People seemed surprised when I walked with Shalah into the "garden-recovery" program presented Sunday afternoon by gardening guru Janet Carson.
It's true I don't care for the gardening process. I hate process generally. Show me the product.
Stressing the shocks on the Jeep with bags of dirt and trays and pots of flowers and shrubs transported from the big-box garden center to home ... that bores and fatigues me. Toting and yanking, vital motions of gardening transport, leave me stooped the morning after. Getting down into the ground for planting was no fun for me even when I had a better chance of getting up.
But the look and feel of a small spot of land humanly enhanced for relaxed retreat, taken with morning coffee or a late-afternoon libation ... that is a source of enchantment, even if the garden is overgrown and amateurishly ill-planned. That's part of the charm.
When you spend the day inundated with political outrage, global peril, national dysfunction, mass shootings of children and social-media critics who say you must be a child molester if you accept that there is such a thing as white privilege, it's good at the end of that day to take a sip in the shaded breeze while seated in a cushioned chair positioned near a little man-made waterfall as Pip, the resident cardinal, tries to teach Shalah how to sing as he sings.
"Hush, I'm talking to Pip," Shalah literally said to me the other day when I tried to bring up something I thought important.
We had a landscaper lined up years ago. But then the late, great rescue mutt Scooter's internal blockage required an emergency lifesaving surgery costing about what the landscaper was set to charge. So, Scooter got more time to live and we got a self-styled backyard jungle motif. The layout is a monument to the little black car-struck puppy that Shalah retrieved from the middle of a busy avenue and carried into the vet's office just in time for his first lifesaving surgery.
Scooter was an expensive pet, worth every penny and due every monument.
Our pal who was building our deck referred to our backyard as a "meditation garden," and I liked that even if I'd never thought of it as that. I don't know if the word "meditation" applies to drinking a glass of chilly pinot grigio while listening to '70s "yacht rock" played over the portable micro Bluetooth player hanging from a branch of a Japanese maple tree. But it clearly counts as the good life.
The house-cleaner stepped out last week to see the size of a fallen limb that I was dealing with, and said, "Wow, y'all got a vibe going on out here."
So, when Mother Nature decides to run the December temperature to zero, and when two 11-foot sweet olive bushes drop all their leaves over two days less than a week later, and then when Shalah says she fears damage to the entire bank of old-fashioned hydrangeas that have reliably produced powder-blue and pink sponge-like beauty for a couple of decades, then, yes, I mobilize.
I miss even March Madness when I get a Facebook message that the Hillcrest Garden Club invites the public to a Sunday-afternoon garden-recovery discussion at Hillcrest Hall.
"What are you doing here?" people asked by way of a welcome.
Right now I'm headed for that pinot grigio on that table over there.
I could have said I was researching how to preserve a monument to a hell of a dog.
Janet Carson knows her stuff and has a very nice way about her. She answered both my questions.
I learned that, when those old-timey hydrangeas show early-spring greening only from the ground with the canes barren and brittle, there likely will be only bloomless low-level growth this year.
And I learned that, since those massive sweet olive bushes display general if sparse leafing throughout, then they are alive, if not necessarily well. I learn they will need pruning so that they might, in time, thicken.
Mainly, and time and again, Carson advised the one thing I happen never to have had, which is patience.
Don't get hasty to act; just sit tight for a while to see what these injured plants show and tell, she said.
But hasty is how I act. The pattern of my life has been to plant the seed of my work one day and behold it in full bloom of publication the next.
Waiting for full serenity to grow back is a matter of high agitation. I'll need to mediate on that for a while in the garden of hydrangea stumps and sparse sweet-olive foliage.
But they're alive, the optimist would remind.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.