As You Like It: Our Garden of Eden

We’ve just finished reading two short stories by Mark Twain, entitled “Eve’s and Adam’s Diary.” Twain describes Adam as a man with little imagination, caring only about building structures and animal husbandry, and Eve as intelligent, imaginative and courageous but also vain and self important. The task that Eve loves best (besides naming all the animals) is taking care of the park, as she calls the Garden of Eden. I thought to myself that it’s a good thing that, in our family, things are reversed, because if it were up to me to maintain our “grounds,” we would have put down Astroturf long ago.

I love grass, trees, and flowers — I just don’t want to be the one who takes care of them. I like to work outside for an hour or so and then go back in the house for some iced tea. Because of this, poor Steve is the one who takes care of our great outdoors. It wasn’t like that when we first bought our house. I would plant impatiens everywhere and water them faithfully all summer. I fertilized, planted, weeded, and generally “took care.” But I learned early on that planting anything in our rocky New England earth is a challenge. Lisa learned that too — the hard way.

One beautiful September day Lisa saw bags of daffodil bulbs in the supermarket and pleaded with me to buy them. Since Mariel adored Lisa and did everything that she did, she also began to beg. I warned them that bulbs weren’t easy to plant and that I didn’t want to be the one who ended up digging all those holes.

“Of course not mommy, we’ll do everything and they’ll be so pretty. Please, please, please…” two pairs of eyes gazed at me hopefully. I gave in and bought a couple of bags of daffodils, some fertilizer, gardening gloves and two planting tools. From the size of their smiles you would have thought that they had just won the lottery. Lisa had visions of a front yard filled with yellow flowers, and Mariel, well, Mariel was just happy that Lisa was happy. She had no idea of what she had just signed on for and neither did Lisa.

The next day I showed them how to dig the hole, where to place the bulb and the fertilizer, and warned them that the digging would be tough.

“Don’t worry mommy,” Lisa told me. “Mariel and I will do it. You won’t even know we’re out here.”

I left them, wondering how long it would be before the first call for help. Sure enough I soon heard Lisa screaming at Mariel that she’d better get back and help or she would tell mom. I closed my eyes and put my fingers to my forehead feeling the beginnings of a headache. I knew that I was going to be on my knees digging holes before the day was through. I pretended not to hear what was going on, fervently hoping that those two would work it out in some way that would not involve me.

Soon I heard the door slam and Lisa yelling, “Mom! Mariel won’t help me plant the daffodils even though she promised. She broke her promise. You have to come outside and make her help me!”

I tried to tell Lisa that Mariel was too little to be digging holes in impossibly rocky soil where the rocks outnumbered the dirt 100 to one. But Lisa was having none of it. For her, breaking a promise was unheard of. So then I tried to explain that Mariel was too young to even know what a promise, or the breaking of one, entailed. But my explanations weren’t going over very well, so I went outside to search for the truant daffodil planter.

I found her in the sandbox, digging happily. She looked so adorable sitting there with her pail and shovel, but I had another offspring to placate, so I knelt down and asked her why she wasn’t helping Lisa.

“It’s too hard, mommy,” she told me. “It hurts me; I can’t do it.” I kissed her and told her to have a good time in the sandbox, and then I turned to the ball of fury beside me who was insisting that I had to make Mariel do it! I took her aside and explained as best as I could that Mariel just wasn’t old enough and that I would help her. She wasn’t happy with that. She thought that Mariel had broken a sacred rule and gotten away with murder. But the two of us went out and dug holes for the rest of the afternoon and planted all the bulbs. I may have cheated by throwing in as many as 10 in a hole just to get rid of the darned things.

Happily, that spring many of the daffodils sprang up and gave us great joy. Lisa proudly told everyone that she had planted them, and Mariel added, “And I did too!” I thought Lisa would strangle her, but strangely enough she kept quiet — but she never volunteered to plant anything again. And Mariel — Mariel ended up being Steve’s landscaping helper, raking, spreading mulch and weeding. Unfortunately, now that she no longer lives at home, the only helper Steve has is me. And the only thing I’m good for is bringing him a cold glass of water.

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Posted by Joan Florek Schottenfeld on Jun 15 2011. Filed under As You Like It, Featured Content, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.