Garden Babies

It’s your birthday

My youngest baby’s first birthday was this week, which I celebrated in part by giving away three bags of infant clothes, because (unless life really sees fit to surprise me), after almost seven years spent pregnant and nursing, this is my last offspring. Hopefully one more year of breastfeeding to go (as I’ve done two with each of the others), but it’s clear my babymaking years are coming to a close. Age one still seems closer to baby than it does to toddler, but not by much and not for long. Suddenly she has four teeth and just repeated butt butt butt, laughing along when the other kids got her to say it.

We had a birthday party, but it was for my almost six year old’s Colombian classmate, so I’m a bit hungover today from sipping these tiny mango cocktails rimmed with Tajin seasoning that the grandmother kept giving me, after watching our kids pop about 400 water balloons in a kiddie pool.

My own baby’s birthday party, which we have agreed will include a smash cake, is forthcoming.

Meantime on the big day of, she settled for Colombian ice cream and getting to eat her very first piece of piñata candy, a blue sucker. So by baby standards, there was lots of sugary mess and therefore no settling at all.

But I can see I’m not savoring every moment with this sweet and sticky baby. Most days I’m feeling a vibe more akin to run along and join your siblings while Momma does something else.

Which I’d imagine is natural at this stage and especially given the number of years I’ve been doing it.

Perhaps it’s also because I’ve secretly had another baby. Just not the human kind. A policy baby. A project that has been a tad bit less difficult to gestate, but which I have continued to quietly hold space for in the background since before I had any children at all.

Ironically it is this week that it has suddenly come alive, in the same space where it first almost died. A story of resurrection.

I feel so anxious, before it happens. Unsure why. It is not because I’ve been having more endometriosis pain and inflammation in all the heat (which I have), or because my garden got strafed by errant men with weedwhackers (which it did), or because I was afraid the city would tell me to tear it all down because the land doesn’t belong to me when I complained (which I was).

It is because of reexperiencing where I was last year. Battling preeclampsia, then with an infant in the NICU for what would turn out to be two weeks. The primal animal devastation of being home, asleep at night in your own bed, your newborn off under some other roof instead of there with you.

It was a life-changing half-month, to say the least. One in which my husband and I both fell apart in different ways, away from each other. But I wish more than anything that we could have gotten to look ahead to the future and see this time we have now, where there’s no feeding tubes or beeping machines, just a beautiful laughing child trying to climb up on a chair or splash in water or grab our housecat by the tail, being handed back and forth between us, none the worse for the wear.

There is truly nothing the world could give me that’s more beautiful.

So I turn from my anxiety to a sense of hope for the future I want to give my family. Not for any of the iterations that may happen, but for the one I’m actively trying to build. And I soon see that the next baby I’m trying to help along, outgrow the things that are keeping it on machine assistance while struggling to be well, has toddled into view.

Funny things happen once you invite an ecosystem into your life. Even if it’s one child or one fruit tree, a whole hellstrip garden, or a little pot of herbs. It changes you. It expands you.

I saw one of those bees you saw last year! a friend texts me. I don’t even have to ask which one. I know. It’s a bumble bee that stands out by being yellower and fuzzier than the other bumble bees. Bombus perplexus.

Maybe I need to be nicer, I think. Stop saying things like how former city council president Ian Cain’s equally perplexing and fuzzy yellow new hairdo reminds me of Sisqó in the early 2000’s, or that the video he posted of himself slowly disappearing into a stand of invasive phragmites is the most apropos reaction to his stint in local politics that I’ve seen.

Because even if that whole situation is giving midlife crisis energy, who among us doesn’t sometimes want to start over, reinvent themselves, tap into an alter ego or another previously unexplored side?

I still think he’s a dick, but good on him for doing it.

Yet local politics and policy has things humming and moving along better without him, even if most of the movers and changers are on summer vacation right now, leaving the online haters grasping for thinner and thinner excuses for outrage bait content. Slurring their words through podcasts and lip filler, combing through candidate signatures, getting madder that anyone they might recognize supported Patrick Roath in the act of running at all.

I’m proud to have put my own signature on the page, and to soon add his lawn sign to my yard.

