Thing is, none of this is very easy. Although Jeremy has agreed to come here and participate there's still not too much for us to write about. So far we have pulled up the old and overgrown plot, gone out of town for 10 rainy days and returned home to weed covered mud pile (lesson # 1: weeds. grow. back. unless you get them at their deepest roots you are not "getting" them at all). I spent the morning at the garden yesterday doing nothing but looking around. It was early and the crows were out, all the kittens were still sleeping. People are growing the most wonderful things: strawberries, peppers and lettuces, coneflowers that stretch long toward the sun.



Then I went out looking for the perfect seeds and had a picture perfect basket full until I ditched them remembering that there is still so much work to be done. It would be nice to plant some sugar pumpkins but let's be honest - I don't bake... but maybe I can start one summer - just in time for Halloween?... So this is how my thinking goes, instead of taking tiny steps toward something good I'm overwhelmed from the beginning with nothing much but weeds and seeds. Let's go back to begin at A, then follow it with B...move on slowly then from there. When something might be your forever really, what's the rush?

ANNE:

Let's be honest: this is NOT our garden. In fact, this looks nothing like our garden. Our plot looks more like the crazy lady on your corner's garden - overgrown and full of weeds, where dandelions come to die. Yesterday we found a decaying skeleton of a tiny field mouse sticking to a trap. A spider, round and huge and terrible was climbing up my arm. The snails have taken over fast and even though you try hard not to, your big shoes pop their shells. There is a tiny patch of mint though so I guess we'll start from there.

4 years ago I put my name on a waiting list for a plot at a local community garden. I knew the list was very long and that being chosen was unlikely but life was slow and I was bored so I sent an application. A little more about what happened here.

I'll admit I was nervous to ask Jeremy if he would be interested in working with me but I knew right away I didn't want to do it alone. The whole thing felt very overwhelming and I am lazy and in true commitmentphobic fashion I was instantly afraid of all it would entail. Truth be told I can barely get the dude to take some time off for a movie - how was I going to convince him to help me run a farm?

But love, like gardening, can often be surprising and there we were at 8am standing side by side in front of the most ridiculously overgrown and run down little plot of land you've ever seen.

We got the keys to the gate and a strict set of instructions (community service hours are mandatory, false garlic ruins everything, you can only harvest a handfull of fruit from the orchards per day etc). When the tour guide asked us if we had any further questions one of the other new members leaned over and whispered "Yeah, is there an iphone app for this?". Most of us spent our first morning laughing at how little we actually KNOW about planting a garden, still Jeremy seemed confident, eager even, to begin.

I've gone on too long already without making much of a point. While we were working yesterday, digging in the dirt and ripping out the weeds I saw my boyfriend differently. The very same urban, busy, stressed out Jeremy that I have been staring at for 4 long years turned into someone else entirley: a sun kissed mountain man of sorts, the kind of guy who puts down his heavy metal tools to save a snail, to watch a rolly polly and a ladybug scurry up their muddy hills. We weren't even an hour into it when it hit me:

GARDENING IS SEXY.

And then there was a moment, in the late afternoon when the air was hot and thick with work and the garden was growing busy when he looked at me and said: Correct me if I am wrong, but this land, this plot - is ours forever right? and it took everything inside me not to cry, not to burst out into dusty grateful tears and throw my filthy arms around him relieved about forever, so happy that this might really last. I spent the rest our time there quietly, uninterested in being bossy, letting him do things like he wanted to - even when that meant listening to him make a screaming dying baby alien sound EVERY single time he pulled up a root.

He doesn't know about this new blog yet and I am not sure he'll be as enthused about sharing this story as I am, but when I woke up this morning I couldn't help but think of all the ways that gardening and loving are the same. You think you have a plan and you want it to be perfect, but nature has it's way with you and you're forcefully invited to be patient. You are required to go slowly, to make the most of all that endless time that passes in between the big things, the so called "important" things you think define your life. We can not rush this garden no matter what we do, there are bigger things than us in charge, we just show up and dig.

I'll be sending this post to Jeremy this morning along with the login information and an invitation to share his own version of what is happening between us. My hope is that we use this place to tell a story about the seeds, sprouts, bugs and blooms of loving, living and planting together. Wish us luck!