by lisaduchene | Aug 31, 2023
A new home, marriage and job had me longing for my old, comfy garden patch on the Maine coast. How to move it to this new life? My quest led me to a best friend and her lessons in moving plants, dancing with ladybugs and finding fresh strength.
I found Elizabeth outside, crouched over and scooping soil into plastic grocery bags with green leaves poking out the top. Petite and wearing a baseball cap, she worked deep in the yard behind her tall, stately brick Victorian house with black shutters in my new town.
I introduced myself as the freelance magazine writer here to interview her for a story about “How to Move a Garden.”
“Oh HI!” she said, smiling, brushing off dirt and pulling off her garden gloves to extend a hand.
She motioned to dozens of plastic grocery bags full of soil and plants, flopping every which way. Bagged daylilies, Japanese painted fern, double-purple columbines and Cranesbill geraniums sat tucked in the shade behind the lilacs, next to the compost pile, awaiting their move to her new house in West Virginia. Each bag also held a plastic tag with the plant’s name and a few scoops of compost.
Elizabeth chuckled. “I’m just trying to squeeze in as much compost into these bags as I can. I worked hard on it. I can’t just leave it here!”
In that moment in the summer of 2006, I knew we could be friends.
After walking beside each other through crises, Elizabeth stood for all my best friends as the Best Woman at my wedding.
Gardener’s Gold
The first time I’d left a garden behind, I moved my compost pile first. I’d shoveled the finished, rich soil — “gardener’s gold” we call it — from a spot near Maine’s Kennebec River into my red Toyota pickup truck, drove it eight miles inland and unloaded it onto a patch of grass that my new landlord had approved for a tiny garden. Next came my free-form hydrangea with its delicate ivory blossoms that bloom in late summer. That hydrangea then moved with me once more, and anchored the garden I’d left behind to move to central Pennsylvania. (Read more about hydrangea here.)
So I understood “I can’t just leave it here!” about something you made and nurtured over the years on a little patch of earth you’ve tended and loved. That longing had landed me here, in Elizabeth’s garden.
Elizabeth had already moved blueberry bushes and grapevine cuttings along with rhubarb, strawberry and raspberry plants to the new house. Among the last to go would be a boxwood shrub passed down from her grandmother and already in the family 25 years.
Elizabeth and her husband, Bill, were in the midst of their third move in a few years. Each time, she had packed and re-planted more than 500 daylilies and many more perennials. She’d opened her gardens for the local garden tour, earning the awe and respect of the garden club ladies in town who steered me to her when I asked for their help with a magazine feature on how to move a garden.
One tough and tender hydrangea has survived four moves to new gardens.
Uprooting
We garden folks like to think that life revolves around our gardens, and we’re probably happiest when it does. But the reality is that we are sometimes forced to uproot ourselves, leaving our gardens behind.
After pouring your heart and soul into a patch of earth for years, how do we leave it?
That was the premise of the story pitch, anyway. But truth be told, I was grieving more than a garden. I was grieving my old life in Maine, struggling here in a whole new life to find some footing, and connection.
I was 36 when I met Elizabeth. The previous summer, I’d had a gorgeous wedding on a sandy beach near Acadia National Park, then days later followed my new husband to graduate school at Penn State. I’d bought an adorable, folk Victorian house for us in Bellefonte, Pa., a town nestled among the mountain ridges and 20 minutes from campus.
Oh — and launched a freelance writing career after 13 years of “regular” jobs on the editorial staff of several publications.
You read right: New marriage, new job, and new-to-us house in a new state. And we made all those moves in a head-spinning, two-week period.
A year later, I was floundering. Way deep down, a little part of me knew this marriage and move was somehow both inevitable and not built on the true, everlasting, mature, to-the-end-of-the-earth kind of love.
The marriage was likely already in trouble. I craved the sea, felt stuck and trapped by these mountain ridges in a land-locked place.
When I left Maine, my writing niche was reporting and telling stories of all the incredible magic, life and conflict found in marine ecosystems. Here I was, in a new place with no mighty river, no harbors or fishing fleets. No briny marshes. No oyster farms, pounding surf, islands, tidal pools or coastline. And it is humid and hot here, without a cooling sea breeze off the water.
I was trying hard not to be miserable — so I focused on making a new garden, and making a new life.
A patch of weedy earth beckoned: The skinny, deep lot sloping down the hillside behind our tall and narrow house. I decided to dig into some garden writing, starting with a pitch on moving a garden.
That summer day, Elizabeth was plenty busy — and generous and gracious with her time, showing me all of her gardens: the lush bed of tall and arching ostrich ferns off the porch, curving beds of colorful perennials in full bloom, the tiered side garden full of herbs. Formal plantings in the front of the 1883 brick Victorian: Hostas, boxwood and blue mist bush lined the front walk. Two Peegee hydrangeas and a weeping cherry tree stood sentry near the sidewalk.
For the new owners, Elizabeth carefully left behind tidy plantings, a landscape map and plant list to serve as a starter garden for an inexperienced gardener.
