You all know how it is that when we work hard for something, or save hard for something, we appreciate it ever so much more?  That's how it is for me and my garden...

My garden's a wee thing compared to the enormous gardens we used to grow, but for now it's juuuust right.  Ah; I wish I could share some of it with you.  Just this week I picked quarts of snowpeas...and cut gallons of fresh basil... and cucumbers and spinach and chard.  I clipped bunches of chives, and the leeks are getting plumper by the day.  The tomatoes are five or six feet tall in giant cages, and the fruits are ripening, and the foliage is so dense you can just cast glimmers of orange and red from the ones deeper inside ...the tiny patch of corn is tasseling, though it's almost decorative or ceremonial: my husband is a former Nebraskan, so there has to be at least an homage to corn, in case you want to toss some pollen to the rising sun, either accompanied by a prayer...or not.

We built our house into a hill, and the downstairs back door opens onto a walkway between two strips of rock garden, starting shoulder high and falling to ground level as you walk down the flagstone walkway toward the windbreak row of poplars and fir and the chokecherries the birds love so much... 

The winter squash vines are snaking their way through every inch they can, the little butternuts are small and green hourglasses; the summer squash leaves are big as dinner plates, and the blossoms are enormous yellow-gold trumpets; and they taste good, too. 

The garden used to be all flowers, but last year I gave a lot of them away to make room for veggies, as The Boss says, "on accountta the economy."  Some are still there: blue delphinium, six feet tall, and pale yellow dahlias as high as the corn they stand next to, flowers a foot across, with polished dark green leaves...morning glories climb and twist their way up the house on supports I've offered them...deep magenta with blue veins and yellow centers.  Several patches of ethereal pale purple Russian sage add a misty quality here and there.  Fall plantings of snow peas and radishes and spinach have broken ground and put on their second leaves....the occasional garter snake will sometimes surprise me when I water, and I never can help shrieking a bit; the Findhorn people in Scotland call those little snakes Devas, and claim they indicate a Happy Garden with Good Juju, or something.  Works for me; but then again, snakes have no legs, if you think about it.  Kinda creepy critters, and shriek-worthy when you're surprised by them.

Who knows why, but the zinnias are at least three feet tall, and about pop out and declare their colors, and volunteer cosmos and Queen Anne's lace dot the extra little spots between the intended crops...borders of Snow in Summer grow along the edges in spots, and the brown stalks and seed pods of former poppies try to stand proudly in lieu of their former flaming-orange grandiosity; likewise the peonies: We'll be back again next year, their bushy greens proclaim.

Some years back, our house was flooded by underground water; what a freaking mess it was.  We needed to affect a permanent fix, and without boring you to death with the enormity of the labor of putting in a second French drain system, the Fix left the area around the house looking as though it had been bombed and strafed.  I began working half-days and working the rest of the day on: Rocks.

Our house sits at the tail end of the La Plata glacial moraine, so we are a bit East of Eden-ish concerning rocks; our daughter's first word was rock, learned from the days when I would load the kids into the pickup and go out and pick the rocks that relentlessly push their way up through the soil and interfere with haying the fields.   I'd make piles of rocks, then clang them into the bed of the truck, drive ahead to a new spot, repeat...and when the springs groaned and said "That's enough rocks," we'd drive to the rockpile in a nearby bit of woods, throw them off, and head back for more.   Ah...Rocks. 

I learned to lay rock veneer on our round chimney in the center of our 12-sided Hogan, and against the exterior walls.  The idea was to make the place like it grew out of the ground; (thanks, Frank Lloyd Wright; wish I'd never heard of ya, by now!)

But now it was time to learn a new rock skill: flagstone walkways and retaining walls of river rocks, to hold back the new dirt, and cover the new dirt and ...oh, my.  Rocks.

So on the weekends, my husband and I would go to the mountains and gather granite flagstone, all different colors and patterns, bring the pieces home and lay them out in loose mosaics in order to show their shapes; shape being the main thing about laying rock walkways.  It's like constructing a jigsaw puzzle, because the idea is to construct something with seams of relatively similar sizes and of course, levels, so you don't trip yourself walking along the surface.  If a rock is close, and just needs a mite of remodeling, you can cold-chisel off the extra bits; it's kinda fun in a way...(okay; shut up...you have to make it fun, see?)

Gawd; we needed a lot of them, and er...building them was down to me.  The front of the house was easier, so I build a little rock garden off the new front porch we'd had to build, and laid the walkways, learning along the way.  I learned to hunt for shapes to fill the next space that was implied by the ones I'd just laid: I need one that looks like Ohio, but with a longer jag on the northeastern angle; or: one like Iowa could work here, with a slightly bigger bump...like that.

Of course, part of the fun is lugging one of the suckers to the spot, trying it, and if it's the wrong one, taking it back and searching for another one matching the shape in your mind.  Or what's left of it.

The back of the house was a bitch: it required two twenty-five foot river-rock walls, a flagstone path seven feet wide, and three stone stairways through the walls.  I spent a lot of time imagining how to build them...and by god, I finally did.  The treads, of course, needed to be oy-veh! huge and heavy, and when one of those rocks wasn't right, it could seriously piss me off.  I had to incorporate them into the walls, which was tricky, but I have a bit of a stubborn streak in me, and I finally finished, and laid the flagstones.

As luck, or fate, would have it, the day I finished it snowed the first time.

I ruined my knees on those rocks. 

And now that garden and those rocks have taken on a special meaning for me.  I know every goddam quart of soil and every goddam rock out there; it occurs to me that I could curse them roundly...but the anger's been mostly burned out of me by now.  And I love the living hell outta that garden for what it cost me.  And I even love those goddam rocks.