Cold spin

Who knew that I loved to garden? I have loved it in theory for years, a theory supported by the fact that for the last twelve years I have spent half my time having a yard the size of a living room and the other half having only window boxes with no yard at all. In this new house, though, the front is exposed to the sea and the weather and the back stays level long enough for a lovely deck (er, if we had the money to build one) and then tumbles down steep terraces to a sheltered and sunny hideaway. In the back the sea is less constant a presence, a low whooshing that doesn’t detract from the millions of birds that eat the seeds in the trees on the hill. It is a place that feels magical, a place where magical things might have happened, might happen again.

The problem is that the hideaway is, well, hidden away, and the house doesn’t communicate that well with the back garden (one of its few flaws). There are so many things to do to the inside of the house, and the weather has been so wintery (cold and wet or windy or both), that we’ve mostly ignored the garden. On Saturday, that changed.

The week leading up to Saturday was a farce, really, with hilly ups and downs like the New Zealand landscape. Our washing machine broke and we were down. But they would come and fix it—up. They came and told us it was a Major Problem, and they’d have to come and take it away—down. They rang the next day and said they’d be dropping off a loaner—yea! The loaner, when delivered in the driving rain, turned out not to work either. Get the pattern?

And other bits were just like that. No heat in the house yet, and the weather turned frigid. But the heat pump guy came on Friday and said he could install next week—I went to sleep dreaming of heat. But it turned out he couldn’t install it where we wanted it and so we’re heatless still and for the near future.

To these household discomforts are added a healthy dose of psychic discomfort. Last week, my tenure and promotion became official. I’m an associate professor now, and have a contract “without term.” IF I want it. I expected to drink champagne and feel celebratory and cheerful, but it sent me spinning. Do I want it? What DO I want, anyway? A heat pump? A fireplace? An academic job in the US? A consulting job in NZ? So many choices in front of me and this one somehow intractable. I spent the week spinning while my washing machine stayed still; each night I dream of good and bad choices, lovely and terrible possibilities.

So on Saturday I wanted to get out of the spin and get rooted, which meant, ironically, unrooting wheelbarrows full of weeds from the back yard. This yard has had a rather up-and-down existence too: landscaped by a professional landscaper 20 years ago, ignored for the next ten years, nurtured by the woman who lived in the house just before us and then neglected by us and, worse, trampled on by our builders for a year.

I was not particularly cheerful heading into the garden; it’s a good place to feel overwhelmed by the nascent potential and by the hundreds of hours of work needed to realise that potential. And I was cold and bundled in long johns and jeans, winter coat, hat and scarf. I plopped myself down on one of the terraces and faced the ancient struggle of my Irish farming ancestors: person against weed. I yanked and tugged and dug and scrabbled. I put my whole body weight into some of the bigger ones, landing hard on the ground when the roots finally gave up and exchanging a spray of dirt in my hair for the spray of curses I directed back at them. I trimmed and deadheaded and cleared pathways. At the end of the day I was dirty and tired and more cheerful than I’d been the whole week. The unkempt, weedy land had become an unkempt, mostly-weedfree land, which was all I was hoping for anyway.

The washing machine is still broken and we still have no heat. I still have to decide whether or not to go back to my old life. It’s still wintery cold, and on Sunday the rain came all day in horizontal sheets. But the feel of roots slowly loosening, and the shock of success when a big clump of weeds is in the compost and not in the garden has soothed me. Now, sitting on the train to go and get the kids, sleepy and warm in the afternoon sun, spinning seems like such a silly thing to do. Unless, of course, you’re a washing machine.