Dreaming small in my backyard

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I can’t get the song “Monsieur Mouse” out of my head. I’ve been humming it in the shower, whilst getting dressed, making lunch, walking the dog.

C, D, E (hold: one, two), E, D, C (hold: one, two). 

This three-note banger is from a children’s piano book. The best line is “ Monsieur Mouse loves a crowd, but no cats are allowed,” because even a mouse has his limits.

I encountered this unexpected earworm while producing the radio version of John Stewart’s essay about taking piano lessons with his 5-year-old son, Ezra.

John’s piece is about many things — being a dad in a world that feels like it’s unraveling, learning new things, overcoming guilt and shame, and my personal favorite: “dreaming small,” concentrating on things that are only within our orbits of control.

For me, that’s been my literal backyard.

A few months ago, my parents decided to sell my childhood home. After 38 years, it was time. Time for someone else to look after the old bones of that 1796-built colonial and tame its big lawn.

Growing up, people in my small town knew which house was ours: the pale yellow one at the top of the hill with the giant silver maple out front. “Oh, I know this house,” friends’ parents would say when they pulled into our driveway to drop me at home.

I didn’t think much about our backyard when I was a kid. It took forever to rake up all the leaves and the sunsets were beautiful and there was that one time my brother and I attempted to get artsy with the lawn mower, but that was about it. After I moved away, however, my mom — and dad, by default — got very into gardening. When my husband and I decided to get married under a big tent out back (nearly 20 years ago), a Herculean effort went into making  the environs “wedding-ready.” Now it’s lush, and mature, and a whole lot to care for.

I’m not especially nostalgic by nature, but part of me did wonder how I might keep that slice of hometown history with me, beyond pictures and artifacts.

Enter my friend, a very dedicated gardener — a perennial evangelist of sorts. He took one look at my mother’s plots and decided the plants would have to come with me. Without quite comprehending what this meant, I said, “OK, yes, cool, let’s do it.”

Keep in mind I have no green thumb. I had dead, Christmas-evoking evergreens in the pots on my front stoop until mid-April. I regularly buy succulents at Trader Joe’s, and kill them. I once dehydrated my grandmother’s 65-year-old dieffenbachia so severely it almost died. No matter. I unwittingly embarked on a massive garden project in my suburban Massachusetts backyard.

In the span of not-quite four weeks, I’ve transplanted dozens — maybe hundreds — of plants from my parents’ yard to my own. I tore up two large plots of grass (one bed for sun plants, one for shade) using an edger and my new trusty pickaxe. I learned about the importance of fluffing soil. I got the guys at the garden store to load 32 bags of cow manure into my car, and I’m planning to go back soon for 30 bags of leaf mulch. I have moved an oak leaf hydrangea not once, but twice, to ensure I get the leaves in the sun, and the roots in the shade. This weekend, I’m planning to chop down a large plant that I thought was a tree but is actually a weed, before I prune and transplant three spirea (flowering bushes also known as meadowsweets). What is happening to me?

My friend Johanna would say I’ve reached peak middle age. There’s a popular theory that people in their 40s inevitably develop an interest in birds or plants, and I’ve gone to plants. It’s not the worst hypothesis. As I survey my backyard, I see two garden beds where there were none before. I see happy hostas and a pink peony that just dropped her petals. I see a long gray hose in desperate need of a better storage system. And I see me, dreaming small.

It’s putting into practice what thinkers including Marcus Aurelius and Simone Weil and Mary Oliver have been saying for centuries about finding purpose and meaning in the ordinary. Most of the universe is beyond my control, but I can pull weeds. I can tie the stems of my already-bloomed daffodils into a cute knot. I’ve even come to see watering the garden as an enjoyable sort of meditation (that would be even better if I had a decent hose rack). This week, as I futzed with my watering wand, I even hummed along to “Monsieur Mouse.”

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