Tending Gardens
Four chairs, a front yard, and enlarging your world...
Our four-chair room is the coziest room in our home. A cross between a parlor and study, and a room which had originally served as the dining room. Years ago, Evangelina painted it a deep blue, window casings, moldings, and built-in shelves included, the room that now surrounds you does so with a warm embrace regardless of the time of day.
We named it the four-chair room because when we first looked at the house fifteen years ago, the previous owners had four chairs in it. Our very own four chairs have welcomed many since the room, and the home became ours…family, friends, kids, and dogs have filled the space with plenty of conversations, coffee, and hangs.
Last week, I was sitting with Evangelina having morning coffee in that room as we begin so many of our days. The first thing she said when I sat down was that she had decided to put her phone down more often and stop scrolling so much. I was already aware of this fact because in the previous seven days she had finished reading two novels as well as at least one audio-book that she had been listening to while digging up the last few bits of lawn in our front yard.
What’s interesting about her choice to put her phone down is that she hasn’t used social media in at least five years. Still, the devices that scream at us when they are in our pocket or left on the counter will find a way to demand to be picked back up. Social media or not, the power of our devices and their effort to share an unending flow of information is the defining quality of their existence. I immediately reached for my phone, but instead of scrolling I deleted the Instagram and Reddit apps that are always crying out to me.
I have done this in the past, but they have always found their way back. This is something I have been meaning to do for months. It is not a revelation to say that my world is better when I don’t have immediate access to social media. I am currently unconvinced that it’s important for my work’s success, but hesitant to cut ties completely as I don’t quite know the alternative yet.
What I have realized is that I hadn’t shared much over the past few months, yet I was still offering these apps an embarrassingly large amount of my attention. Had I gained anything from all of those hours?
I’m pretty sure that all I had done was to send a handful of dm’s to people that I could have just as easily texted, scrolled right past my “friends” posts while “liking” few, and commenting on fewer and fewer posts. The one caveat of enjoyment by still being online too much was the chance to see the joy of Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart’s friendship and antics as well as the brilliance of Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibramovic treating Alexia Lalas on their pre-game set, showing the same level of skill difference that existed between them on the pitch. But, how many times can I see the same thing…or to see people I don’t know regurgitating the same content in a way where I learn nothing more than I did the first time I watched Thierry Henry disassociating during Lalas’ meaningless bro-isms or Zlatan saying, “America, you’re welcome” when Lalas disappeared from one broadcast.
Back in the four-chair room during that morning’s coffee, I mentioned to Evangelina how I enjoyed that my world is smaller when I am disengaged from my phone. She countered by saying that she feels the opposite without her phone. Her world opens up to be larger, with so much more to notice, more to engage with, and more to do.
Though our perspective of the scale of our worlds was opposite, I think we were saying something similar. The world we engage with is a choice and each choice creates opportunities to do and see what we want to. I look at the work she has done over the past year– A year spent working both in our yard and in a landscape design program. I find myself in awe of the knowledge she has gained, the scale of what she has accomplished, and how she challenged herself to try new things throughout.
While she has worked in her garden, a distinctly small part of this world, her work has broadened her reach in countless ways. The energy she receives from waking up to the blooms of her newly planted datura becomes part of her for the rest of the day.
I’m often sitting in one of those four chairs and each time I see her move across the window I watch her asking herself what her plants and their soil needs. Which of their siblings must be brought home from the nursery on her next visit. Almost as often, I see her in conversation with a neighbor or stranger as they walk by a yard that is now overflowing with an energy that is far from the norm of front yards.
Native grasses and plants fill space with a lightness that moves with the wind. A stone path wanders around the corner through these plants with textures and layers that invite your eyes to meander through the space whether or not you are on that path. All of her work offers up something that the greenest, most well-cared for, most manicured, suburban lawn doesn’t stand a chance to compete with.
What Evangelina has created is a space full of life, where people break out of their own worlds to offer a quick compliment, a few words of encouragement, or a fully engaged conversation that wanders on a path longer than the one in her garden.
A lovely reminder that whatever work we do with our minds and our hands…whatever it is that we choose to bring into this world is always noticed and is always a gift to those who find themselves wandering into our worlds. In turn, and probably best of all, our own little worlds are given the chance to enter something even larger when it becomes part of someone else’s day.
