Margie

It was that day she took me to a workshop on how to plant a perennial border. There was the promise of lunch and learning which plants should be planted in the company of other plants.  She wasn’t as accommodating later on, ideas rarely turned into action plans the older we got.  But for this, way back those many summers ago, she made the plan to go, just us two.  

She thought I knew so much about gardening because I remembered plant names. Because I spent time in my backyard each spring,  planting, tending. Pretending. She didn’t know these plants were yearly purchases, coming innocently to my yard from the greenhouses, spending the summer with me, but never living to see the next.

She’d heard of these people who had left their lucrative, creative, intense New York lives, for a farm in the middle of Maine where they planted gardens and harvested herbs which they’d hang in fragrant bundles upside down from the rafters of their barn and would make gorgeous wreaths to sell, and write books about their new life adventures. “You can’t imagine.” She’d always tell me I couldn’t imagine. “I can imagine,” I’d reply resentfully, hating to be told any idea was beyond my capacity to comprehend, even though it was just a phrase that had nothing to do with me really.

We drove from her house to the farm. She drove as she always did with one foot on the brake and the other on the gas, over back roads she knew as if she’d always driven there. We ended on a tree-lined road and parked in the dusty driveway alongside the farm. I remember little from that day except for the few hours we spent planting hostas in a shaded bed the new farmers were creating. We grumbled, resenting our need to help them to do this when they already knew how, and we would still have to go back home where we would continue to plant the tall things in front of the the short things, the shade things in the brilliant and devastating sunshine because we knew no better. But we dug, we moved the hostas around in groups of three.  Always plant groups of three, we were told. Always continue an idea of design along the entire border. Don’t just buy one of a plant, buy 3.  And then it was time for lunch.

She’d told me about the lunch, how the woman from New York would prepare a lunch for all the volunteers, something simple but fresh from their garden, and we’d eat all together. We’d whispered about it all morning as we dug holes for their hostas.  Then we were called to lunch alongside a sunlit field, in a small cottage they’d constructed from barn boards and sashed windows thrown open to let in the breeze. There was a simple kitchen, a long wooden countertop, glass vases and jam jars filled with coneflowers and bachelor buttons and sprigs of rosemary, and a few tables for us to gather. She had made cold chicken salad served over greens she’d gathered from the garden, drizzled with my first ever taste of raspberry vinaigrette that turned the dark fragile greens and the poached chicken a vivid red.  It was a lunch we always remembered for its delicious simplicity.

I don’t remember our drive home, I don’t remember us bringing any new skills into her garden or mine. I don’t remember ever going back to the New York people’s farm. But I remember and will always remember that day with her, that gift of a day, where she chose me, where we went together and created a new garden as friends.