Leaving the Garden

Written sometime around August 6th
(this is my first peach on my peach tree to the left here...still too green)

I am preparing to leave my garden for the season. This feels quite premature. It is not even the middle of August yet here in Maine, and several of my crops have not yet come ripe. I don’t really feel ready but I need to go. Goodbye Maine, sweet land of fog and potatoes!, of fish and blueberries!, of coldness and dampness!, of tradition and roots! (like beets etc.) My life is about to change. I am pulling up and following my family to Los Angeles, that Pacific precipice of American ambitions and delusions, a place I NEVER thought I would end up.

Five years ago now I was living on a solar powered, off the grid homestead at the end of an un-maintained road in western Maine with my first husband. I had chickens and turkeys and extensive gardens that we had built by hand. We saved quite a few of our own seeds and canned or froze much of our produce. We had just incorporated as a CSA. We also worked within the surrounding communities as educators and community youth leaders. Occasionally people would come and visit our homestead and I felt that we provided an example of sustainability that could help the world, or at least help our local communities embrace more resource conservative living. My extremely unconventional lifestyle was an incredibly satisfying expression of my beliefs and ideals. I felt very strong and confident much of the time.

But my heart, that mysterious organ of true desires, didn’t agree. And I very unexpectedly fell in lightning-bolt love with another man from a very different walk of life. I got a divorce and left the homestead and all of its trials and satisfactions behind. I moved in with my new love and his several children, we married, and I became in an instant a live-in caregiver of teenagers. They’re really great teenagers, but tofu scramble or roast chicken, hand plucked and fresh from the yard were just not going to cut it for dinner anymore. It was a big adjustment in many ways. And then I unfortunately became quite ill and couldn’t work my nonprofit job or anything like it anymore. During this period I couldn’t live so starkly by my ideals, I lost many of my comfortable relationships, I lost much of my physical strength and stamina, I didn’t even have a garden for a while there. In effect everything that had held up my world and made me feel sure….it all systematically fell apart, and this emptied me out and totally broke me open.

Luckily for me a guiding light through the depths has been the complete and utter sureness of my love for my new husband and his love for me. It grew and blossomed in the darkness and saved me from a crisis of faith. I can’t argue with it. It’s so right, which must mean that through all of the upheaval, my life is headed somewhere right for me as well! I just really want to know what the destination might be though. So….as they say, (sort of), the universe helps those who help themselves. I intend to try to write my way back onto my feet.


Here is a slice of my journal entry from last May during our first visit to our new house in Los Angeles:

“It is 4:30 on the morning of my 32nd birthday. I wake up lying on the floor……like, flat on the hardwood floor on a top of a very flat, slightly damp air mattress. (In the usual mad rush of kids and dogs and work we forgot the charger for the air mattress pump.) There is no furniture, no lamps, and no hot water. It is just before dawn and it sounds like a jungle in the garden out there. Yesterday at this time I was waking to foghorns on the stormy, grey, austere Atlantic outside my house. Now the fog from the Pacific rolls through the outrageous tumbling bouganvillea and hummingbird filled trumpet flowers and jasmine that populate this strange seeming fairyland that is California.

All of this reminds me of my backpacking days in my early 20’s. Living out of a bag, sleeping on floors, surrounded by birds all of the time. Only then I was young and energetic. I feel infinitely older now, and it’s not just from the night on the floor.

The previous five years have proceeded like a ravine slicing through my life, carving the way from my twenties into my 30’s. My transformation has been dramatic, extreme, full of depths and heights, and totally unavoidable in order to get to the other side. I prayed for change and it came, as always. I just haven’t made sense of it yet.”

In this blog I’m going to try to make some sense of things…I hope. I intend to revisit my memories of my recent past in an attempt to knit myself together again and heal the chasm of the last five years so that I can step onto higher ground on the other side. Bring the old me integrated into the new me, pull together the east and the west in my life. I am going to try to write at least every week, reaching back into my memories of the adventures and routines of my previous life, and at the same time document what kind of new life I find and build for myself in the City of Angels.