Rooted by Sarah Anne Childers
Two years into my time gardening at Laura's she retired and moved to a small town in the Cascades. She rented out her city home, and I continued to garden in the backyard. The summer Laura retired, her daughter moved back to Seattle, perhaps to stay Laura told me, hopeful. Laura asked if I minded if her daughter visited the garden to pick raspberries. I did not mind. In fact, I hoped to meet her.
Ever since finding Little’s stone I had imagined Laura’s daughter as a girl in the garden puttering beside Laura as my daughter did now with me, as I had with my mother in her sprawling garden in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains. Laura liked that there was a little girl playing in her garden again. She even lent us the tools her daughter had once used - sturdy pint-sized rake, shovel and hoe, the last my daughter's favorite because it was so excellent for whacking the soil, and the poor lilac hedge too when she thought I wasn’t looking.
I didn’t see Laura’s daughter in the garden that summer. At the time I wondered if she came when I wasn't there to nibble raspberries and perhaps search for Little’s stone, which I made sure not to disturb. I wonder now if she knew already what I have come to know in my bones and hands that seek dirt, and that is this: a mother’s garden is more than a garden. I wonder now if that knowledge drew Laura's daughter back or kept her away or perhaps both simultaneously, a push-pull I can appreciate.
My first spring in Laura's garden, I hauled in bags of musky compost to dig into the beds. And then, after whispering a little prayer to whatever deity looked after seed packets, I planted. I had a tentative plan, a fuzzy vision of the possibilities plus a mandate from my daughter that “we grow strawberries and juice and granola bars, mama!” But mostly I made it up as I went, guided by the fantastical whims of a novice and a child (this explains the root beer mint and dragon's tongue beans).