Fresh Roots
Meanwhile, I’d begun to root in our little town. The garden club ladies and I were working hard to create a community children’s garden, to teach children about the natural world and nurture their sense of wonder.
On a garden tour day, Elizabeth arrived out of the blue with bags of extra daylilies to sell and a sign to help raise money for the project. She had been miserable in the new place and convinced her husband to return to our small town.
Soon, she agreed to help design a section of the children’s garden for birds and butterflies.
By then, I’d let go of the garden in Maine and the magical thinking that I could manage the property, and tend the garden from five states away. We sold the old, multi-family house. Before closing, following Elizabeth’s advice, I returned for the hydrangea and irises that had traveled and grown with me by then at three different houses along the Kennebec River, and left behind tidy, mulched beds for new owners.
Long drive for a few plants. But they reminded me of the musical clanging of the river’s buoy bells guiding boaters and delighting me as I worked the soil. They reminded me of how it felt to be part of a place.
Roaming & Rescuing
Elizabeth settled into a new-to-her, old brick Victorian house a 10-minute walk from mine. Soon, we were walking together a few mornings a week, telling stories and talking about everything from gardens to old houses to husbands and living a creative life. Elizabeth designs and makes botanical jewelry, capturing dogwood blossoms, oak leaves, hydrangea blossoms and leaves in sterling silver.
She would hit pause on my power-walking and talking to stoop and pick up a beautiful leaf or seed pod that had caught her eye. If not for her, I would never have noticed such tiny details.
We became a dangerous pair. We up-cycled, before it was cool and trendy. Both of us loved to save old items tossed to the curb and could not drive by a good, old wooden door, because if you love old houses — well, you just never know when you’ll need one.
We each had a pickup truck. Her husband also had a key to the town yard waste depot. We’d run off to snatch up plants people had given up on and tossed away, and loads of half-composted leaves for making new garden beds — because we are always making new garden beds.
Ladybugs on the Loose
By then, I was fully rooted here in central Pennsylvania, in love with the land, the fertile soils and resilient forests, immersed in sustaining the children’s garden.
One July, we had a ladybug lesson coming up in the children’s garden and needed some actual ladybugs. So I mail-ordered thousands of ladybugs — maybe 10,000? — because that’s the smallest number I could find. The plan was to divvy them up into small batches and sell those to local gardeners.
On a wicked hot Saturday afternoon, Elizabeth came over with her scale and some small paper bags to help.
The lady at the ladybug place said to put them in the refrigerator crisper drawer and they would get really mellow and hibernate.
Then, I could measure them out by weight into individual packets. I carefully calculated the number of ounces for each bag.
But when we pulled the ladybugs from the crisper drawer into the hot kitchen, they all perked up really fast.
And all at once. I froze, stuck on how we were going to herd them all onto the scale and into bags as they were crawling off in all directions.
Elizabeth took charge. In one sweep of her arm on the kitchen counter, she loaded all the ladybugs into one bag, ran with it out to the kitchen porch, shook them out into several bags, clipped them at the top with clothespins and put them all back in the crisper drawer.
It took her about a minute.
Then we laughed, shrieked and doubled over with laughter. Then giggled some more.
That winter, every so often I’d spot a ladybug crawling up the sage green walls of the kitchen and text Elizabeth: Hey, Elizabeth! You missed one!
Hunker Down, Girl
Building a life here, I was immersed, too, in turning the narrow, sloping hillside behind my house into a luscious, sun-dappled shade garden below a canopy of maple trees. My garden was a vast space to tend by hand and I lost myself in hauling rocks and logs to make level paths, in moving truckloads of mulch and wood chips down onto the hillside, one wheelbarrow at a time.
Just in time. Soon, the new friendship and garden woven into my safety net would be tested.
My marriage was strained. We kept trying new marriage counselors. None could fix that despite the love we’d felt for one another, it was not the kind that could go the distance. We weren’t in love, nor were we the right people for each other. My closest friends, like Elizabeth, knew long before I did and were ready to catch me.
When my then-husband got a one-year teaching assignment six hours away, I stayed behind. My intuition insisted I hunker down. That little voice inside was loudest when I was digging in the shade garden behind our house. An earlier, younger, more naïve version of me had ignored the warnings of my intuition, so perhaps this time it was shouting loud enough to hear.
My ex-husband and I separated that fall, and Elizabeth took care of me the whole time, sharing walks and dinners, zipping over when I needed help moving a piece of furniture, reclaiming the house as solely my space, one room at a time — making sure that as I cried my necessary tears through the winter, that I kept moving and did not get lost or stuck in the depths of grief over the marriage.
Spring Always Comes
Spring arrived, without fail. I felt better. I was mending, healing and traveling again on magazine assignments. On one flight, I sat beside an angel who shared wisdom on relationships and marriage. That pep talk from Pheonix to Minneapolis helped me forgive myself.
I took a train trip to Boston for a writing conference and visit with a good friend, soothed for 12 hours each way listening to the rhythm of the steel wheels clattering on the tracks and the train’s swaying, forward motion.
