Green out the garden

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I stepped out of the house yesterday, about halfway through my afternoon shift - that’s how I think of the stretch between 3pm and 7pm where I cajole homework and hover my finger over the words in reading books and inspect chores and mop up sadness and make dinner - anyway, in the middle of that I said ‘carry on!’ in a genial way over my shoulder and walked out into the garden like I was sleepwalking.

I’ve been doing this several times a day all year. Our garden is big and wild and I am constantly being overmastered by it. This year I planted spring bulbs in the winter and they grew, glorious and tangled, and then I planted more bulbs in the late spring and they are growing but not in the way I expected. I planted gladioli in little clumps, and they have knifed out of the ground with funny tall flat leaves, but no flowers. I can’t work out where the flowers will come out of these paper-thin little sheaths, but I assume they know what they’re about. I planted four dahlias, too, but I forgot to mark where I planted them and nothing has appeared. It’s quite possible that I’ve accidentally weeded them. We’ll see what turns up. That’s why I keep walking outside: because the garden has a way of compensating, easily, for the things that I have accidentally made more difficult, and I like being surprised.

I’d had an unusual day, recording piano music for my sister’s wedding. She is getting married next month and wanted me to play the piano, but also be in the wedding party, so we arranged that I’d learn the pieces and record them beforehand. I’ve played for lots of weddings over the years and this is the best idea anyone has had, probably. Of course no one plans or attends a wedding thinking much about the pianist, and rightly so, but if the pianist is having a bad day you would know, trust me. And you never want to be having a bad day on a day that cost someone else many thousands of pounds.

It took us all morning to record ten pieces, by which time my hands were aching to the elbow, but we got them. There’s a feeling about playing the piano - any skill, I imagine - where at first you try a new piece, and it’s very hard and you hate yourself and your stupid fingers, and then gradually, gradually you teach your body to know the twists and leaps of it, and then one day you sit down and you can just do it. Do it, without thinking of anything at all. It’s like freewheeling down a hill after toiling upwards for days. I was thinking, afterwards, that the feeling is like a kind of earned mindlessness, which is maybe what we mean when we say ‘mastery’. It’s a very pure feeling, somehow, but of course the ease only comes after hours of stupid fingers - and, before that, years of my parents’ money and time and persuasion. My boys are in the learning stage where it’s all uphill, all the time, and I keep trying to explain about the freewheeling, but they don’t really believe it’s coming. Why would they? It’s so rare, in life, to do something easily. It costs so much underneath. How does a garden explain what it’s doing under the soil, to the beginner who can’t even recognise a dahlia when she sees one?

Well, I really treasured that experience. Being forced to do the hours, to get the rush of the downhill. At the moment I am trying to put together a proposal for a poetry pamphlet, which if you don’t know (I didn’t, before) is a mini-collection of about twenty poems, published by a small press. It’s a good first step to publishing a full collection, which is what I want - it shows that you can write and that there are people who want to buy your writing. I have a pamphlet idea I’m excited by, and I have the poems ready. Some days I even think they are good! But writing poetry - and its accompaniment, publication - has not been something, in my experience, that I can teach my body to just do. Every day I start again at the bottom of the hill. Back in January I said that I had spent ten years at home with children, and so now I wanted to give ten years to this writing that is hard, terrible, satisfying, not very lucrative, and absolutely right, and see what I could do with it. Maybe there will be downhill rushes eventually, or maybe the climb itself will be the thing. What a thing it is, to have no certainty in it! I have eight years left. And so every day I walk away from this stubbornly imperfect work for a moment, and drift outside to see what the garden has made easy for me in my absence.

It’s almost July. There’s a lot I don’t know. I would like, I think, to be surprised.