Tag: Maryville

While My Garden Sleeps

While my garden sleeps, I make big plans for it. Each year I learn more about how to make it bigger and more interesting. I have always had what one calls a “green thumb”, although I’ve also had my share of mistakes.

When I was seven years old, my mom’s cousin Dale Hollenbeck brought me all the spindly, sickly plants on his shelves to try to bring back to life. By some mystery, it turned out that I could actually keep them alive. I may not have brought them back to vigor, but I could at least give them a fighting chance at a couple more years.

I didn’t know a lot about gardening, as was evidenced by the time I planted a kidney bean in a peanut butter jar in the pure clay soil of our backyard. By some miracle, the bean came up — well, the stem came up, but the bean itself with its seed leaves remained in the clay. I was left with a botanical mystery — the headless chicken of the plant world, which persisted in its barely animate form.

Perhaps the most important childhood moment for me as a gardener was the discussion I had at age 14 with my neighbor and almost-grandfather, Johnny Belletini. Johnny taught me a small but extremely important lesson — all plants had names, even weeds, and even the weeds could be useful. Most importantly, he taught me about dandelion wine. This led to a very enthusiastic me running back to my house with a dandelion wine recipe in hand and forbidding my parents from mowing the lawn until I picked all the dandelion flowers for wine. (Note: there is nothing forbidding a fourteen-year-old from making dandelion wine in US statute. They just can’t drink it.) My parents and I spent four good years making wine as a result, until I left for college. But I digress.

I didn’t get back into growing plants (or winemaking, for that matter) until after I got my Ph.D., mostly because I had neither the time nor the place to garden. I dabbled in landscaping my wee rental house in Oneonta NY with shade plants because that’s all I had to work with. When I moved to Maryville and bought a house, however, my dreams of gardening blossomed (ahem) again. My taste in gardening developed.

At my first house, I had no basement, no sunny windowsills — and a taste for cottage flowers that would frame my cute little acquisition. I couldn’t find the plants I wanted at the local greenhouse. My father and I built me the world’s smallest greenhouse out of four wooden-framed storm windows, and I started seeds there every year for a while., running a cord out the back door to the chicken house heater that kept it warm. If the electricity went out, an entire crop could be ruined, and that happened at least once.

I live in a bigger house now with my husband, and this house has a full basement. In the room that used to be the coal room, the previous owner fitted it with shelves. We fitted it with shop fluorescents and grow bulbs, and I now have a grow room big enough to handle 12 seed flats.

The gardening theme at this house: Everything I plant needs to have something edible about it except for the moon garden, whose plants tend to be white-flowered, strongly scented, and toxic. Right now, I have the seed flats waiting for seeds at the right planting time. I have some seeds cold-stratifying in the basement refrigerator with some roots that I will plant in the spring. I have a piece of ginger which I hope will sprout so I can plant it for a bigger yield later this year.

As always, I have big plans for the garden as it slumbers in its February torpor.

Making the Best

Despite the repeated dreams for years that I go back to teach at Oneonta, I am back in Maryville, MO, setting up for the new school year at Northwest Missouri State University. Unless I can find a way to afford the housing costs without having a mortgage in my retirement, I will likely retire here in Maryville.


The difference between a dream and a goal, however, is a plan. At this point the plan depends on two different external factors — whether the college will be hiring for someone in my position or whether I will wait for the way to open, as we Quakers say, and if it doesn’t, I wasn’t supposed to live in Oneonta.

Meanwhile, I am working to make the best of my life now. What have I missed about Oneonta? An atmosphere where differences are accepted, if not embraced. A place where I can be myself and feel accepted. In other words, in words misattributed to Thomas Paine, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” 

I feel like I haven’t gotten this in Maryville, but how correct are my observations? I have experienced reactions that feel like censorship when I talk about my bipolar disorder, for example, but I have also received support, mostly over Facebook from my Facebook friends, many of whom are in psychology and social work. I have felt awkward talking to people here, because I feel passionate about writing and the obsession of the day, but I felt awkward in Oneonta because I was the only one around me not passionate about something (other than winemaking, which was my thing while I was in Oneonta). 

As much a haven as Oneonta has been, I didn’t start writing in earnest until I had spent some time in Maryville, where the writer’s circle skews children’s, Christian’s, and cookbooks. (I’m literally scared to go to their meetings because my works question the current state of Christianity, as do I)

Do I really need a haven? Or do I need to push against something to create and grow? Do I need to feel like an iconoclast? An outsider? I don’t know; I’m thinking.

And in the meantime, maybe Maryville is the best thing for me because I don’t have what I need here.