On the return trip, Elizabeth texted. She felt a lump in her breast. I am nauseous now as I write, recalling that message, when my stomach dropped to my knees. At the time, her husband commuted to an out-of-town job during the week and came home on weekends.
I remembered a chilling statement she’d made the previous Christmas. With her family history, she said, it was not a matter of if she would get breast cancer, but when. So she was sure, the instant she felt the lump.
She asked if I would go with her to the biopsy. Of course. And my muscle memory kicked in. During my dad’s life-threatening illness, I had chased doctors for information, becoming his advocate and bulldog, his “business manager,” as he said.
So I jumped in to be Elizabeth’s bulldog, traveling to appointments and taking notes and talking through everything she was learning. Off we went to meet with a breast surgeon, an oncologist, a plastic surgeon at the big medical facility two hours away.
We made a list of all the greenhouses between our town and the hospital and added plant shopping onto each trip. We bought loud, outrageous garden hats in bright turquoise, grass green and hot pink and wore them in the waiting room the morning of her double mastectomy.
She was a lesson in living and grit. She was a warrior.
She’d scheduled her surgery and chemo treatments around the big and intense, four-day Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts and just over a week after her surgery she did every long, hot day of that show.
In that next year, I could not fix her breast cancer, just walked beside her and did what I could to make it suck a little less, a bit less awful.
When she felt up to it, we walked in town. Sometimes on the path between woods and the creek. She helped me re-furnish my empty house, a piece at a time. Out with the old couch, in with the new — and in-between Elizabeth and her husband shared their couch so I wasn’t home alone through all the holidays that seemed meant for couples and families.
Quietly, we fought together for our survival; hers physical, mine emotional. We became sisters. We helped each other heal.
Best Woman, Ring-Maker — & Cheerleader
A few years later, Elizabeth’s cancer gone, she once again bagged up her most important plants for another move and I had a huge favor to ask. Would she be my best woman? And stand for me at my wedding, representing all of my best women friends?
Friends who could not be there because the wedding was in five days. I’d fallen head-over-heels in love with a good, kind, handsome man and his two teenage sons. We just knew. This was the right guy and the right love, built on the true, everlasting, mature, to-the-end-of-the-earth love.
The house was the “Man Cave,” but the property — flat and in full sun with mountain views — was a blank slate with room to play whiffle ball and grow tomatoes. Room for an end zone and my favorite pollinator plants. I’d started a garden, moved a lot of plants and knew I’d be saying goodbye to the shady hillside.
Mike and I had been waiting to see how deep into the playoffs my stepson’s All-Star team would play. The season ended and the next Saturday, lots of friends and family would soon gather for our summer picnic, so we decided it was a good time to get married.
Why not? Second weddings are pretty low-key — at least this one would be.
This was a big ask of Elizabeth, given the timing. She was plenty busy with a move to Maryland for her husband’s job. My wedding would take her whole Saturday on her final weekend in the house and garden she was leaving.
Oh, and would she make our rings?
But Elizabeth did not hesitate for a second. She was happy and excited and said yes, of course she could. She made a simple silver band for Mike and a band of hydrangea leaves linked with berries for me. We gathered buckets of hydrangea blooms from the garden she was about to leave for our bouquets and centerpieces.
When the pastor declared that Mike and I were married, Elizabeth pumped her fist. It’s one of my favorite wedding pictures.
“You hit the jackpot,” she always says, and she is right. I’d moved over a line of mountain ridges and an hour away from my friend and shade garden in that little Victorian town to be with my new family — and had never in my life been so sure of anything.
Early that Monday morning after the wedding, as Elizabeth packed for the last load of the move, I was at her soon-to-be-old house with coffee, helping her with the final cleaning and packing. How could I not?!
And when the house was done, we stuffed bagged and potted plants into every corner of her SUV, even the pockets of her capris before she drove away.
When Gardens End
The day we met, Elizabeth had answered all my initial questions about moving, what plants to take and what to leave, how to pack plants for the move, how to leave the garden for new people. Over 17 years, as I worked through all those bigger, deeper questions I could not ask her that day, she helped by walking beside me, inspiring strength as I worked out the answers. The best kind of friend.
But she never did literally answer the question of how one moves a garden. Perhaps because she does not believe, nor could not bring herself to say the words “You can’t.”
You can move plants, and tools, mulch and compost. You can move yourself, and all of your stuff and gear, your books, furniture, pots and pans. You can move your mindset, your heart and your philosophy, your memories, your love of community. You take lessons and wisdom, friendship and connection.
All that comes with you to the next place.
But you cannot move a whole garden.
A garden is a collaboration of soul, careful hand-tending and a unique patch of earth, so it cannot be moved.
That intimate connection and communion among your soul, your hands, the earth and natural world over time happens at that specific place and time. Like a performance after the singer has left the stage, the garden ends once the gardener leaves the place. Even if a new owner takes it on and tends it, your garden has ended and a new one that belongs to someone else has begun.
But you can say goodbye, beautifully.
