Mommy Brain

…about gardening.

“I do not love to garden. I love other people’s gardens, and I like cut flowers. I have Astroturf and a whole lot of high-quality plastic flowers stuck in the dirt of our front yard. These are quite a lovely sight and bring to mind many e. e. cummings poems.

People used to give me potted plants and trees, and what happened to them is really too horrible to go into here. They’d end up looking like I watered them with Agent Orange. I’d tell people that I didn’t do well with potted plants, and they’d decide that I’d just never met the right one and that they were going to be the person to free me and cause God to restore my glorious gift of sight and all that, and they’d bring me some little training plant, and I’d try really hard to water it and keep it in or out of sunlight, whatever its little card of introduction said it preferred, and to take it for little walks around the house, and within about a month you could almost hear chlorophyllous breakdown, a Panic in Needle Park sort of thing. Then you’d see it clutching its little throat, staring at you with its little Keane eyes, gasping and accusing – and I mean, who needs it? Believe me, I have enough problems as it is.”

from Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott