SG and I finished our season of work today as groundskeepers of the Mountain Magnolia Inn, my parents' business. To the best of my calculations, I have been tending those 2 1/4 acres of grounds there for 12 years now. Every year I tell myself and others that it is my last year, and then early the next spring I go back and work the grounds for another year. There are several truths of the matter. One, I love the place. Two, it's a killer work gig for Hot Springs, land of very few job opportunities. Three, each season that I work the grounds there, my awareness becomes more finely tuned to the sense of place and the subtleties that can only be perceived about a place slowly over time. I love how I can smell the first breeze of spring there in about mid February, and how the flowers of April and May always shock me with their beauty and intoxicating aromas. I love to drink wine from the enormous petals of the magnolia tree, and how its perfume transports me back to my childhood and sometimes it seems even to a time before I was born. I love the summer cicadas, and how the very first wind of fall blasts me with sadness in August and sends walnut leaves swirling all around the place- I always have to stop in my tracks and watch that happen. And then the third week of August rolls around and like clockwork, the spider lilies pop up out of the lawn with no leaves and bloom like crazy. In September the zinnias get really moldy, but the garden asters go hog wild. October brings leaves to rake, and there is always lots of comradarie to be had with fellow rakers. On a chilly damp day we burn all the brush and branches pruned and gathered throughout the year, and usually someone from the fire department comes to see that everything is OK. In November the light is scarce afternoons as we prepare our hearts for the dark of the year and tuck in all the gardens for the winter. The end of the end is cutting off the well pump and draining the irrigation. That happened today.
Tending the gardens there year after year satisfies some deep need of mine- a need to stay put and be a part of something. I lament the fact that I did not get to spend my childhood on that piece of earth, with those trees to climb and the river just across the railroad tracks. I wish I had known this place my whole life, and that all my people were here and that there were not missing links or fragments of life and memories. Really, I have this opinion that us humans are not hard-wired to live the way we live in this day and age, to see so many places but not really know them, to take in so much information and try to keep tabs on the whole wide world.
But alas, we are an adaptable species, and I will continue patronizing the world wide web, and listening to the news on NPR as I drive to a whole other city and county to work most mornings. I will continue to watch foreign movies and travel to other places and talk to all sorts of people just to hear their stories. The thing is though, I bet come next spring, about the middle of February, you can find me pruning hemlock trees and sowing larkspur seeds at the Mountain Magnolia in Hot Springs- even if I may have sworn up and down I wasn't going to be doing that again.