New Adventures
So, before we closed on the sale of the sweet folk Victorian house, I thanked my shade garden on the hillside for helping to see me through the storm. Once again putting Elizabeth’s lessons to work, I potted up five small hydrangea seedlings, offshoots from the main plant that — just like me — used to grow and thrive in Maine, and found a way to grow and thrive in central Pennsylvania. I made a new garden, my last I expect, here in the full sun on the other side of the mountain ridges from Elizabeth.
Elizabeth and I, out for dinner, in September 2022.
Three years after she stood as the best woman at my wedding, Elizabeth moved back to Bellefonte and created a lovely shop, “Art a la Carte” in an old downtown building. She sells gorgeous glassware, pottery, fiber, art, paintings, wood carvings, jewelry and silk — all made by Pennsylvania artists.
There is plenty of research linking solid friendships to health benefits like lower stress, better coping and better physiological functioning in daily life.
I can vouch for that. Like plants, even best friendships are difficult to sustain through moves and transitions. The stress can be too much. No longer is it easy to meet for a morning walk or pop over for a glass of wine on the porch. Many friendships fade away.
Ours has changed from when we lived in the same town, digging for cast-off plants and fighting alongside each other in the trenches through that year of my divorce and her breast cancer.
We have each come out the other side of our crises, both intact — and changed. Stronger. We don’t need each other as much as we did that year.
But we still love each other, and lean on each other. And so we are in constant contact and visit every few weeks.
Sometimes, friendship-for-life takes some grit, a commitment to have difficult, necessary and honest conversations. Some people can’t do that, and the friendship fades.
But, gratefully, Elizabeth and I can.
Ever notice how a plant will make its way through the tiniest crack in the concrete, always seeking the sun? That’s Elizabeth. She is as tough and tender as our most cherished plants. Me too.
by lisaduchene | Jul 24, 2023
It was too hot to sleep. So I went rummaging through the freezer sometime after 1 a.m. one recent night, looking for chocolate cake.
I thought of Franny, who says an ice-cold piece of chocolate cake with an ice-cold glass of milk cools you off on a hot summer night when you can’t sleep. Not that the surge of sugar and caffeine will help you sleep. It won’t.
But that cold sweetness just feels so good — and takes off a few degrees. Which was exactly what I needed.
Sweet Matriarch
I should call her Mrs. W., instead of Franny. Her daughter and I have been best friends since our college dorm rooms were down the hall from each other at Boston University. We lived on the 4th floor of Claflin Hall, with a perfect view of a huge, three-sided billboard for “Ellis the Rim Man” towering 70 feet into the city sky from the rooftop of a building housing an auto parts store.
I adore the woman and the fun name, so I can’t help myself. Franny is strong, capable and full of love for her three children and six grandchildren. Every few summers for the past three decades, I get to see her at the family’s beach cottage in Old Lyme, Connecticut, with upstairs bedrooms with no air conditioning and that warm, old-cottage scent laced with oil paint — or maybe it’s linseed oil or varnish — that reminds me of Franny’s daughter, my dear friend, a painter.
Franny, and my artist friend — who over decades of friendship has become my sister — and I have visited at that beach cottage’s kitchen table on sweltering Saturdays in July, often over cups of coffee. From that kitchen table, Franny keeps tabs on the whereabouts of grandchildren and who’s closely watching the littlest ones, and the comings and goings in and out of her cottage. She rules the roost from that kitchen table.
I’ve watched her navigate differences of opinion in her family by saying her peace, then letting it go. (For the most part.)
The last time I visited with Franny was one of those hot July Saturdays. Her husband had died after a long illness. His funeral and burial were behind her now, and we relaxed over coffee, talking about cold chocolate cake on a summer night when it’s too hot to sleep.
Insanely Rich and Decadent
So on the evening of Memorial Day, with a busy, hot summer on the horizon, I thought of Franny. We had leftover chocolate cake after a family picnic, so I stashed it in the freezer for July.
I made the cake — rich, chocolate with peanut butter frosting — to celebrate the May birthday of our soon-to-be daughter-in-law, a kind and beautiful teacher. A perfect match for my younger stepson.
Chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting. Great choice. I used the chocolate cake recipe from King Arthur Baking Company. Then quickly found a peanut butter frosting recipe from the web with loads of butter, powdered sugar and peanut butter. Insanely rich, sweet, nutty and delicious.
In the middle of a sweltering night in early July, I found that last, cold slice of chocolate cake and ate it with a glass of cold milk. Sweet relief. Franny was right. I felt refreshed, and surprisingly, slept fine the rest of the night.
Times of Joy
She has been on my mind ever since, and I wonder what else she can teach me for this still-new, empty-nester and grandparent life-stage as our kids start their families. Our family is growing, and what a happy time this is. We’ve celebrated the first birthday of our first grandchild, a precious little boy who is talking now, born to my older stepson and his wife. Then, this May the birth of a beautiful baby girl, our second grandchild, born to my younger stepson and soon-to-be daughter-in-law in the midst of their wedding preparations.
This time in our family is full of joy. I am soaking and savoring it, since you never know what life will bring next. We’ve been planning parties and menus, sweet desserts and celebrations since January.
