Garden Party

I got lost right outside my door the other day. I was out sprucing up my patio, literally thinking about nothing when my attention was caught by an airplane floating across the sky. It was bright orange against a perfect blue sky, and I couldn’t hear its engines. In that second, I had one of those joyous moments when I suddenly remembered something I hadn’t thought of in years; it was like I could see the past like it had just happened. I remember my grandmother stopping what she was doing to run outside in her house shoes and shade her eyes so she could watch jets fly overhead. She literally marveled at them, and asked that she be buried in a cemetery near an airfield so the planes could fly over her forever. My siblings and I used to laugh when she stood outside in her smock and gawked at the jets. If there were more than two, she was convinced that the Blue Angels were overhead, and would look up in the sky and then back at us to see if we were looking, then back up in the sky, smiling the smile of a person in awe. There were no airplanes when she was a girl. She was born on a farm and bore my father on a farm; she never drove a car in her life. When I was a kid, Star Trek was my favorite television show. The people of the future, as I saw it, had the most wonderful gadgets anyone could think of. Not only did they have spaceships, they had communicators with which they could talk to one another instantly. They could record without film and transplant organs. Absurdly, I thought, “Wow.” I’ve turned into my grandmother.

I wouldn’t have had any of those thoughts if I hadn’t been outside in my little garden.

It’s a small patio with a few flowerbeds that, until last weekend, was populated only by weeds. Now it has freshly hoed (sandy) soil, a damp, earthy aroma, and seeds for impossibly colorful flowers that I hope are germinating as I write. But what it lacks in size it makes up for with a relaxed, cordial atmosphere. It is a place to let my mind flow freely. I can almost hear Louis Armstrong singing “What a Wonderful World” as I daydream, wondering if my flowers will look like the ones on the package. Nothing is urgent in the garden. Unless you’re an ant.

Even though I know better, I put out food for a couple stray cats that also seem to enjoy lounging about on the patio. Being outdoor cats, they don’t seem to be as dainty as indoor ones, and often scatter bits of food around the plastic plate I put out for them. I was on the patio, smoking and assessing the garden, wondering what sort of improvement I should make next, when something caught my eye. I had to look twice to make sure I wasn’t relaxing to the point of hallucination. As I watched, an errant piece of cat food, the size of a pea, maybe, was moving by itself across the bricks. A closer look revealed four tiny ants carrying what to them must have seemed like a miracle from the gods. As I looked, I saw a second piece of cat food being carried to a small pile of sand dug out between the cracks of the patio floor. It was only about eight feet from the cat food to the anthill, but I got to thinking that what they were doing was akin to four humans lugging a cupcake fifty yards wide to a cave twenty miles away. I had to smile as I admired the ants. I saw that they had reached the entrance to their home, but had encountered a problem: The piece of cat food was too wide to fit in the crack. They tried it from every angle but it wasn’t going to fit. I imagined myself as a great benefactor, and reached down, picked up the piece of cat food and broke it so the crumbs would fit the doorway. The ants scurried about when I put the pieces back down but it didn’t take them long to get the smaller loads delivered. As I watched, one of the stray cats wandered back and stepped directly on the ants’ receiving dock. I shooed her back, but she was persistent and came again, only this time, she must have smelled the tiny piece of food, because she inhaled it, ants and all, and crunched it away. She looked up, smacking her lips, oblivious to the frenzy she had caused among the ants. I put a little more food on the dish to distract the cat, and my cell phone rang. I talked for a few minutes and when I hung up the phone, I realized I was standing on the anthill.

In spite of the onslaught of technology, or perhaps because of it, there just isn’t anything like digging in the dirt, planting seeds, and daydreaming. No matter how bad we may think things are for us, they could be much, much worse. Giant monsters could appear in the sky, eat us and crush our dwellings, and never think once what they’ve done. Yup. I can get lost in my garden.