I've lived in the same house since the day I was born, nearly twenty years ago.
There are six bedrooms in this house: two small, two medium, and two master. At some time or another I have occupied five of those six. Remodeling has been done to many areas of the house, but it is still a place where I have spent what will be about a fourth of my life.
Last night I couldn't sleep.
I can't exactly tell you why. I don't even know what was bothering me. I tried to sleep around 2am and only slept for about an hour before waking up for no apparent reason. Some kind of dread was looming over me, and I couldn't dispel it no matter how I tried, so I ended up drifting in and out of sleep until about noon.
When I woke up I made myself some oatmeal and tea and decided to eat outside on the patio. I sat underneath the awning with my cat by my side, and that's when I really got to admiring and contemplating the garden, which catalyzed a whole mass of other thoughts in my mind.
Our garden is pretty big and it looked even bigger as I was growing up since there was no brick patio or awning near the doors. Back then it had been a teeming mass of foliage, grass, trees and flowers, the remnants of which can still be seen today.
All of my direct relatives love to garden. My paternal Grandfather owned an acre of land up in La Canada for more than sixty years, and over half of that acre had been greenery that he tended to himself until his vision started to go. My maternal Grandparents, Lola and Lolo, had lived with me as a child and spent ample time in our back and front yard; a lot of the gardening that is still thriving today is thanks to them. My parents, too, are obsessed with buying plants. They may not spend as much time maintaining or cultivating them in the garden, but I know that a lot of their retirement time will be spent there.
Their combined efforts allow for the garden to be a peaceful place today. As I sat there absorbing some vitamin D and petting the cat, I realized an emotive preference I had to the garden over any other part of the house.
The house itself can be representational of the relationships and experiences my family has with one another. We've torn down, remodeled, destroyed and mended parts of the house. We've defaced it with words, with art, with pictures of memories far, far away. Some places are permanently broken. Some are cluttered, messy, and complicated with stacks and stacks of things. Some are clean, and homey, and welcoming to look at and be in. Some remind us of better times, some make us appreciate the current times. Some places feel unfamiliar, some we hide in, and some we avoid. Some places match the rest of the house, some do not. Some things feel awkward, like the left-handed cabinets in the kitchen despite being a right-handed family. There are niches were bugs my Grandfather brought along when he moved in are still festering. There is an old mirror built into the hallway wall that distorts the onlooker, but we still all use it anyway. Sometimes the house feels like a home, and sometimes the house feels like what it is - a house.
Needless to say, my feelings towards my "house" are extremely mottled. When I think about my home, I get more feelings of melancholy than nostalgia. The garden, I realized, is a completely different story.
There was a play structure here once. Blue and white, simple and rickety, it rusted by the time I was five. We took it apart and liquid rust melted out of the edifices like vermillion bile.
There was a trampoline here once. My brother showed me how to do flips on it. We put it under the tree to see if we could jump and reach the branches. During the summer we'd spray the surface with water. One time my friend fell and hurt her neck. Multiple times I fell and hurt other things.
There was an aviary by the fence once. I checked eggs, held newborns in my hand, watched death pass for the first of many times. Lolo built the aviary out of wood from scratch, at least fifty or so birds had passed through it, and the structure lasted over a decade. With sadness, I think grimly, that in the end it even outlasted him.
There was an animal graveyard here once, though I suppose it's still here, just the brick tombstones and crosses have gone. 1 dogs, 13 hamsters, 20+ birds, 1 guinea pig, 1 rabbit, and god knows what else. 2 cats unaccounted for. 1 dog is buried away from the graveyard, under where the trashcans used to rest, since digging through trash had been his favorite thing to do (and he was properly named Sneaker). At some point when I had first gotten Mitzy, my dog of almost eleven years, she dug up a checkbox a hamster had been buried in. I thought it was buried treasure. I was wrong.
There were tea parties on the brick, aloe vera to be picked by the side of the house when my skin hurt, pill bugs to be collected underneath stones. There were plums, bananas, apples, and kalamanci to be picked and deposited into buckets with the help of Lola and Lola. There was kalamanci juice to be devoured in summertime. There were stepping and skipping stones, and an old brick barbecue to climb on top of to see over the fence or otherwise leave bread crumbs for birds. There was a small blue jeep my brother had owned that actually worked. There was a circular swing made of woven basket that hung on a rope from the tallest tree branch. There was a short, rickety fence once, in which throughout preschool/kindergarten my fingers were riddled with splinters from talking to the little boys next door.
Not much has changed. There's a mocking bird in the tree that's a sin to kill, different wind chimes, a brick patio...and a porch swing that I cannot bring myself to sit on. There's nothing wrong with it, in fact it's clean and nice quality, but it was bought during the short time my paternal Grandpa Don came to live with us for a few years. I was in middle school at the time, and our house was renovated to accommodate him. He loved to sit on this swing all day during the daytime, which seems like a nice gesture, but I feel otherwise. I can only associate sitting there with Grandpa Don seeing the world through his degenerating eyes, trying to take in and appreciate what he adored so much as his vision worsened with each passing day. When I do sit there, I inadvertently feel a mixture of regret and melancholy. Regret for so many things I wish I would have done better when he was here, regret for the things I should have asked him about or paid attention to. Melancholy for what happened to him. People always spout out "No regrets!" but sometimes it's still hard not to feel that way.
On the whole, however, being in the garden makes me feel as if there is some sort of peace and meaning to my past. The culmination of memories and the subsequent feelings that arise, along with the steady breathing of the nature around me, creates a stronger sense of actuality that I cannot accurately put into words. I know that when I leave my house for the final time, it will be the garden that I will miss the most.
My mother has this little stone carving that says: "One is closer to God in a garden than anywhere else on Earth." If being closer to God means being closer to better understanding yourself, then I have never heard truer words.