Now, we are within days of my younger stepson’s wedding and summer’s hottest days. I am thinking a lot about extended family and friends who are “family-of-choice” as we prepare to host rehearsal dinner for 60 people.
Memories surface of being my cherished friend’s 20-something maid of honor. I knew nothing about throwing bridal showers, wedding etiquette and bridal registry. Franny took care of the bridal shower and I showed up to give a toast.
On the morning of my friend’s wedding day in 1995, I drove her to her hairdresser’s salon at the mall to have her hair done and her white organza veil secured in place. She looked stunning.
But the hairdresser ran over the allotted time and Franny was in a panic about the schedule. There were no cell phones then. She reached me through the salon’s phone. The photographer would be there soon. The bride was still in the hairdresser’s chair. The mother of the bride was fit to be tied.
You can’t rush a hairdresser working a hot curling iron around your best friend’s hair and delicate veil on her wedding day. So once they were done, I rushed to make up some time. We ran through the mall, my friend in her jeans and wool coat, her veil flowing behind us. I told her to buckle up and drove like a demon on the interstate back to her parents’ house.
We had 15, maybe 20 minutes to get dressed while the photographer waited. As my friend got into the limo, she gathered the skirt of her gown, held it high, crouched to get into the backseat — and brushed the silk of her gown with her freshly painted lips.
We all gasped.
Franny handed me a bottle of club soda and a cloth, and tasked me with getting to work on that rosy smudge.
After the wedding, back in the limo, surely the bride and groom would have preferred a private moment. But I was along for the ride, still working on that stain in the skirt of her gown, full of the fear of Franny.
Staying Cool
Now, my friend has been married almost 28 years. Our big family wedding is just days away. My mind is swimming with dozens of details.
How to keep 60 guests at the rehearsal dinner cool on a hot evening? How many fans? How much ice? How many pitchers of water and lemonade? I am obsessed with serving ice-cold, fresh-squeezed lemonade and figuring out how to get it all done.
Then I remember all these details are for an event full of joy. That there is always time to pause, take a breath, say a little prayer of gratitude, a thank you and yes and appreciate this happy time. How lucky we are to share our lives with people we love. To love and be loved — really, it’s paramount, essential to a happy, well-lived life.
And when it’s all done, I plan to sneak off to Old Lyme, catch up with Franny at the kitchen table, listen to all of her wedding stories and soak up all of her wisdom that I can.
by lisaduchene | Jun 29, 2023
How a dilemma at the garden center became a favorite moment of this birthday.
Numbers are not my thing, so I tune out as many as possible, like my official age. Just a number, right?!
But then comes a birthday, when I embrace the whole month of June as mine for celebrating long, light-filled days, a fresh summer — and am forced to face a higher number as my official age.
Especially this month as my husband and elder stepson delighted in calling my attention to the NUMBER 53.
How does it feel? my husband asked on my birthday morning, delivering a cup of coffee to me in bed.
My elder stepson texted birthday greetings early with a couple pictures of his gorgeous, grinning little boy whose smile turns my insides to wiggly-wobbly JELL-O. Soon, another message with the freaking NUMBER, in all caps, a lot of punctuation and the question:
How does it feel?
I asked him about Father’s Day weekend plans, ignoring the pesky question that had already planted itself in my mind, and got ready for the “mulching party.”
My Birthday Wish
My husband’s gift of two big scoops of mulch included him unloading it that afternoon. Mmmmm… I couldn’t wait.
Last summer, we splurged. On my birthday, he took me to my favorite beach in Maine while our contractor and his crew renovated the second floor of our house for a new bathroom designed around my dream bathtub. The cast-iron, clawfoot soaker would be so good for bathing grandchildren — and for my aging joints — and required a new floor system to support it in our 1860s house.
This year, a mulch party is exactly what I wanted and needed. The rain finally returned our soil to its soft, luscious state, my place to recharge and regroup, digest and daydream as my hands pull weeds and work the earth.
Back to the earth is my way to slow it all down and savor.
June has been busy, loaded with happy events and layers of memory. The blessing and privilege of aging, I’ve found, is that certain times of year take on all kinds of meaning both bitter and sweet.
My birthday falls around Father’s Day, and this one was richer and harder than it’s been in awhile.
All month, as we celebrated the bridal shower for my soon-to-be daughter-in-law and my younger stepson’s first Father’s Day, I’ve held the joy of watching our kids launch and settle into their family lives as new, fantastic fathers.
Still, as Father’s Day approached, I felt the weight and emotional reverberations of the past.
A Time Loaded with Memories
For many years selecting a Father’s Day card was a dilemma. (Read: When Father’s Day is Complicated.) Those cards all say such nice things. My dad and I worked hard to heal and make peace in our relationship. Then, 11 years ago, enjoying the first baseball season of this new life as part of a baseball family, I called my dad on Father’s Day from my younger stepson’s baseball game, eager to share the moment with him.
Our catcher played that evening at the field with the big lights where you could perch on the hill and watch the game against a backdrop of folding green mountain ridges and the sound of horse-drawn buggies.
I knew my dad would have loved to be there, sharing a couple of hot dogs.
