World Was My Garden, Too

Sam Pickering

Description

He roams New England, Arkansas, the Caribbean, Nova Scotia and the familiar and odd plots of mind and thought. He explores shorelines and climbs "hillish" mountains. He sits on porches and talks to passersby and their dogs. He meets strange and delightful people, most of whom are real.

Sujets

• Essays
• Sciences et techniques
• CNF
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781948692151
• Langue: English

Extrait

The World Was My Garden, Too
Other Books by Sam Pickering
Essay Collections A Continuing Education The Right Distance May Days Still Life Let It Ride Trespassing The Blue Caterpillar Living to Prowl Deprived of Unhappiness A Little Fling The Last Book The Best of Pickering Indian Summer Autumn Spring Journeys Dreamtime The Splendour Falls All My Days Are Saturdays Happy Vagrancy One Grand, Sweet Song Parade’s End
Travel Walkabout Year Waltzing the Magpies Edinburgh Days A Tramp’s Wallet
Literary Studies The Moral Tradition in English Fiction, 1785-1850 John Locke and Children’s Books in Eighteenth-Century England Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children, 1749-1820
Teaching Letters to a Teacher
Memoir A Comfortable Boy
The World Was My Garden, Too
Sam Pickering
Copyright © 2019 by Sam Pickering All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
Requests for permission to reprint material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions Madville Publishing P.O. Box 358 Lake Dallas, TX 75065

Acknowledgements:
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the Georgia Review in which selections from these essays first appeared.


Author Photograph: Vicki Pickering Cover Design: Nancy Parsons Cover Art: Childe Hassam, The Island Garden , 1892, watercolor on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly, 1929.6.64


