Bread and Circus

Carrying Water Instead

Is he really in the Epstein files?

Did you-know-who take hard drugs while stealing our data and cutting every government program that investigated him?

It would be nice, I texted a friend after reading about all this, if the first one deported the other one, and then got kicked out of office due to exposed election fraud or bribery in retaliation.

But that’s me sounding off. Really none of this is nice at all. It’s deeply embarrassing to them and us. It feels like we’ve fallen so low in just a few months.

Besides, it’s all just bread and circus, I tell myself. They’ll make up sooner or later. There’s too much money and power in it for them to do otherwise. These two men are proverbial mushrooms on the top of a dung heap the rest of us very well will be cleaning up long after they’re shriveled and forgotten.

So I quickly feel disgusted and go outside to spend some time in the actual dirt. Or more like check on what’s growing out of the dirt from when I previously planted things.

It’s been so hot that I almost don’t actually do anything but repeatedly wipe away my own sweat while admiring my roses. Then I take a selfie in front of them, as they look amazing this year, since it seems to have been a great season for everybody’s roses.

I notice the grass needs mowing and a million plantain plants need pulling. The tart cherry tree also needs netting before the birds start eyeing the red hue the fruit is is turning. (Usually we get 5-7lbs of them, but it’ll be a low-yield year for the cherries, since fruit trees, like everything else, have on and off cycles.)

I mow my lawn just before the rain comes and then take my kids to the Y to jump in the bouncy castle they have inflated on an indoor field each weekend. Except this time someone misplaced the key to the storage closet and there was no bouncy castle today.

I try to explain to my five year old, who is now crying, that someone has taken the key, so they couldn’t set it up. She furrows her brow angrily and said “was it Donald Trump?!”

I don’t know if they discuss politics among classmates at her age, but in our house she doesn’t ever see this man on tv or hear much at all about what he’s doing. The only other time I’ve mentioned his name to her was in the fall, when the hours at our local library got shortened and she was crying, wanting to know why it wasn’t open yet, and I’d said Donald Trump and the people working for him had cut the library funding. She was as deeply offended by that fact as I was, if not more.

But here I was, feeling impressed by her political inference skills, concluding that even though it’s kind of hilarious to think of him perpetrating such a small scale heist, I could absolutely see how a man like this might very well choose to keep the bouncy castles under lock and stolen key as well.

We kicked a few soccer balls around and then returned home for lunch, the front yard dripping wet with new rain, pink and yellow with roses and yarrow, coreopsis and dianthus, plus a few peonies that hadn’t quite fallen apart yet.

My kids’ bouncy house disappointment notwithstanding, I was glad to be home. It felt like it greeted me. It is finally looking like someone planted things here and loves the space, even though I haven’t watered anything, and I haven’t weeded in a week and a half.

After lunch I prepare for dinner guests and work on hastily creating a volunteer tree watering signup sheet for a tree planting I have been helping organize with the Quincy Tree Alliance, which I’m now on the board of. Two native serviceberry trees donated by the Wollaston Hills Neighborhood Association for Safford Park.

This past week I’ve been focused on such a wide range of activities, including an extensive job application process, end of school year plans for my kids, and more gym time than gardening and nature. But clearly I’ve still made some time for the great outdoors, despite the fact that it’s been boiling hot out and I’m in my third trimester.

I see how graciously the garden allows me this reprieve, with things I planted in prior years and weeded earlier in spring doing just fine without me hovering too closely.

Sometimes it’s not what you do, it’s what you have.

And yet much of what you have is based on either what you’ve done, or someone before you has done before.

I think about that sort of thing a lot more nowadays, these quiet legacies of what we say and do in our pocket parks and front yards and neighborhoods and homes. How we so often tell stories of being self-made, because they sound really good, but almost none of us are. We each have a hand in the design of many kinds of creative community-influencing endeavors, whether that’s locking up libraries and bouncy castles or planting roses and park trees.

I find each year that I am increasingly proud of the fact that native wildflowers, as well as peaches and plums and cherries and apples, are growing so well on such a small parcel of land as my own, which previously only held a few scraggly hedges and a wheelchair ramp. It was such an excellent pandemic project, a gift to my future (now current) self and family and neighborhood to do this, and it’s paying dividends for my confidence and mental health, even as life has picked up, becoming much more full of social activities and workouts and children and now a likely full on return to the workforce in the years since.

I get reminded that our gardens and parks are meant to be explored and worked in rather than obsessed over to be just so, as it’s the state of being in them is where the magic is, like how a bouncy castle functions when it’s jumped in. It’s there for the call and repeat, the inviting to and responding to activity.

Even when I’ve found myself in a job interview process, indoors and asking questions on video calls about facility selection strategy and the difference between grants and awards and lots of other technical things that I’m genuinely excited about getting back into, some part of me knows that 20 feet outside of my door in one direction there are six kinds of roses, plus pink and purple spiderwort covered in bees, and in the other direction there’s small beds of mint and lemon balm, should I need a calming herbal tea. The comfort that thought brings me is immeasurable.

I hope the people who help plant and care for and will soon walk among the new serviceberry trees in Safford Park can feel similarly.

I want to say, and indeed probably will say as I move along in the process - that growing an org or a movement is not unlike growing a garden. You take stock of what you have, what your budget is, what your style is, and what your work input might look like, then you put in what you can, getting others to join you where they can, knowing that if all goes well, what you plant will soon grow beyond you all.

As the weekend winds down, I plan playdates for my children, tidy up my home office space, bringing in a single rose for my desk, then look at the tree watering signup sheet. The whole thing is full, except for two weeks in late September, all these people who aren’t thinking of just themselves, their own bread and circus, but out here knowing the happiness to be found in making simple quiet decisions to carry water for new park trees all summer long.