But he sounded so strange on the other end of the call, and said he didn’t feel good. The next day, an Emergency Room doctor told my dad he had pancreatic cancer, a moment of shock marking the beginning of the end. His last chapter. Our last chapter.
A moment heavy on my mind this June. I looked forward to unloading all of that weight I’d been carrying, along with the mulch, into the garden.
Dear Toyota: Short Women Drive Trucks, Too!
Off we went to the landscape center in the big Toyota Tundra pickup. I am five foot, four and a half inches “tall.” Before we bought this truck, my husband made sure I felt safe driving it, and I do. Yet, climbing up into the driver’s seat with nothing but the steering wheel to hang onto is tricky. (Dear Toyota: Why is there a nice handle on the passenger side, and not the driver’s side?)
Just after that little bulldozer dumped a big scoop of single-ground, pine bark mulch into the pickup bed, I realized we’d forgotten a rake or hoe to spread out the mulch, making room for a second scoop — which was coming quick. And someone was waiting in the mulch line.
So I held the top edge of the truck bed, anchored one foot on the tire and pulled myself up and over the side.
Soon, I was on my hands and knees in the bed of the pickup, pushing mulch into the corners, taking in the sweet scent of pine bark.
I felt deliriously happy, like a Cheshire cat stretching in a sunbeam. My body warm, hands working, arms reaching as my knees and toes anchored me in the soft, rich shreds of bark.
Joyfully immersed in my task. No stress. No pain. I felt good, fully alive and grateful to be.
Embracing mid-life, not afraid to be silly — and excited about all the miles ahead.
So — how does 53 feel?
Like that moment in the mulch pile. Mostly like a privilege, borrowing a descriptor of aging from a relative’s post about her college reunion. I am healthy and lucky to have never spent a night in a hospital.
Also, truth be told, it feels a little scary to be closer to the end than the beginning. Someday this body will indeed go back to the earth for good. None of us really knows when, nor what will happen in the leadup or aftermath of that moment.
My ‘50s have given me heightened awareness that life is finite, unfolding like quicksilver.
My body is changing. My feet and joints are stiff and tender after sitting awhile. My friends and I talk about the shoes we love most for our sore feet that are showing their mileage.
But oh, all those exciting places our feet can still take us.
My heroines are vibrant, strong and wise, rocking their silver hair, calling it like it is, shaking off inhibitions and busting society’s norms of how women of a certain age are supposed to look and behave and be.
Not afraid to say no, to get the rest we need.
I want to be a good role model for my daughters-in-law, our infant granddaughter, my nieces. You can do or be anything you want to be, sweethearts, at any age. Find your bliss and purpose. Be strong and brave and do your part to help heal this world aching for the rising wisdom of strong women.
Right here in the Middle, Rejoicing
My challenge, then, is to rejoice in all I still have and all I can still do rather than lament what I’m losing, to face fears head-on. With honest conversation, faith and planning.
The rush of it all struck me in the pickup bed at the garden center, chuckling and playing in the mulch, thinking when we got home I could lie flat on my back in the mulch, moving both arms and legs into the curves of an angel’s wings and body. The thought made me giggle.
Warm and limber, my few creaky spots in my lower back felt just fine as I planted my right foot on one rear tire of the pickup and deeply lunged so the other foot could reach for the ground. Back to the Earth.
53? Well, I felt young enough to still do THAT and old enough to not give a rat’s patootie who saw a silver-haired grandma blissing out in a pile of mulch — or what anyone thought of it. That’s how it feels.
by lisaduchene | Jun 10, 2023
My mom and I were saying goodbye the Sunday after Thanksgiving when our conversation took a prickly turn.
Or maybe it was just me.
Long ago, we learned that looking ahead to when we’ll see each other next makes saying goodbye a bit easier. That afternoon, she and my stepdad were ready to leave our central Pennsylvania home for theirs in Ohio. We’d had a nice holiday visit. Thanksgiving 2019 was behind us.
Our goodbye conversation leapt over Christmas and ahead to events planned for my stepson and daughter-in-law’s wedding. We jumped to April and discussed the table centerpiece decorations for my daughter-in-law’s bridal shower.
My mom and I, her only child, are close. She raised me as a single mom. We are both gardeners who love flowers and design. We often dream in blooms and bouquets. My mom is a master of centerpieces, wins blue ribbons at flower shows and arranged all the flowers for both of my weddings. (Gerbera daisies for my first. Hydrangeas for my second.
For my older stepson’s fiancee, his high school sweetheart who had already been part of our family for a long time, my mom and I both wanted to help create a beautiful setting that would just sweep her away, and make her feel so special.
And to us, that meant gorgeous flowers.
We both envisioned creamy hydrangea blossoms and pale pink rose blooms spilling from vintage ivory pitchers upon pink-covered, round tables.
But what — dear God! — would visually anchor them on the tables? My mom saw square cloths in mauve, or maybe burgundy, below each trio of pitchers. I saw round metal trays, or maybe flat charger plates.
The conversation got a little …testy.
Me: “This is a silly argument!”