A neighbor calls my husband over. An overturned grocery truck on Route 128 got her sent home with more greens than anyone could eat. We keep what we can use and then call the food bank. They could desperately use it, but unfortunately lettuces won’t keep until next weekend. So I get a friend from the local public housing authority to come pick it up and distribute it to those in need there.

It feels amazing to do something, even small like this, to help.

$50 in food stamps doesn’t go far, she says as she loads the boxes into her car. This could really make a difference.

Plenty people born and raised here aren’t assholes, I tell a friend of mine at the park. I’m so tired of some of these people’s claim to speak for them all, and also you’re right that all the ‘we didn’t get out to vote, but when we do, they’re one and done’ rhetoric just isn’t factual. I’d love to put out some information showing that the voter turnout level was fairly typical, the people who usually vote did vote, but it just wasn’t for more of the same. That we have clearly needed something different, something more inclusive to serve our interests as a population, and lots of us are trying to build it.

I drop a couple baby items streetside for free pickup (which are soon happily snatched up), look at my damaged garden, and take a few phone calls, exchange a few emails, trying to figure out if this is an end or a beginning to a project I’ve loved. But I am soon sure it is the beginning of something bigger.

Case in point on the doctrine of ask and you shall receive.

The conversations go surprisingly well. My hope grows stronger. The sense of respect I feel does too.

I’m not just some weirdo with a scraggly wild garden, waxing emotional over a few striped caterpillars while attempting to explain myself. I have done the work of adopting this ecosystem and mothering it, loving it, making it my own. Belonging to it as much as it belongs to me. And now tasked with nursing it back to health after an unfortunate incident.

It feels awesome I didn’t even need to momma bear anyone into seeing this. That they understood my love, and make room for it to continue and expand.

After an official and genuine apology, with an offer to make it right, I get the most beautiful dream of all, permission to adopt the hellstrip I have gardened on, with a little city-issued sign indicating it belongs to my family under an expansion of the traffic island adoption program.

On a personal level, considering that my house is on a lot that’s barely over 4,000 square feet, but the hellstrip is ten feet deep, the addition of this whole space seems huge. By adopting it as an island, I now have responsibility for not only the 300 square feet in front of my house, but all 900 square feet of the strip. A tripling of the space.

My neighbor is cool with this. I checked. Happy it’s no longer his responsibility to mow it.

But as a policy nerd, someone who has studied such erudite concepts as Theda Skocpol’s polity-centered approach, then sat in classes where we talked about all the directions policy implementation can come from, I understand I have achieved something even more spectacular and potentially city-changing. A policy change that comes from the bottom.

The responsibility of operationalizing my dream of what a hellstrip garden pilot project can really look like - perhaps should really look like - is suddenly looming.

I find myself googling linear gardens, imagining something akin to NYC’s High Line right in my own front yard. For the pollinators, of course. But also for me and the neighbors.

I decide I will dig out some roots from among what was ruined, move the plants that can be saved, then smother the rest of the mowed space with builders’ paper and mulch. Start over in that portion with something a bit more strategic in the fall. Perhaps only three or four kinds of plants across the whole swath, in eye-pleasing drifts and clumps by the streetside.

I make notes on the types of plants I’m considering. Something to give interest in spring, summer, fall, a variety of textures. A harkening back to what this space held before humans lived here.

Blue star amsonia

Little bluestem

Rubus odoratus - Thimble berry

Baby Joe pye weed

Wavy hair grass

Showy tick trefoil (midsummer bloom)

Hyssop leaved boneset (summer bloom, great for hellstrips)

Campanula rotundifolia aka harebell or scotch bellflower

Gillenia trifoliata aka Bowmans root, Indian physic (summer bloom, fall foliage, great for hellstrips)

Wild geranium

I like this idea of keeping the little remaining section in front of my house as the native plant species garden I started out with, and then going minimalist with the rest of it, just a few types of plants in drifts. But I decide I need help on narrowing the plant list and honing the optics. I ask someone at the garden club if they can sanity check my design. I look up more things while waiting to hear back.

Then I take a break and walk my children along the garden. The portion that is there, and the one that will be. We look for bees and butterflies together as if it’s everybody’s birthday and we are all brand new.