How To Live In A Garden, or Leave Rocks Where They Are

“I have a meeting at 10 o’clock. I need to get back to the car.”  

Jean announces this with force. We are thirty miles from town in the Anaconda Mountains, at Storm Lake, on our annual summer trip to Montana to visit her father.  We have cold-plunged as a family into the freezing water, now layering sweaters to descend the dirt road back down the mountain. Jean is cold and ready to go home.

“Who’s your meeting with?”  

She’s walking ahead, frowning.  “The candy store.”

“That sounds important.”

“Actually, it’s my company.”

“Sounds like a big meeting.” Dust rises behind us on the steep incline as the lake disappears. Lush meadows appear in sunshine through dark evergreens.

“My company is called How to Help The World. I’m writing a book.” Jean is six. Her white blond hair is a mess; she has just learned to swim, barely.  She regularly declares that she is up for ANYTHING, but right now, she is tired of walking and wants to get home and eat candy. She begins dictating her book to me to distract herself.

“Chapter One is called, The World Needs You. You know how the world has a lot of trash. You kind of want your house to be small. You want the world to be clean and nice. You don’t want trash all over the place. So, help the world. Don’t scatter plastic. Don’t litter. Don’t eat junk food. Don’t throw things out the window.”

I love this book.  I’m confused where it is coming from because there is no way I’m this good of a mom.

“Chapter Two is called Flowers and Flowers. Chapter Three is Leave Rocks Where They Are. Because rocks, even if they are not plants, are still part of the world. Don’t unbury them. You wouldn’t want someone carrying you everywhere, lifting you up. Same with the rocks. Treat others how you like to be treated. Even the world.” 

The skinny road is impassable by car, full of evidence of past winter snow melt – deep crevices and the rocks which have just made their cameo. Indigo, yellow, orange paintbrush, fields of lupine color the forest floor around us.

“Chapter Four. Don’t make things die. If you have a beautiful flower out there, don’t just pick it because then you won’t have time to enjoy it. Water it, give it sun. Do some nice stuff.” 

I take her hand for a steep, hairpin turn;  she points her sneakers against the incline to get purchase.  Jean makes me make sense in a way that I never did alone. My mistakes are experiences I will offer to her, like a worn-in stone, to help her on her way.  No longer just stubborn or impossible when my instincts don’t fit in, I’m clearing the path for her now too. What would I have for her if I lived without courage?  Jean, for now, needs me and she wants to learn what I have to teach her. It won’t always be that way. She dictates unaware of how much help the world really needs, yet she navigates it with large-scale hope, a child’s sense of justice which brings me a bewildering and cosmic kind of joy.

“Chapter Five. How to Make a Garden. What you want to do —  if you want one flower in your garden — that’s not enough. You want all the kinds of flowers. Purple, yellow pink tulips, every kind of flower.  Sprinkle some seeds everywhere, bury them, water them, give them sun and they’ll grow.”  

This Montana trip, its wide, unstructured days, have made room for big kid dreams and questions.  Don’t lie to me, Mama. Is Santa just you bringing me toys? Why do people lie to little kids? Who invented money? Why isn’t the world fair? Why are people poor? Things shouldn’t cost anything. Life should be fair.

“And if you have some cucumbers, carrots, you should do something really nice. If you have a lot, give ‘em to people so they don’t have to go around buying stuff.”

I nod in agreement with her insights and have few good answers for her.

“Chapter Five. No, Chapter Six. Wait, what chapter are we on?” 

“It’s almost time for your ten o’clock meeting.”  We are in sight of the car. “It’s about the book?”

“Yes. Chapter Seven. How To Live In A Garden. Eat what you have in your garden. Don’t waste food and don’t waste money on anything. 

I buckle her in, feed her water, brush her hair back from her face. I was wasting money on a pair of earrings I bought, she had told me recently. Also recently, in pjs in bed, she recounted a school shooting she had heard about.   

“I don’t like it, I don’t like it all, Mama.”

“I didn’t know you had heard about that, Jeanie.”

“I didn’t know you knew about it.” We held each other. 

“Does the whole world know, Mama?”

I couldn’t lie to her. I nodded. 

Jean falls asleep quickly on the flat highway, the very last glimpse of baby discernible in her pink mouth fallen open. For these past six years, strange and disorienting and all those of Jean’s life, I’ve relied on my normal coping tricks: Try hard. Stay busy trying hard. Make good things.  Being a mother on my own can keep me busy enough to not often be afforded the question, is this busy meaningful?  Is this trying hard doing any good?  But there are a few new tricks. One more good day — full and happy — under Jean’s belt. A doubling down on the courage to ask hard questions.  What is it that I want Jean to see me do?  She has an abstract idea of my work.  She loves to ask me to quit my job.  Who is your boss? Why do you work so much?  Why do you have so many meetings?  Why is your office always a mess?  But she sees me pursue my passion and how that takes care of us in the real world dollars, sense and suppertime sort of way.  It’s messy.  It’s ours. Driving, her dictation of How To Help the World plays against the sky, the plains, the mountains. She will have little memory of it on waking.  Something granular, something cellular, something quotidian, something mysterious, for a moment, makes sense.