My mom: “We’re not arguing!”
Will I See You Again?
Soon, of course, the world shut down and it didn’t matter. Large gatherings were nixed. All the celebrations as envisioned and planned disappeared.
By March 2020, the pandemic had up-ended everything. I worried about our kids. I worried about my parents. To protect our family, in those first few months I even bleached the groceries as they came in the door.
My mom and stepdad were at high risk of severe, life-threatening illness due to COVID. Our conversations focused on essentials, physical survival and mental health. Are you OK? Do you have a mask? Are you getting groceries and medicine? Please stay home. Button up and ride this thing out.
Too many people died horrible deaths, alone in the hospital with no way to say goodbye. I was terrified. I had no idea when I’d see my mom again. What if I never saw her again? Our debate — not an argument! — about shades of pink and shapes under the pitchers that had seemed so important now seemed ridiculous.
This summer, my younger stepson is getting married. As we enter the final stretch of preparations for the celebrations — bridal shower (this weekend), the rehearsal dinner and wedding reception next month — I can’t help but remember all the disruption of 2020 that up-ended our older kids’ meticulous wedding plans.
And I’m wondering about lasting lessons from the collective trauma of those pandemic years. We’ll never be the same. Nor should we.
What did we learn?
I sure as hell hope I learned a lot. It’s hard to look back on that time. But I want to be sure to remember the lessons, the wisdom we gained.
We all went through a huge, painful ordeal in different ways and emerged changed … right?
I like to think I emerged with a greater appreciation for the richness and importance of connection — and to not argue over silly stuff. I like to think this wallop of a reminder that this life is finite and so temporary made me a bit braver and bolder — more willing to double-down and go after my dreams.
I like to think I appreciate simple kindness more than ever, and that I’m placing even greater importance on connection to loved ones, to family and friends who are family-of-choice. Those folks who comfort us through the hardest times. The ones we want to celebrate our milestones with. We missed so many celebrations, so much face-to-face time and so many hugs.
I hope I’m a little more patient, a little less likely to sweat the small stuff, and I know I learned some new tricks to battle anxiety — because I have never been so anxious in my life as I was in 2020 and 2021.
But maybe it’s just that I’m in a new life-stage, a 50-something now, with a “so this is mid-life?!” perspective. For me, a sense that there is plenty of time has shifted to wondering if there will be enough. Time seems to go ever-faster.
Recalling those pandemic days of hanging on and dreaming about gatherings and celebrations and the big family dinners we could not have, I promise to never take gathering for granted again. Our pre-wedding celebrations — the BONUS party in Cleveland, a baby shower and this weekend’s bridal shower — are all the sweeter and I’ve been savoring them.
Sweet Reunion
We were so very lucky. My mom and stepdad both survived, and stayed COVID-free through the pandemic. I got to see them both in September, 2020, when we returned to outdoor visits and spent the day on the patio beside my mother’s garden.
That first, cautious hug my mom and I shared was sweet relief after so many months. We are very close — testy conversations and all.
Our daughter-in-law’s bridal shower was reworked. She and my stepson got married with a smaller number of guests, reworked their wedding plans and postponed the reception. Needing the comfort of flowers, I filled white ironstone pitchers with hydrangea blooms and pale pink roses for the bridal shower, and a few more on their wedding day, when my daughter-in-law had a photo session in my studio. I was honored.
Life propels us forward. They have a gorgeous, healthy little boy now — our first grandchild. And we are enjoying a blissful time in our family, watching as our kids become parents and approaching the wedding this summer of my younger stepson and his fiancée. They just became parents to a beautiful, healthy baby girl. (Here’s a story about the first “Bonus” celebration of their wedding.)
I want to savor every moment of this time.
This weekend, the women from both families will gather, visit and celebrate our soon-to-be daughter-in-law. We’ll take turns holding the baby. We’ll do the essential work of supporting this young couple fully, officially committing to a life together, stepping up to be their support system, strengthening family ties, and forming new connections.
Over great food — and flowers, of course.
Today, I’m arranging white and yellow daisies into wood flower boxes stained an espresso brown for the bridal shower honoring my younger stepson’s fiancée, a new mom.
Once again, I want it all to be perfect and for our daughter-in-law to be swept away by how beautiful everything looks. Once again, I’m trying hard to get all those little details right. They matter.
I’m so grateful to be thinking about shades of yellow, gold and green — not bleaching groceries.
But I’m not arguing with anyone.
I flew solo on this project, since my stepdad has had some health problems and my mom has had her hands full. I’m sure I’ll call her today, feeling very lucky that I can. And I’ll miss her at the shower.
We’ll just have to celebrate at the wedding, when I get to share all the joy in our family — now eight of us — with my mom and stepdad. When I see them again.
by lisaduchene | May 26, 2023
Would you join me this month to celebrate my love affair with the natural world? During May, I’m devoting most of my social media posts and all of my stories here to exploring my lifelong connection and love of the natural world, sharing the lessons of the mountains, the forest, the sea and the garden.
