Nearing the Garden Stage

There is that moment in an infant’s development when he has managed to crawl, managed to pull himself erect, and even dared to momentarily let go of the table leg, but stands teetering -- caught between the urge to walk and the security of holding on.  As spring lurches, by fits and starts, into reliable presence I feel myself similarly teetering between the greenhouse and the garden.  Anxious to begin in earnest with all the fruit and physicality the soil represents, I recede into the relative security of the sunny enclosure with its neatly lighted rows of sprouting seed cells and the concise sprinkles of the watering can.  Not much can happen as long as the growth is confined there -- but that’s just it.  Once transplanted to the garden, all kinds of things can happen; only a few of which are good.  There are, in other words, opportunity costs to possibility.

Since late February I have been tending seeds -- sorting the packages by germination requirements, sowing on schedule according to need, watering, warming, wooing and coaxing.  It is fiercely loving parenting, this pre-gardening business.  Just this week the last of the seeds went into their cups, and the first of the tomatoes moved up to bigger digs.  

Wispy cumin.  
Recalcitrant eggplant.  
Shy peppers
Exuberant chard.
Puppy-eyed romanesco.
Reticent lavender.

Some have crept -- patiently stretching yoga-like into vertical stem.  Others erupted after little more than a kiss of the compost -- animated by a raw and native joie de vivre.  Some teased -- keeping to themselves in subterranean mischief -- until I had abandoned their prospects, condescending only then to emerge.  Still others are, I am reconciled, stillborn.  By now, however, every time the pups and I open the door and step inside that warm and moist horticultural cocoon the garden’s foreshadowing is plain.  And soon the reality of it -- the perspirational, aspirational, and terrifyingly vulnerable work of it -- will begin.  

Which is what I ache for.  
And dread.
All at the same time.

Teetering in the liminal space between safety and soaring. 
Like so much of life.