ISBN: 978-1-948692-14-4 paperback, 978-1-948692-15-1 ebook Library of Congress Control Number: 2018968032
Dedication
For Vicki who tolerated a few leaf spots and a little rust but who kept days green and free from canker and blight.
Table of Contents
Preface, or the World Was My Garden, Too.
Rummaging
Re-Reading Nicholas Nickleby
Uncommercial Traveller
Jogging
My Study Window
As the World Turns Us
As the World Turns Us, II
Eureka I
Eureka II
Allergies
Breakdown Years
About the Author
Preface, or The World Was My Garden, Too.
In January I pruned my study. Afterward I donated eight cartons of books to the annual sale at the Mansfield Library. In thinning my shelves, I discovered several volumes that I hadn’t read and forgot that I owned. Among the books was The World Was My Garden , David Fairchild’s account of his travels as a “Plant Explorer.” At the end of the 19th and through the first third of the 20th century, Fairchild was responsible for introducing thousands of plants into the United States. He traveled the out-of-the-way globe sending back flowers and shrubs, trees, grasses, ferns, and agricultural crops—varieties of wheat, cherries, bamboo, and soybeans, among greenhouses of others. He introduced Americans to kale, avocados, and quinoa, this last a grain I ate for the first time three years ago. The biographies of generals and presidents with a few reformers tossed in as social leavening usually dominate textbook accounts of American history. But, to my mind, Fairchild did more to shape this country than any of the “great men” celebrated as fathers of the nation.
The World was published in 1938. My volume appeared in 1945 and had belonged to my grandfather, Mother’s father. He wrote his name and the date inside the front cover on the first free end page: “John L. Ratcliffe 1946.” A stroke killed him two years later when I was seven years old. I don’t know how the book ended on my shelves, but I suspect Mother saved it for me, seeing or hoping to discover aspects of her father in me. Grandfather himself was a plant man, a florist with several stores who owned extensive nurseries in which he grew and experimented with flowers. Every spring his thoughts turned to flowers, and he went to Italy to welcome the season. I spent childhood summers on Cabin Hill, his farm in Hanover, Virginia. Every night in the middle of the dining room table a magnolia sat in a basin. When I went upstairs to go to bed, I always found a water lily on a platter on my bedside table. Surrounding the house and along the drive were orchards of flowering trees: magnolia, persimmon, pecan, cherry, and dogwood. Looking like green hems, rows of boxwood stretched through fields above cattle pastures, twenty-five thousand, Mother once told me, “every variety that grows in Virginia.” Mother was prescient. Grandfather’s loves flow through my sapwood, and if he had lived until I was twenty, I would have spent more time outside than inside houses, my arms not laden with books but bursting with flowers and bouquets of my other outdoor loves, insects and reptiles.
On the desk in my study now are a pair of hyacinths, the flowers on one purple, those on the other pink. Above and behind them loom two pots of Easter lilies. At dusk the fragrance of their blossoms fills the room, clotting the air like sweet cream. Spring hasn’t arrived in Connecticut, but it is close. Two days ago, a Cooper’s hawk landed near the wood pile in the back yard. After standing motionless for a moment it ran through leaves scampering like a pigeon. Next it hopped atop a log and froze, ignoring gray squirrels that foraged nearby and instead scanning the ground for young chipmunks breaking hibernation and leaving burrows. Last week a skunk sprayed the side of the garage, the perfume evoking memories of happy, blooming country nights. All seasons are gardens. Most of my plants are weedy and not cultivated, in winter, for example: braids of spore sacs beading the stalks of sensitive fern, the fruits of virgin’s bower balding and breaking into feathers, and then the split follicles of milkweed, each half the keel of a rowboat, salty and storm-wracked, beached and eroding out of sight into sand. Like racks of small soiled neckties, leaves crinkle around mugwort. Atop the rosettes of spotted wintergreen white veins slice razor-edged across leaves, and wedging themselves into and between mullein’s empty seed capsules, insects spin tents around themselves.
The World Was My Garden awakened nostalgia for a life I didn’t live—a feeling or perhaps a fever common to oldsters, especially to the retired no longer incessantly distracted by the forgettable and who have the leisure to imagine. Happily, fevers break. Although I envied Fairchild’s explorations, my meanderings to Canada, the Caribbean, Arkansas, and around Storrs that I describe in this book satisfy me. I write about long-discovered, recognizable trees and flowers and then a great deal about people. Fairchild appears to have known every important person in the botanical world. Explorers, thinkers, inventors, and the upper crusts of social movers and shakers became his friends. I spent my life in universities surrounded by decent, admirable people. However, few escaped the classroom long enough to morph into characters. No one was called Doodlebug, Hangnail, or Mole Eye. At the Community Center no one groans after exercising or sings in the shower. Nobody is the subject of fond, entertaining gossip. Still a locker-room remark occasionally startles me into an exclamation. “I reduced my blood pressure by eating beets,” a mathematician told me after I mentioned a recent visit to a cardiologist. “I eat beets at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Before flicking my light off at night I go to the kitchen and for a bedtime snack treat myself to a platter of sliced beets. I sprinkle vinaigrette on them. A couple of times I doused them with Miracle Whip but that wasn’t so good.”
“Never again will I make a left turn when driving,” a French professor informed me in December. “They cause too much stress. You’d be surprised how easy and tension-free it is to reach your destination by turning right, right, right, and right.” “Last week I received an email from the widow of my thesis advisor,” a man sitting next to me in the locker room recounted. “When our marriage was bad, you sided with him not me,” the woman wrote, “and when you ate dinner with us, you laughed at his jokes and not at mine.” “I didn’t know they were having marital difficulties,” the man said, “and I ate dinner with them only once. That was in 1973, forty-five years ago, a day before I received my Ph.D. I left Ireland right after getting the degree. I haven’t seen, heard, or thought about the woman since then. Insofar as jokes go, not only do I find false jocularity unappealing, but I can never remember any.” The man paused then continued sounding both mystified and exasperated. “Yesterday I received a second email. The woman wrote only three sentences, ‘There’s another thing. My jokes were better than yours. Yours weren’t funny at all.’”
In Plain Talks on Familiar Subjects first published in the late 1860s, Josiah Holland criticized “college-made men.” They “hold principles subject to precedents” and “blindly worship words and phrases.” “Pure scholarship is always conservative,” he wrote. It timidly resists change, clings to “dominant institutions,” and “swims easily along the current of peaceful life, but shrinks from emergencies, and shirks the work of revolutions.” I am more teaching than college made. Only in the pool at the Community Center do I make a splash, and when I doze on the daybed in my study, revolutionary thoughts do not disturb my peace of mind. I don’t worship words, but in these pages, I toy with words and, honestly, why not? What I write about phrases won’t make me diabetic although a few sentimentalists have called me a sweetheart. I was an ordinary teacher. I am not wealthy or poor enough to be a curiosity. I’m not important, and I’m indifferent to opinions of me. No one is proud of me. No one envies me and seeks my acquaintance. Living without hope doesn’t make me unhappy. At my death, Vicki has promised that obsequies will be muted and private. I am the invisible neighbor. I’ve never been guilty of peculation, and only rarely have I been the subject of conversation and speculation. I am not the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. I am the First and Only Son of a First Son who worked for the Traveler’s Insurance Company for forty-five years. My index finger