Into the garden we go…
As I tend the hydrangea shrubs in my shade garden, I can almost hear the music of the buoy bells on the Kennebec River near its meeting with the Atlantic on the coast of Maine. Those clanging bells guide boaters heading out to sea or back home.
Of course, it’s impossible to hear the buoy bells from my patch of ground here in a fertile valley of central Pennsylvania. Nor can I actually hear the foghorn bellowing in the distance from my first garden decades ago, when the thick and blinding fog rolled in off the ocean. Or, for that matter, announcements over the loudspeaker at the massive shipyard with the giant red and white cranes perched over the river. That was our third garden.
These tough hydrangea plants that bloom in hundreds of delicate ivory petals clustered into loose balls first hooked me on growing flowers. They have been with me in every garden I have loved, tended and left behind: three along the Kennebec in Maine, and two here among the ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania, where I now hear the clattering hooves of horses pulling Amish buggies and church bells playing melodies of hymns. I weed and hum along to my favorites.
These hydrangea connect and remind me of my most cherished people and places. And in that way, they represent the power and delight of a garden to me: A collaboration of soul and careful tending upon a unique patch of earth. A powerful connection to communities of people and the natural world that includes us all and that I find as necessary as oxygen.
Blush Blooms, Dresses & Bouquets
They remind me of the blush blooms of the hydrangea in my mother’s garden, and of the pink earrings Karen wore with a deep pink silk dress as the matron of honor for my first wedding beside the ocean. She is among a tiny number of best friends, sisters-of-choice. Another, Elizabeth, and I carried hydrangea in our bouquets for my wedding to my husband and love of my life. Elizabeth — my best woman who stood for all of the strong and beautiful women I am lucky to call friends — created my wedding band of four hydrangea leaves in sterling silver.
The day before the August wedding, Elizabeth and I cut buckets full of hydrangea blooms from her garden for my mom to arrange for the steps of the stone house where we had our ceremony and for all of the tables. Hydrangea overflowed my car, and I sailed home on their sweet scent.
In the days after our wedding, I was so high from the event and celebration — so in love, still so in love — and surrounded by loads of those gorgeous hydrangea blossoms, I decided these gardens at our house beside the church could overflow with the hydrangea that would be in full bloom each summer for our anniversary.
“Hydrangea heaven” I call it. I’m up to seven different varieties, and counting.
Blooming on New Wood — or Old?
Truth be told, I rarely focus on the hydrangea shrubs that are offspring of my first hydrangea in my first garden. Tucked into the ground as tiny offshoots from a shrub left behind in a quaint town full of Victorian houses and over the mountain ridge, I let them be for years here, growing bigger each season.
Busy with tending family and putting down new roots of my own, I forgot all about them.
Then — realizing they had not bloomed in awhile, I pruned the tips of them one fall and they bloomed in creamy white blossoms the next summer. They grew into five lush shrubs overflowing their spot. I moved one last fall and am waiting until after a good, soaking rain to move another. On this chilly, late May morning, I just pruned them. Hope I get away with it.
Some hydrangeas bloom on new wood and some on old wood, depending on the variety.
My oakleaf hydrangeas — with cone-shaped blooms and leaves that turn crimson in the fall — bloom on “old” wood, meaning it’s last season’s growth. So I can prune them in the summer after they bloom, or not at all. Two of my three “oakies” are already full of buds. (That third one is new this year.)
A garden bouquet of late August blooms. The pale and deep pink blooms are oakleaf hydrangea. The green are the buds of sedum, Autumn Joy, and the ivory is a smooth hydrangea.
My “mophead,” classic or “smooth” hydrangeas — Hydrangea arborescens — must be pruned in the fall or early spring because they bloom on new wood, fresh green stems, less than a year old.
First the Compost, then Plants and Furniture
That first garden in earshot of the buoy bells on the Kennebec was at a rented, mahogany-stained cape house overlooking green trees stretching to the horizon. A shift in the shades of green foliage marked the location of the wide river below, but we could not see the Kennebec. Only the trees.
When I moved to an in-law apartment at the end of a Greek Revival house — where I could see the river from my bedroom — that hydrangea moved with me. After the compost pile and before I moved any furniture, as I recall.
Two years after moving to Pennsylvania, I finally let go of the house in Maine, and spent a sum several times the cost of a new plant to retrieve that hydrangea and drive it back to Central Pennsylvania. That’s OK, a bit of soil from those patches of earth I poured my heart into clings to its roots.
The hydrangea collection at the Norfolk Botanical Garden includes 900 plants, representing 20 different species an 200 different cultivars.
So, seven varieties is … well, just a pretty good start. I must remember to tell my husband about the hydrangea collection at the Norfolk Botanical Garden.
If I could only pick one plant, it’s that first hydrangea. One plant I’d pick to take into the afterlife. One plant that connects me to all the gardens, to my best friends who have become sisters, to the day I married my husband and stepsons …
It’s that first hydrangea. When I fell in love with it, I fell in love with gardening and our connection has only growth richer and stronger over time.
(But — my idea of heaven is that there are no limits on hydrangeas. No limits on good friends, cherished loves and gardens. Just saying.)
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