theirs and someday I hope to have something as eclectically beautiful to call my own.

My father was not a huge fan of the actual gardening part per se, don’t get me wrong, he’d get out there on a Sunday afternoon and pull his fair share of weeds, always keeping up with the best of us, but he certainly did not revel in the task. His forte was accessorizing—dressing the garden up in a new set of stairs, making star gazers (which I wish I had a few of my own), and doing all the heavy work. I thought that I hated those times when I was younger, I mean, it was time out of my Sunday spent getting dirty, finding grotesque alien looking bugs, being pricked by thorns, and fighting with every weed that came my way. I really thought that I would not miss having to go out in the yard and pull weeds—I was wrong.

I miss the time spent bent over a plot of land pulling out milk weeds, and jumping back when a grub came out of the ground with the roots of a giant weed. I miss my mom going inside at around 1:30 in the afternoon to make sandwiches for everyone. I miss watching the sun go down off of our deck—watching it duck into the sea and listening to my dad tell tales of the Merchant Marines. I miss smelling wet dirt while my mom finished up watering and my dad told me that the green flash, although clothed in all sorts of lore and fairy tales did in fact happen every time the sun went down and that there was some kind of scientific explanation for it but he wasn’t really sure what it was. I had such a rich young life.

I hope I can give that same gift to Ocean. I want her to moan and groan about coming out into the garden with me, but I hope secretly she enjoys it. I hope that she too will look in her flower beds when she buys her first home in hopes of seeing a weed she can pull. I hope that her husband talks as fondly of her green thumb as her father does of mine. I hope she likes the smell of wet dirt, and I hope she never gets sick of hearing about her grandparents, for the older I get, the more I hope I can be like them.