Gardening: A retrospective

Today, I stuck my bare hands into the dry, itchy refuse left over from last year's garden. My feet got dirty. I wore a dorky straw hat. As I was raking the leaves that I refused to rake as a matter of principle in the fall, I thought about the last time I had helped prepare this garden for planting, which was two springs ago.

Last spring, I lived in Wuhan (yes, Wuhan), and I was wrapping up the academic year at my university. Two springs ago, on the day after my birthday, I woke up hungover. It was a Sunday morning. It also happened to be the very morning that my partner declared would be garden day. Fuck. Sick, twisted timing, I said to no one. Instead, I nodded. Yep, I guess today we’d spend the worst of my hangover hauling walrus-sized bags of dirt and manure from a horrible, busy store like Menards where your cart never works, and then spend the following interminable hours under the randomly fierce May sun doing strenuous activities. To add to this, I’ve never been a natural at gardening. I forget every year how plants grow, marvel at it briefly, and then forget again. It’s not a ‘flow’ activity, although I like to pretend it is.

The night before, a group of us had gone out dancing for my birthday. After almost two months of not drinking, I had tried drinking again. Maybe 4-5 drinks. It was a fun night of dancing and being with friends, and I never tipped over into anything sloppy or regrettable. At the end of the night, I got obsessively stuck on the word ‘conjugal’, and kept on repeating it and laughing as my friend drove us home.

        Several short hours later, I stood hunched, exhausted, and mildly nauseated in our backyard, trying to predict what my partner would want us to do next. Rake things? Okay. Pick up the things we raked? I guess. Dump walrus-sized bags of gorgeous dirt here? Alright. Rake the dirt? Seems unnecessary, but okay. It was the tedious foreplay of actual gardening. My hangover segued between its usual phases of getting better, abruptly swan-diving, turning into a rancid irritability, and teetering towards vomiting. My body felt old, achy, weak, and clumsy.

        To be clear: this wasn’t a severe hangover. For me, it was probably mild-medium. At one point, mid-rake, I started to cry. I couldn’t do it anymore, this simple, fulfilling activity under the gorgeous Spring sun. My body couldn’t handle it, and my mind fluttered wildly within a barbed-wire cage of anxiety. My partner was annoyed with me, understandably, since I provided no explanation for my behavior or my inability to do simple tasks. I dropped the rake and went inside. The truth? I couldn’t garden, at least not that day. I probably couldn’t manage to do much of anything at that moment.

That mild-medium hangover was my last. There was no ‘rock-bottom’ that I could clearly point to. It was just a fun night out followed by a morning of gardening. Maybe it’s the quiet moments where we realize we don’t lead our own lives.