The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [111]
My grandmother had a small stand of mint that she used for making her own mint jelly. I recall that she used to call mint “near a weed,” and she was careful to keep it within bounds. In my twenty-one years of struggling with the garden, I’ve let the mint take over. It keeps the real weeds down. I use it in sun tea all summer and often send it, fresh or dried, to my urban friends, for whom it is a luxury. I do try to keep it from overrunning the columbines, my grandmother’s favorite flower, and mine, a flower that can withstand both bitter cold winters and the wild storms of summer. The delicate whimsy of the columbine is deceiving. After violent hail and wind, I’ve seen the flowers, long spikes intact, blooming in the mud, the long stems bowed down but not broken.
In the half of the garden where my grandmother grew her vegetables, I’ve given up on tomatoes—end rot, no matter what I tried—and in some years have simply let the weeds take over. When I manage to be at home in the early spring, I have a friend till the ground and plant basil, lettuce, and snow peas. In a recent fit of optimism, I’ve tried to establish parsley (having killed off my grandmother’s patch years ago), chives, sorrel, rosemary, and thyme. The thyme died before the summer was out, as did much of the tarragon patch a friend helped me establish years ago. Some of it seemed to have survived, and I hope it will be up next spring, along with the rosemary, parsley, sorrel, and chives. I wouldn’t put money on any of it.
My parents were never much for gardening, and oddly enough, it was when I lived in New York City as a young adult that I first felt compelled to work with the earth. I had friends with a country place in Rhode Island, and I looked forward each spring to getting my hands into the warm soil and doing whatever job they had for me to do. I’d visit several times a summer and on into fall, shoveling manure and compost, gathering seaweed at a nearby beach for the compost pile, hoeing, weeding, picking potato bugs and releasing lady bugs, picking the ripened corn and tomatoes and eggplant just before we were to cook them.
In the medieval era gardens were designed to suffice for the loss of Eden. The garden I’ve grown into, in my middle age, seems more a kind of Purgatory, but I love it. It’s a ratty little garden, not much at all. But I can call it mine.
THE CHURCH
AND THE
SERMON
Sometimes I feel that the small, isolated town I live in is as much a mystery to the outside world as any monastery. Here, churches help to define the community in ways that urban people might find incomprehensible. They are the only local institutions, for instance, that could have generated enough local support to establish and maintain a domestic violence hot line (and now a safe house), a community food pantry, and services to destitute transients. My husband, who grew up in New York, said that it was-n’t until he moved here that he realized how much ministers do.
The Sunday morning service is a social highlight of the week for many people. Especially for the elderly, it’s one of the few times all week that they get out. But for them, and for many younger people, church is much more than visiting with friends over coffee before the service; worship has been important to them all their lives, so they go. If a guy skips church now and then, it has much more to do with his love of fishing, or the need to get a hay crop in, than with existential angst. For many families here, church is both a serious commitment and a joy.
When I’m asked to preach I try to take advantage of my role as both an insider—the granddaughter of a woman who was a member of the church for most of its existence, over sixty years—and an outsider, someone who did not grow up in the town and has lived for much of her life in cities. Sometimes, especially when I’ve preached just before a new pastor is due to arrive, I’ve said things about us as a congregation, and our history as a church, that no salaried