Warm sunny weather finally hit Chicago this week! I’ve been looking forward to it as if it would solve all of my problems, but then…what if it did?
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My family’s first early-pandemic project was a garden. I say “my family” as a cover; in truth, I channeled all my “the world outside our walls became a biohazard overnight” panic into a vision of a wild place where my kids could play safely outside. Under my borderline-dictatorial leadership, we tore up half of the grass in the yard with no real plan beyond a sketch and a strong desire for a native wildflower & prairie grass garden. Monty Don would have been horrified at my lack of research or foundational understanding. I grew up in apartments, OK, Monty? I don’t know from soil and seeds. I don’t have time to learn about gardening. I’m busy.
Like most residential lots in Chicago, my house is on a narrow and long strip of land, intimately cozied up between neighbors. Most houses sit gregariously close to the sidewalk with a square back yard and a garage going into the alley, but my beautiful, rundown house is on the very back of the lot. In exchange for no garage, we have an unusually spacious and sun-drenched front yard that, up to this point, was practically a blank canvas. The green grassy lawn and tidy, narrow perimeter flowerbeds the previous owners nurtured didn’t fit my family’s vibe. We are a people of chaos, stumbling forward and saying yes and figuring it out as we go. Who has the patience for roses when diapers need to be changed and alphabets need to be sung and cackling children need to be sprayed with a hose? I wanted a rich habitat for pollinators for our urban ecosystem and for my children’s joy; something that would thrive despite my haphazard, uneducated gardening; something that would evoke the wildflowers & untended acres I grew up with in Texas. We scattered pollinator & jungle prairie seed mixes from Prairie Moon, poked knuckle-deep holes in the soil and make room for little fingers to place sunflower seeds, and waited.
It was a wild success!
Last weekend was Mother’s Day, which has become our day to wake up the garden. We removed the winter cover of browned leaves and fallen stalks, planted sunflower seeds and experimental annuals (fingers crossed for scarlet runners up the arbor trellis!), got cranky under the sun and dirty under our nails. I’m so excited to see what happens this year. It feels like wild alchemy.
I have a tendency to go into projects with a brash, mostly unearned confidence, trusting that I will figure things out as I go and hoping I’ll enjoy the ride. That’s how the garden was; that’s how all of my quilting projects begin; that’s also how I have made comics in the past. I have an idea, sketch as little as I can get away with to get the shape of the story organized, and then get to work deep in the mess of it. For my next book, I’m trying to be more careful and planful. I’m scripting it out first, and even though I’m antsy and irritable to not be drawing already, it is paying off wildly in (what I hope will be) nuance and complexity of character and storytelling. It is making me go slower, following the characters as they evolve rather than moving in blocky archetype. I am excited to see the book take shape, and I’m eager to get off my keyboard and onto paper.
And then.
In recent weeks of writing, I learned that my main character is a gardener.
A fastidious gardener.
A gardener with a lifetime of wisdom and expertise.
So now, after all that, I have to learn about proper gardening.
Goddamnit.
Recommendations:
- I stayed up past my bedtime on Monday (a true sacrifice of morning coherence) to finish watching Slow Horses, a spy tv series with Gary Oldman & Kristen Scott Thomas that careens from one chaotic accident to another. A delight in 6 tight episodes!
- Newly listening to the audiobook of Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change by Angela Garbes. I am already getting a lot out of it, and feeling invigorated and validated and connected.
- Over the weekend when I was assembling furniture (a happy place for me where part of the pleasure is muttering curses in a near-constant stream) I listened to the Jeff Hiller episode of “I Said No Gifts” and just adored it. I loved Hiller in the imperfect but deeply felt & infectiously winning “Somebody Somewhere,” his character was so familiar and warmly embodied, I was happy to get to spend more time listening to him.
- Strongly recommend spending time with 18 month olds who are hungry for nouns. “This? This? This?” “Olive! It’s good!” “Ove good! Ove good!” What a joy.
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Diary comics: