Rhode-O-Den-Drons

While the world rested, on Sundays when I was growing up, we worked.

We had an enormous (perhaps made more so from my revisionist city-slicker perspective of today) garden. A front yard and a back yard and miles of woods behind it. By today's standards, it was almost wilderness. Back then, it was a wilderness to be tamed.

In the fall, there were endless miles of leaves to be raked. In the spring, weeding. In the summer, especially after the divorce, lawns to be mowed. After the divorce, whenever there were visits to the city to my father to be had, first there were trees to be cut down, branches to be piled in heaps in the woods.

Perhaps it is not surprising then that I am not unhappy we don't have such a wilderness today. There is little I miss about Sundays knee-deep in pakasandra patches while my friends went to the mall (though, for the record, I do not miss malls either). And perhaps it is also surprising that I am only starting to learn the concept of a day of rest now. That Sundays can be for sitting and reading and staring into space. They do not only have to be about cooking a week's worth of meals, coding agendas, paying bills. They can simply be for being.

What I do miss about that house at this time of year is the moment each spring when it was warm enough to walk to the mailbox barefoot and when all of the rhododendrons were in full bloom. They were my mother's pride and joy. They were delicious to look at, a testament to both beauty and the annual rebirth.

Two weeks ago, when my father came to visit us, we sat on our rooftop. We had nothing  on it but furniture and building debris, literal toxic waste. My husband claims to hate yardwork more than I do, which i find unfair considering how I had to sacrifice sacred trips to the mall for it, so I dreaded the idea of decorating our rooftop together and said as much to my father.

My father, perhaps the laziest and most reluctant gardener of us three, turned to my husband and said: "I planted 29 rhodedendron bushes at our house. Just remember that, 29 bushes." He said it the way someone might have once said, I sacrificed my child on a mountain top for all of humanity, if I can do that, boy, you can get a couple of window boxes.

And so, the following weekend we took my husband's grandmother to the garden store. After much pleading and convincing him he was reading the directions ALL WRONG, I ended up the proud owner of three rhodedendron bushes. Soon, they will be too big for this roof. Soon, I will worry about them all winter long that they will freeze and catch cold.

Today, however, one bloom has blossomed in fuschia. Today, I am barefoot and it is spring.